The Cinema of Cancellation

Part 1: Trying to define a Mini-Genre

In our most recent episode of In Bed with the Right, my co-host Moira Donegan made the point that we probably get more movies about people being accused of abuse than people being abused because public accusations are inevitably dramatic, big, political. There is of course also the possibility — which most of these films at least entertain — of being unjustly accused, or the accusation exceeding whatever the truth is, which holds even more dramatic potential.

I got deeply interested in what I call the “cinema of cancellation”, but I had a hard time describing it. I’ll be arguing that it is (a) a fairly long-lived, but small subgenre in Hollywood, one that has started to find international imitators. But more importantly, (b) the “cinema of cancellation” is a set of tropes that can be deployed in a whole range of genres (from courtroom thrillers via erotic films to comedies), where it is all about inverted economies of prestige — a person who is owed respect and admiration instead is ostracized and made a victim of the very hierarchies they were once atop of. There are thus classic cases — films that are about professional downfalls and public reckonings, and films that seem to at least entertain the possibility that those downfalls and reckonings went too far. I’d include in this list films like Oleanna, Presumed Innocent, Disclosure, Deconstructing Harry, Disgrace, The Human Stain and Tár, as well as TV-shows like The Chair and Douglass Is Cancelled. (I’m sure there’s a bunch I am missing — I’ll be opening the comments below, so please chime in and make further suggestions!)

But these core films share a vocabulary with a far broader range of pop cultural products, which don’t make public ostracism their main topic, but derive their energy, their moral impetus, their narrative drive from this inversion in status. These run the gamut from The Simpsons’ 6th season episode “Homer Badman” to the opening montage of the Harrison Ford Fugitive. It’s noticeable that these tropes become so ubiquitous around pretty much exactly with the time period of the moral panic around “political correctness”. At some point, these kinds of tropes just sort of emerged. But whether the whole film turned on these tropes, or whether it was just a throwaway bit, they drew on several long-lived antecedents in Hollywood.

And — and this is the real reason I’m writing about them now — they seem to have greatly influenced how people think about the real stories, the real-life anecdotes that make up the grist of the PC and cancel culture-panics. We know how these scenarios are supposed to go, because we’ve encountered them as scenarios. In The Cancel Culture Panic, I traced an odd tendency to treat Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) as evidence of a social problem, rather than what it manifestly is, namely a novel about a fictional case of racism accusations revolving around a made-up professor at a made-up college. How, I asked, did this fictional story come to feel so real to so many people? Well, in this entry and the next few, I’ll try to flesh out one answer to that question: because these types of fictions have decisively shaped our way of paying attention to and interpreting real life. Because they have reinforced our way of interpreting challenges to authority, and the role of media and public discourse in those challenges.

In our first episode we focused on the David Mamet play Oleanna, in which a professor (played by William H. Macy) tries to help a student (Debra Eisenstadt) who comes to his office in distress. She misinterprets a few of his gestures and utterances, and the next time they meet, she’s mobbed up with a bunch of feminists. We never see the public dimension of their disagreement, but the play derives its entire tension after the halfway point from the fact that there is a public dimension. We know he’s starting to be disciplined by his institution. His life is a shambles. And she’s seen distributing leaflets about him. By the end of the movie, she has escalated her HR complaint against him, his life is a shambles and she finally baits him into hitting her. Her triumph consists, as Moira put it on the podcast, in turning him into the monster she thought he was all along.

One thing that my list above and my earlier request to you might make clear: the films we’re talking about here weren’t massively influential. Oleanna definitely was a conversation starter among my parents’ friends when I was a teenager, and the play has been revived periodically. But I don’t think it’s had an outsized legacy. Why then talk about these films at all? Well, because they cannily reworked older tropes and genres that were in fact quite influential. So when we hear of a professor accused of being racist because of “one wrong word”, it’s not just that we flash back to Philip Roth or David Mamet, we flash back to decades of Hollywood stories. This first essay in the series is about the genealogy of these tropes. For before there was “one wrong word” there were “wrong men” — and lots of them.

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Alfred Hitchcock was very fond of the “wrong man”-scenario, whereby a person is accused of a crime they didn’t commit. That kind of “wrong man”-scenario gets started by a logic of contamination. The wrong man is in the place where a crime is committed, where a spy is expected, or — in the case of Roger O. Thornhill in North by Northwest — simply accidentally raises his hand when another person’s name is called. He is never selected at random, but through a series of mistakes and misunderstandings. What we’ll call the “cinema of cancellation” — about people unjustly accused (or excessively accused) of personal malfeasance whose lives are gradually destroyed — functions by a similar logic. The accusation is essentially an oopsie: as in Thornhill’s gesture which turns him into the spy George Kaplan, it’s a misinterpretation. I see why you picked me, the film’s protagonists acknowledge, but you’re still not right about me.

The wrong man as an image contains both terror and a certain thrill. It’s about how a small mistake can have outsize consequences. But it’s also about how a small gesture might, just might be immensely important. “What does the ‘O’ stand for?” Eva-Marie Saint’s Eve Kendall asks about Thornhill’s middle name in North by Northwest. “Nothing,” he replies. This cypher, this man with nothing at his center steps into the far more exciting life of George Kaplan, and suddenly the world appears to revolve around him. There is a degree of wish-fulfillment in these scenarios, even when they’re deeply scary.

Which is also why it matters that it is almost always a wrong man. They are usually white middle-class men who can indignantly tell the cops “this is outrageous, officer!” rather than simply end up shot dead. They usually have the resources and privileges to turn the tables on their pursuers eventually. These are fables of professional masculinity, both its risks and its rewards. They are also, without acknowledging as much, fables about the professional white man as a type. It’s where being universalized as an “everyman” turns into a bit of a boomerang, as — for once — a wealthy white guy “fits the profile”. One reason you don’t get many “wrong woman”-scenarios in mid-20th century Hollywood is likely that screenwriters found it difficult to construct a series of events in which a woman was mistaken for another, who was however a nationally wanted criminal, notorious Soviet spy on the lam. Even in persecution, then, the “wrong man” story is about privilege.

In the late 1980s/early 1990s there was a slew of movies that were essentially “wrong man” movies. Except that where the “wrong man” of the 1970s New Hollywood thriller had usually been persecuted by shadowy agents of the state, these wrong men were prosecuted by public opinion. Even when these were legal thrillers, the legal system got a healthy assist from a fired-up public. And rather than being accused of espionage, it was usually ultimately something having to do with sex — their lover would turn up dead (Presumed Innocent), their fling would turn out to be crazy (Fatal Attraction), or their ex-girlfriend would prove adept at manipulating corporate hierarchies and HR departments (Disclosure).

So when I say that the “cinema of cancellation” is ultimately a continuation of the “wrong man”-film, except with a misunderstood fling (Fatal Attraction), one wrong word (The Human Stain), an errant gesture and badly put invitation (Oleanna), substituted for espionage or murder, I use the neologism of “cancellation” to point to something else. The reason I’m not calling them anti-“PC” films, for instance, which they also are, is that they don’t spend much time on the PC stuff. They center on the wrongly accused man (usually it’s a man). They do not give the revolutionaries, the inmates taking over the asylum, much screen time, or bother to delve into their motives very much. Oleanna is a two-person play, the other feminists — who are clearly coaching and radicalizing the student — enter only as a malignant outside force through pins, leaflets, posters.

Something I realized only in making my list for our podcast-series: There are surprisingly few satires amongst their number. Even a film like 1997’s Deconstructing Harry, which — in a metaphor I actually quite like — is about a Woody Allen (or more likely Philip Roth) -style artist who has “forced the world to adjust to the distortion he has become”, has that world just kind of yell at and about him. Women (and a few men) barge in from off-screen and call him a “motherfucker”, and Allen starts riffing, self-analyzing, mugging in various self-deprecating ways. The focus is still on him; their moral dudgeon is the permission structure for his narcissistic self-interrogation. Roger Ebert’s review of the film almost got there: “There is hardly a criticism that can be thrown at Allen that he hasn’t already thrown at himself (or his alter ego) in the film,” he noted. Deconstructing Harry is a movie about a public persona that in the end manages without the public.

Deconstructing Harry is a film that is disturbed and disrupted internally. I mean, it’s in the title. Allen cuts scenes to highlight discontinuity, his camera seems deliberately positioned to disorient the viewer (within the very real limits imposed by his genteel Bergman- and Fellini-rehash, of course). But in Deconstructing Harry this technique actually ends up giving the game away: disorientation works because it makes the viewer long for orientation. We want the world to be back in order again. The way the women (mostly) that come at Allen in various scenes fracture and charge visual space makes up most of the (modest) aesthetic appeal of this film. But they also create the tension that, structurally, we want to see resolved. Even though the movie claims to think they’re right, they are an audio-visual disturbance. Kirstie Alley as Allen’s jilted wife (well, his second jilted wife) gives a great performance, but the whole point of it is its … well, shrillness. Not in the sense of pitch, of course, Alley had a famously husky voice. But in the sense of auditory disturbance. Part of watching her go mano-a-mano with Allen is joy in the sheer free-wheeling chaos of it. But her obstreperous physicality, her hoarse screams, her apoplectic incoherence also point to the only way this tension can be relieved, the only way the viewer can be re-oriented, re-centered: by having that crazy lady finally shut her trap.

That’s what happens when critics and debate are reduced to epiphenomena of a great man’s voyage of self-discovery. They become background noise, they become tension generators. We sort of know they need to be there for the plot to happen, and we sort of wish they would just go away. We viscerally feel the yearning for the moment before Kirstie Alley barged into the room. Which also means these films reserve their true horror for the violation of homeostasis. They ultimately, just on the level of inciting incidents, long for hierarchies that they feel — and that they want their audience to feel — are sacrosanct, but out of whack. What I mean by that is: Roger Thornhill does not deserve the kind of treatment he receives as “Kaplan”. We may be amused at Cary Grant’s everyman trying to fit himself into an outlandish spy scenario, but we understand intuitively that what needs to happen, what ought to happen is that Thornhill be dis-identified with Kaplan. So three things seem centrally to carry over from a “wrong man”-thrilled to a cancellation fable: (1) it centers the man who has been unjustly accused, (2) it focuses on his martyrdom and (3) the implied desideratum (whether the film gets there, or whether the film ends with a downbeat ending that frustrates that desideratum) would be to see this person restored to the perch they deserve.

So these films have a horror of being judged; but they also wind up coming out in pretty unironic defense of a certain kind of entitlement: In Oleanna, Macy’s professor character expresses a secret fear that “they’ll find out my dark secret.” “What secret?” his student asks, because the play can never stop itself from presenting her as an utter imbecile. “There isn’t one,” he assures her. “But they’ll find an index of my badness. Am I entitled to my job and my nice house and my family?” The answer that these movies tend to give is, I think dual. On the one hand maybe not. Maybe this person is a jerk, is an arrogant bastard who deserves to be taken down a peg. On the other hand: absolutely. For as much as they might doubt the legitimacy of their own positions, the films are doubly convinced of the illegitimacy of those assailing them. Macy’s concern for his tenure, his house, his family might seem fussy, and the play/film will rib him for it. But in the end, the film thinks he is entitled to all of them, and those forces that would deprive him are … essentially monstrous.

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This highlights a way in which what I call the “cinema of cancellation” is different from “anti-PC” cinema. Because films and TV shows that imagine themselves as offending elite “PC” sensibilities (and the critics that imagine the same, calling things “deliciously un-PC” and similar tripe) wear their anti-bourgeois self-conceptions on their sleeve, while the films of professional downfalls are aimed at … well, professionals. The “I’m not PC”-crowd see themselves — whether justifiably or not — as working class insurgents attacking liberal bourgeois pieties. If you watch John Cleese’s path from Monty Python to anti-”PC” crusader, you get a sense of how someone can turn increasingly reactionary all the while being convinced they remain insurgent and rebellious.

There’s plenty that’s incoherent in this position, of course, but that’s not what this essay is about. Because no one would mistake Oleanna for South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. The “cinema of cancellation” is about high-minded, middle aged, professionals and aimed at their box office dollars. One thing these films are not is carnivalesque. They are restrained, serious, and ultimately quite joyless. Or rather, their glee and their joy have to seep out in unacknowledged places.

I was recently re-reading Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash, which has a great chapter on backlash cinema — I’d say that what I’m describing certainly overlaps with that genre, though it isn’t identical with it. One point of overlap is probably Adrian Lyne’s 1987 movie Fatal Attraction, an early entrant in a mini-genre where a professional man’s minor transgression occasions a set of trials that he both does and does not deserve. As in Oleanna, as in Deconstructing Harry, as in Disgrace, he deserves something, the film seems to say, but he doesn’t deserve this. These are erotic thrillers that are not about liberation, but about guilt and consequences. And that seem to displace their newfound Reaganite moralism onto women who mess with consent (say yes when they shouldn’t, say no when they shouldn’t, say yes too enthusiastically, etc.).

Faludi’s chapter goes into detail about how incrementally, painfully, Fatal Attraction changed from a film that said, as producer Sherry Lansing put it, “you are responsible for your actions,” to a movie that’s ultimately about the limits to that responsibility. Right down to an ending that star Glenn Close hated and fought tooth and nail, in which crazy single lady Glenn Close repeatedly stabs “Victorian hearth angel” (as Falludi aptly calls her) Anne Archer, only to first get drowned in the tub by reformed hubby Michael Douglas and then gets shot in the chest by the Archer character.

Like a lot of domestic or erotic thrillers (Body of Evidence comes to mind) of the era, the film’s final beats — Close coming back to life for one last jump scare — abandon the logic of the psychological thriller and instead turn to the vocabulary of the slasher film. As does the setting, which has abandoned gorgeously shot New York City streets and tony offices for the bathroom in a suburban house. A location fit for a Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers. Ah, but what a bathroom it is! I found myself unconsciously pricing out the tub during the interminable sequence of shot/reverse shot where Douglas is drowning Close. And when Archer delivers the coup de grâce, she does so standing next to an impeccably framed art exhibition poster. This is a horror film for the professional managerial class. The Close character doesn’t just threaten to disturb the familial bliss of the nuclear family; she’s threatening a very specific socio-economic arrangement.

There’s another genre that overlaps with the cinema of cancellation quite a bit. The same years when fear of “political correctness” washed across the United States, was the heyday of the micro-genre of “yuppie horror” films. These are near and dear to my heart, because one of them — the 1990 John Schlesinger film Pacific Heights — is about San Francisco! In Pacific Heights — for those of you not up on middling 90s thrillers — Michael Keaton plays a psychotic con man who moves into the in-law unit of San Francisco homeowners Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith. When they try to evict him, they set in motion a chain of events that culminate in an ending every bit as savage as Fatal Attraction’s. I would contend that the stories of professional downfalls in films like Disclosure and Oleanna are basically less schlocky versions of the same dynamic. They are about middle class existence being disordered — a disorder that, like Deconstructing Harry, they find some exhilaration in, but also seem disturbed by.

The other representatives of the “yuppie horror” genre I can think of are Bad Influence (1989), Single White Female (1992), Malice (1993), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), Unlawful Entry (1992), and (kinda) the 1994 werewolf movie Wolf, which seems way more interested in the publishing industry than in lycanthropy. They are all about the vicissitudes of young professional life: sharing swanky apartments, buying homes, hiring nannies, having pets, getting or not getting promotions. Many of these have horror elements — at the end of Pacific Heights, deranged con man Michael Keaton literally re-enacts a slasher film in a gorgeous SF victorian. But ultimately they are probably closer to noirs. Malice has almost entirely unlikeable characters and a view of the everyday world constantly perched on the precipice of mayhem that feels very much like a noir. In other films — especially those concerned with yuppie parenthood — the main characters are fundamentally decent people, but have committed serious lapses: an affair, having their own career or handing over their child to Rebecca De Mornay.

These films are all fables about the trappings and rituals of middle class life turning on you. They are, moreover, gauntlets by which their protagonists prove that they in fact deserve the nice things they have. In being willing to fight for these things, they imbue their possession of them with a legitimacy it didn’t previously have. Those things can be: a nice house, a nice family, a cute child, a great career. So the movies of the PC-panic might seem to fit in with this mini-genre, except for one major difference: Barry Keith Brant proposed that these films by and large transform “evil” from “the classic horror film's otherworldly supernatural to the material and economic pressures.” I think that is on the whole true. Still: a film like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle may be about material pressures as well, but it is ultimately a morality tale about hubris, sin, fate — especially the sin of being a woman with a job and, again, entrusting your child to Rebecca De Mornay.

So Brant is probably right that there’s a profound materialism to the way these movies scare us: their frights (at least in their first half) arrive in the shape of eviction notices, citations, court hearings, or disciplinary processes at work. But I think he underestimates that these quotidian terrors always push up against something metaphysical: about duty, about fate, about control. And I think this is where the PC-movie comes in. A movie like Oleanna isn’t just Fatal Attraction for people who find Fatal Attraction distasteful. It is also Pacific Heights for people who’d be embarrassed to watch a movie about real estate deals gone bad. It’s about the economic security of the professional managerial class; but the genre exists as a genre only insofar that it can plausibly insist that it is about so much more than that.

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The house in Pacific Heights both is and is not a house. Anyone who’s done a home reno will wince in recognition at the ins and outs of buying a rotting old building with supposedly “good bones” in a famously foggy city. But it is of course something else as well: a representations of social compacts and their fragility; a nexus of the niceties of civilization and what it takes to reveal the savagery beneath. There’s something kind of funny about the fact that in Pacific Heights one truly shitty tenant becomes a stand-in for what good people do in the face of radical evil. I mean, No Country for Old Men needed a nail gun and a huge body count to make that same point!

But that disconnect is characteristic for these types of films, which telescope — not totally without justification, mind you — the slings and arrows of middle class fortunes into restatements of life’s great questions. But this incongruence is in fact the secret principle of these movies — this is the emotional truth they capture. Sure, this is at best a minor annoyance, but what if it WAS LITERAL MURDER. Their escalations — think of the infamous “boiled bunny” of Fatal Attraction —, the way they turn metaphors literal and then back into metaphors, however ridiculous, appear to capture certain yuppie structures of feeling.

The most interesting in these selective de- and remataphorizations in these films has to do with the language of crime. A lot of these are court thrillers (Presumed Innocent), or involve (off-screen) lawyers, as in Oleanna. But they are ultimately morality tales — they treat questions of guilt, of what someone deserves, and most importantly of punishment as both literal and figurative. There is this an interesting conflation in these kinds of movies. They raise the question of “is this a good person?” And then they go through a whole courtroom rigamarole, where the point seems to be that this person is guilty of the crime of being a bad person. The feminists, the “PC”, the overeager justice system are just narrative shortcuts to arrive at that conflation. It allows you to stage a literal courtroom scene about what is ultimately just odious personal behavior, and it allows you to sell that narrative contrivance as somehow a political point and ultimately feminism’s fault.

Macy’s character in Oleanna does seem like he’s kind of an ass, a hypocrite, and yes, a sexist. But of course by their second meeting, his student has accused him of sexual harassment, by the third of attempted rape — acts that have legal definitions and that can be substantiated. The film wants you to think that the student and the “group” — her scary feminist consciousness-raising group that seems to be turning her against him — are confusing personal failings for a crime. But the confusion is in fact the movie’s. Because the film is all about perspective and grey areas: the structure of the play (as with most two-handers) suggests that sometimes you’re supposed to side with him, sometimes with her. But if what we’re seeing on stage/screen is all that happens between these people, she is indeed lying in her accusation.

The film head-fakes towards even-handedness, but actually tells us she’s making it all up. She’s not really accusing him of a crime — that accusation is a misunderstanding of the fact that he’s a bit of a jerk. That move — “oh he isn’t a sexual harasser, he is just sort of old-fashioned” — doesn’t somehow represent neutral ground, it’s a standby of anti-sexual harassment discourse. Right down to Clarence Thomas whose confirmation — and Anita Hill’s very clear and specific accusations — clearly form the basis for Oleanna. Hill knew the law and pointed out that specific actions of Thomas’s had violated it. But when David Mamet restages their disagreement, it’s feelings on her side, the facts on his.

These films — and the associated tropes in films of other genres — are conversion engines: they convert petty annoyances in big metaphysical questions. They convert public disapproval into a courtroom, they convert consequences of any kind into legal punishment. And they thus ultimately seem to take a winner’s view of punishment: their sense of punishment is that of Clarence Thomas who still sits on the highest court of the land, but feels himself the victim, punished for life by free trips in his billionaire-sponsored RV. It’s that of #MeToo perpetrators who still release movies every six months, while their victims appear to have been blackballed. In other words, these are films that are able to find punishment in the absence of punishment.

In a movie I haven’t yet rewatched for this series — Alan Pakula’s 1990 legal thriller Presumed Innocent — this is made hilariously clear. I actually think it’s a pretty great movie — Pakula’s direction is great, Harrison Ford is just perfect whenever he’s accused of killing his wife, and John Williams’s score is wonderful —, but the ending voiceover is deeply hilarious to me. The plot — spoiler alert for a film that came out 35 years ago — is the following: Ford works as an ADA, and he’s having an affair with his co-worker (Greta Scacci). She ends up getting killed, and he first is put in charge of finding her killer, and eventually gets accused of the killing himself. In the end, the charges are dismissed. Ford then discovers that the actual killer is his wife (Bonnie Bedelia) who knew about the affair and wanted to punish him.

So, to sum up: Ford has an affair, which is resolved elegantly, when his dutiful wife murders his girlfriend and then takes him back in spite of a murder rap. She also gets away, in her case with murder. But Ford’s faith in the justice system is totally shaken. We end with a voiceover:

“The murder of Carolyn Polhemus remains unsolved. It is a practical impossibility to try two people for the same crime. Even if it wasn't, I couldn't take his mother from my son. I am a prosecutor. I have spent my life in the assignment of blame. With all deliberation and intent, I reached for Carolyn. I cannot pretend it was an accident. I reached for Carolyn, and set off that insane mix of rage and lunacy that led one human being to kill another. There was a crime. There was a victim. And there is punishment.”

You see, Ford’s character having to live with the knowledge that his wife did it, but that he can’t turn her in without ruining his home life, is like legal punishment. Which I suppose it is. If you squint. Real hard. This is the magic of these films: they overload their courtroom and legal scenarios with metaphysics — what is the truth? what does a person deserve? what do we owe one another? — and then boil that down to so many yuppie annoyance (what if what owe one another is last month’s rent?). To the point that they can’t figure out when they’re tackling actual legal and political questions, in which “there is punishment” would certainly at least involve allocating publicly to a crime. This is ultimately what I think links together the small canon of public cancellation-themed films over the last 35 years and the broader tropes that have suffused more widely within the culture: they are about those grey areas and indecidability that privilege affords you. And that defend certain people’s rights to those.