Skepticism, Suspicion and the Endless Shadow of MeToo
If a Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place piece gets over 2000 page-views I consider it a big success. So you can imagine how impressed I was that a piece on the hazards of para-social relationships has been read well over 10,000 times after about a week.
It struck a nerve and is being read by people other than the 20 or so marvelous weirdoes who read and comment on the site everyday. I know pretty much each of you by screen name at least and appreciate the hell out of each and every one of y’all but sure would not mind a few more readers or commenters. Or patrons!
I think the piece hit a nerve because it touches upon our mercurial, complicated relationship with the artists we love, particularly in the post #MeToo era.
Over the past five years ago or so, we have witnessed a paradigm shift in our relationship with celebrities. We went from either assuming the best of celebrities with troubling reputations or thinking that their misdeeds were none of our business to engaging intensely with the artists we love as deeply flawed people as well as entertainers.
Call it the Hannibal Burress effect. Over the course of a single stand-up comedy bit, something that had been in the fuzzy background of pop culture for years, if not decades—how Bill Cosby’s predilection for harshly judging others for swearing or not wearing a belt clashed with the many, many accusations that he had been drugging and molesting much younger women for a half century—was thrust into the forefront.
We’d all like to believe that America’s dad wasn’t a serial rapist who famously hated all drugs except for the ones he used to knock his victims out but that became impossible at a certain point.
It similarly became impossible to ignore the inconvenient truth that R. Kelly, the man behind some of the most iconic R&B smashes of the last three decades, was also the proprietor of an abusive underage sex cult that imprisoned vulnerable women and destroyed lives.
Kelly’s unfortunate predilections were among the worst kept secrets in pop culture, in part because there was seemingly incontrovertible videotaped evidence of his crimes. Yet we looked the other way because we really wanted to be able to continue to enjoy “Ignition (Remix)” without feeling like a monster.
Louis CK was similarly the subjects of rumors that he liked to masturbate in front of mortified women that we brushed aside because we didn’t want to have to give up CK as an artist or a comedian.
We paid a very heavy price, individually and collectively, for not listening to people who had been negatively affected by these men. Monsters like Harvey Weinstein were able to flourish for decades because we ignored the rumors or dismissed the rumors or considered ourselves above such sordid matters.
This raises a tricky question: can we really listen to people with difficult truths to share without engaging in sordid gossip? How do we separate seedy rumor-mongering from important truth-telling? We sure as shit do not seem to know the answer to either of those questions. I sure don't.
What we’re seeing now, I think, is a correction. Nobody wants to be devastated when someone they consider a hero and an idol turns out to be not just a questionable human being but an out and out monster like Harvey Weinstein or James Toback or Bill Cosby or R. Kelly.
So we hold our favorite artists to such a high standard that it is easy for them to let us down and damn near impossible to live up to the hopelessly romanticized image we’ve created for them in our minds.
It’s a protective measure, really. We don’t want to get hurt again so we harden our hearts and are skeptical and suspicious of artists we would have loved unapologetically and unproblematically in a pre #MeToo era.
This helps explain the ill will towards people like John Mulaney, who haven’t really done anything that bad but seem like they could break our hearts by doing things like, I dunno, invite Dave Chappelle to be a surprise guest at a show and then hug him afterwards.
Doing a show with Chappelle or publicly supporting Chappelle in some other concrete way has been, and will continue to be, something that is looked on as sketchy, problematic and unfortunate by a sizable percentage of the population. Yet so many respected comedians have supported Chappelle in so many different ways that it will become difficult, if not impossible, for them to face serious consequences because doing so would punish such a wide swath of the community. Chappelle has become, in a very real way, un-cancellable and that will inspire people who are just as problematic but nowhere near as smart or talented.
I just saw that Chappelle will be the surprise guest for a tribute concert for Taylor Hawkins, the late Foo Fighters drummer. This isn’t even a comedy show. It’s a rock and roll show but they figured, fuck it, let’s get a guy who is synonymous with transphobia to be our special guest.
That’s unfortunate but it’s not surprising because so many people, primarily but not exclusively powerful straight men, desperately want not just an end to #MeToo but also everything that comes with it, particularly the part involving consequences.
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