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| Yes, I know I used this yesterday. I'm going to use it as the actual thumbnail when I record the last entry for my YouTube channel as well. Deal with it. |
Let's join some dots. In the preceding entry, we looked at Todd Field's Tàr, and the way in which it has been misread, perhaps intentionally, by many critics as a tale of artistic genius destroyed by cancel culture when anyone who pays attention to the film clocks pretty quickly that its protagonist is both unambiguously an abuser and very obviously faking genius: Lydia Tàr has worked out how to give off the signifiers which allow her to pass as a cultural icon while avoiding any truly challenging artistic engagement. In much the same way that Stephen Fry is a stupid person's idea of a clever person, Tàr is a Radio 3 listener's idea of a contemporary classical artist: committed to the canon, apolitical, dismissive of the avant-garde, happy to trot out an amusing anecdote and make the kind of cultural references that inspire a sensible chuckle in her aging and affluent audience. Happy to flatter the pretensions of that audience - to reassure them that they must be very clever, very cultured people if they consume her content. And thus well-placed, until the revelation of her career of abuse, to function as one part of an edifice of cultural product based around flattering and indulging that audience.
And in the entry before that, I drew your attention to Elizabeth Sandifer's essay The Cuddled Little Vice, which dissects the life and work of the fantasy author and prolific rapist Neil Gaiman. In that essay, Sandifer pretty comprehensively documents the process by which Gaiman, too, learned how to give off and manipulate the signifiers which allowed him to pass as a cultural icon while never producing anything too challenging, anything which might prove too alienating towards a mass readership. While there were moments in his early work where he threatened to do so, most notably in some arcs of Sandman and some of his earlier, more personal works like Violent Cases and Mr. Punch, it was a con Gaiman had perfected by the time of the publication of American Gods, his first prose novel which was not either a collaboration with a more experienced author (Good Omens) or a retread of something he had first approached in a different genre (Neverwhere, Stardust) - after which Gaiman, unlike Orpheus or Lot's wife, never looked back. After American Gods, Gaiman also became part of that midcult edifice, with his own affluent readership to flatter. Until, like Lydia Tàr, his crimes caught up with him.
It is worth thinking, though, about how those crimes caught up with their perpetrators, both in Field's film and in Gaiman's real life. In Tàr, the revelation unambiguously comes from below - from the young women Lydia abuses and tosses aside. The circumstances of Gaiman's downfall were murkier. While, most notably in a thorough (and thoroughly damning) New York magazine article, the voices of the women Gaiman abused are now being heard, the first people who brought the case against him to public attention were very much not bringing the news from those below.
Indeed, one of the people responsible for the Tortoise media podcast that first brought Gaiman's crimes to public notice is Rachel Johnson, the sister of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a man whose attitude to sexual assault is, to put it lightly, somewhat concerning, and who attends parties given by the Russian oligarch Evgeny Lebedev, which are reputedly also attended by 'models' who, like Gaiman's victims, are made to sign non-disclosure agreements. As it happens, Lebedev owns the Evening Standard newspaper, which employs Rachel Johnson as a columnist (undoubtedly entirely on merit), and where she made a rather interesting admission about her reasons for exposing Gaiman in a column titled 'I broke the Neil Gaiman story, but I never wanted him cancelled like this'.
In that column, in which Johnson is careful to note that Gaiman 'was a kind, vocal, public ally of all the most worthy, trendy minorities and causes from refugees to trans kids', she claims that it was never her intention to bring about his 'blanket cancellation'. Rather, she wanted to 'probe the greyest of grey areas - allegations of sexual abuse within an otherwise consensual relationship', noting that many cases of intimate partner violence go unreported and that prosecutions can be undermined because the victims 'very often send their alleged abuser loving messages afterwards, that can be used as the crux of any defence', before weakly concluding that 'it's...complicated' and ending by saying 'I hope everyone listens to the podcast', which she links to.
It's almost a nothing of a column, but it's important for what it represents. You'll recall that I ended the Tàr essay by musing on the mechanisms by which that film's protagonist would probably, over time, be able to return to some version of the spotlight. My belief is that in Johnson's column we are seeing those mechanisms operating pretty much in plain sight. A lot of trans people, myself among them, feel that the people behind the podcast that broke the Gaiman allegations did so because they hoped to provoke us into rallying round to protect a prominent ally - the way the transphobes at the Guardian suddenly lost all enthusiasm for believing and protecting women when one of their star columnists, Nick Cohen, was outed as a serial groper. As always, the terverts projected their own behavioural standards onto us (the same way they do when they call us 'groomers'). But we don't roll that way. Trans women had no hesitation in kicking Gaiman into the goddam gutter, never mind the kerb, for what he did. Indeed, the title of Sandifer's essay comes from a series of remarkable, vitriolic sonnets trans author Roz Kaveney wrote out of the sheer rage she felt on learning the truth about a man she once called a friend.
In saying she never wanted Gaiman's 'blanket cancellation', Johnson is, partly, expressing her frustration that we didn't close ranks in the way she expected, but she is also offering the now-disgraced author a quid pro quo. Drop your support for those 'worthy, trendy minorities', Neil. Write something suitably penitent about the 'grey area' you drifted into. Blame it on the trannies, blame it on your trauma, say you got all turned around but now your head's screwed on and looking in the right direction - and you can have it all back. Let us help you.
Cancellation comes from both above and below, but you only stay cancelled if the people with the real power decide you should stay that way. If Neil Gaiman abandons his previous, vocal support for trans rights, some of the very same people who condemn him now will be all to happy to aid him in his return to literary respectability. If he doesn't, then he will stay cancelled and we will know that he does, at least, have some kind of character, some form of moral centre. But frankly: the man is a rapist. I doubt that he does. If The Cuddled Little Vice tells us anything it's that Neil Gaiman, who 'learned about the world from ruthless people', is ruthless in pursuit of getting what he wants.
To be brutally honest, I fully expect him to turn his back on trans people if that's the price of regaining the spotlight he thinks he deserves, and the only reason I'm writing this is so I can say I put it down as a marker for when the bastard does it.
