I see your spiky hair and casual t-shirts, the smiling embodiment of every middle-aged man who really should have grown out of listening to Blink-182 by now. You’re a big kid, James Gunn, with the deliberately gross jokes to match. What a shame then that the man with his finger on the pulse of pop culture failed to recognise the grimmest commandment of the social media age – thou shalt not have ever said anything horrific, even in jest, if you’re going to advocate for liberal values.
It’s pretty hard to come to your defence when reading the tweets themselves. They’re not big or clever, representing the worst kind of open-mic comic edge-lording. We’ve all got the right to mature and move on from our past selves but when the jokes date from your early forties that excuse tends to raise a few eyebrows. Yes, you’ve got the freedom of speech to say what you like, but at the same time – just as those on the right fall foul of them when they say something vile – employers with reputations to protect are also free to act to preserve them. Admittedly, Disney claiming the moral high ground on anything is laughable in itself, but it turns out those who live in glass houses founded on crude racial stereotyping can in fact throw directors out of their patio doors.
I’m not convinced comedians should ever apologise for even the most ill-thought out of their jokes – censorship tends to start at the crudest end of the wedge, and the rot shouldn’t be allowed to creep. There has to be space to offend and test boundaries and generally speaking, audiences are intelligent enough to turn their backs on the genuinely unpleasant. The situation is a little different when you’re not a stand-up, but are in charge of one of the Marvel universe’s largest franchises. Disney were always going to find marketing Guardians 3 to kids difficult when you’re on record joking about molesting them. To paraphrase Nebula, they’re not ripe.
But for all of that, it’s also important to recognise the other, more pernicious element of your downfall – that your tweets were pretty much always a matter of public knowledge, and nobody really gave a fuck until you started getting into Twitter spats with right-wing provocateurs. A quick trawl through Mike Cernovich’s feed shows that his moral high ground is somewhere in the bottom of the Mariana Trench, but he’s not the one employed by Disney, is he? It’s hard for a terminally unemployable blogger to lose his job so that burden falls on you instead.
And make no mistake – it wasn’t your jokes that set the Twitter hounds on you, James Gunn, but your criticism of Trump. The moral puritanism expected of those on the left of the political spectrum has now become the scalpel to neuter them with. Yes, it’s somewhat of a strawman, but the world we live in has become absolutely ridiculous when a man who makes films about gun-wielding raccoons and talking trees is held to a higher moral standard for his shit jokes than politicians who are still allowed careers when accused of literally physically molesting people. The double standard is astounding when there are a thousand Al Frankens on the right that should have gone the way he did still in their jobs.
It’s a weird world where the right have reclaimed free speech as their call to arms, and yet have weaponised words and jokes to topple film directors that oppose their politics. Republicans can grab as much pussy and follow teenage girls around shopping malls as much as they like, but jokes? They’ll tear you from your pedestal until only the most brazen of fascistic hypocrites are left in charge, and they’ll be screaming about free speech as they take power.
And then there’s the real crime at the heart of all of this. The most horrifying thought of all, the terror that steeps paralysis into our very bones, the call of wolves to a man lost in the woods at night.
If they can’t get Taika Waititi to do it, Guardians 3 is probably going to be fucking bollocks.
Thanks a fucking bunch, James Gunn.
I see you, James Gunn. I fucking see you.
