Cancel culture

The year was 1991. Actress Sean Young was trending — which in the Nineties means tabloids were dumping on her. The scandal: she barged onto the Warner Bros. lot dressed as Catwoman for an audition for Batman Returns. Two years earlier, Young was set to play Batman’s love interest in the first film, but she fell off a horse on set, fracturing her shoulder, so director Tim Burton replaced her with Kim Basinger. Young believed she deserved an audition for the sequel’s villain. After all, she was Sean Young. She played Chani in David Lynch’s original Dune (a role a not-yet-born Zendaya would reprise in a remake). She made love to future Yellowstone star Kevin Costner in No Way Out.

The Red Shoes, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 film about a ballet and its company, is 75 this month, and its birthday is being marked with great fanfare. From October to December, the BFI is putting on a major retrospective of the films of Powell and Pressburger, with an accompanying exhibition and nationwide screenings of The Red Shoes itself. A companion book to The Red Shoes by Pamela Hutchinson – stuffed with insight and background – is being published, as well as a lavish volume, The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger, complete with pictures and essays (almost love letters) about the late filmmakers from artists such as Tilda Swinton and director Joanna Hogg.

The late-night talk show has been a staple of American television for three quarters of century. It is a tried and tested formula that works beautifully... until it doesn’t — as Jimmy Fallon learned this week when Rolling Stone published the feature “Chaos, Comedy, and ‘Crying Rooms’: Inside Jimmy Fallon’s ‘Tonight Show’.” There are millions of people who would sell their souls to make it Hollywood — and the competitiveness and desperation has been exploited time and time again by those at the top. But unlike many of the abusive tales that have been told over the past decade, the accusations against Fallon are watery at best.  In fact, the piece has bears all the hallmarks of a classic hit job.

When the history of comedy’s resurgence in the early twenty-first century is written — when masses of people, silenced by the speech codes of the day, found solace and contrarian hope in the words of unsilenced comics — Shane Gillis will be a major turning point in that story.  It’s not just that he’s arguably the best stand-up under forty working today; it’s that his work won out over all the obstacles the world threw at him. He is now the comedy world’s embodiment of the Streisand Effect, where his attempted cancellation functioned instead as a rocket ship for his career based not on victimhood but on the stubborn nature of his skill. Gillis’s first special, Live in Austin, was a YouTube joint that has racked up 14 million views.

It must seem very strange to Armie Hammer — once a successful, if not quite an A-list actor, who has latterly been reduced to selling timeshares in the Cayman Islands — that his career has taken such a decisive dive into the dumpster. Not very long ago, he was appearing in leading roles in the likes of Death on the Nile and Rebecca, and then his life went into a nosedive because of allegations of everything from cannibalism to sexual abuse. In present-day Hollywood, there is no such thing as a presumption of innocence until guilt is proved, and Hammer was fired from various projects, as well as being dropped by his agency and management company. His days of fame appeared to be over.

When I saw on Twitter that Bluey was the latest victim of cancel culture, naturally my first thought was "who did she say the N-word in front of?" For those not in the know, Bluey is an Australian cartoon dog who stars in an eponymous kids' TV show that airs on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC and, in the US, Disney+. She and her family go on a series of adventures that guide viewers through a healthy mix of toilet humor and confronting difficult emotions, in a tenor suitable for the under-tens.