“Cancel Culture,” or Why Nothing Gets Better

Sherman Alexie

In one of the weirder stories to emerge during this crisis, apparently novelist and poet Sherman Alexie has emerged from hibernation this weekend, failed to see his shadow, and gone on a media tour. If you’ve forgotten in the roughly three centuries we’ve lived through so far in 2020, it’s been slightly over two years since Alexie, author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, admitted a longstanding pattern of invidious sexual harassment.

Since then, Alexie remained quiet, an unusual pattern of reticence from somebody in his position: Bill Cosby went on tour while charges pended against him, and Louis CK resumed live performances only ten months after publishing a similar admission. Alexie’s willingness to keep quiet (while his books remain in print) was downright remarkable. Until this weekend, when his sudden re-emergence triggered an equally subdued social media response: outside Native American circles, it’s gone largely unnoticed.

We sometimes hear complaints, in fame circles, of “cancel culture,” where celebrities do something so horrific, their audience turns against them, forces them from public view, and submarines their careers. Events like Liam Neeson’s racist rampage, Kevin Spacey’s kiddie diddling, or Roseanne Barr’s doom tweets, are cited as famous people getting forcibly silenced by the politeness patrol. As though a towering, square-jawed Irishman threatening to kill random Black people was playful idle banter, simply misconstrued.

Except “cancel culture” appears remarkably bad at its job. Sherman Alexie’s book sales have slowed, certainly, but never stopped, and his return has elicited almost no response outside activist circles. Kevin Hart lost his Oscar gig, but suffered almost no other consequences. Louis CK remains out on tour, and though he has to protect his setlist religiously, he still draws large audiences to performances that have apparently become increasingly vulgar, violent, and laced with misogyny.

Possibly the king of “cancel culture” remains Mel Gibson. He has suffered public meltdowns, had racist rants captured on tape and distributed online, flipped tables on journalists, and generally behaved like somebody with no prefrontal cortex. Each time this happens, his career lags slightly. But he returns in force again each time. His fees have probably suffered, I’m not ambitious enough to check, but his IMDB page lists four completed movies scheduled for 2020 release.

Ricky Gervais, in yet another attempt
to court camera-friendly controversy

If cancel culture cannot even silence Hollywood’s biggest celebrity when he drunkenly shouts antisemitism directly into a microphone, what hope did it have of holding a literary novelist to account? And don’t talk about “separating the artist from the artwork.” As I’ve written before, if the artist is still alive and drawing residuals, the two aren’t separable. This is doubly true if media outlets draw the artist back into the mainstream, as with Sherman Alexie.

We mere mortals appear infinitely willing to extend forgiveness to famous people, to attribute them virtues they demonstrably don’t have. Perhaps the most famous manifestation of this is Ricky Gervais. It’s been years since any project he’s done has drawn large audiences; I’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks his perennially vulgar setlist is funny. Yet his semi-permanent arrangements with Netflix and the Golden Globes keep him churning out content which nobody particularly enjoys.

Rereading the paragraph I’ve just written, I realize a contradiction: we mere mortals don’t extend Ricky Gervais infinite forgiveness. Netflix and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (which conducts the Golden Globes) do. We mortals then extend these organizations that forgiveness. Sure, we reward them, and him, with ratings. But they know Gervais, and Gibson, and Alexie, will draw audiences, because they’re familiar. Ricky Gervais’ annual low-blow insult festival has become comfort watching for risk-averse audiences.

Sherman Alexie writes literary viewpoints on Native American life and issues, probably believing himself dangerous to America’s White hierarchy. Yet the film Smoke Signals, based on one of his short stories, was distributed by Miramax, then a Disney subsidiary. Disney, like most media conglomerates, is notoriously timid. They never would’ve green-lit such a production if it didn’t have guaranteed returns, which necessarily means a guaranteed large audience. Sherman Alexie reaches us already pre-approved by Disney.

Which means, no matter how awful Sherman Alexie, Louis CK, and Mel Gibson become, they’ll remain bankable properties. They already occupy places in America’s shared mental landscape, which makes them comfortable. We humans notoriously resist change, because changing ourselves rewires our brains, which is painful. We’d rather keep giving billboard space to an acknowledged sexual harasser than change our habits. And Sherman Alexie’s smiling, affable face will reappear, no matter how many sins he confesses.