Emilia Perez: Notes on a Scandal
The rise from rags to riches or anonymity to fame, or whatever you want to call it, is a cornerstone of the American Dream. Then there’s the other face of that coin: from fame to notoriety. If you’re not very careful, notoriety leads to infamy and then the party’s over before it even got full swing. Hollywood, once again, leads by example. The most recent scandal involving the actress Karla Sofia Gascon, who earned many accolades for her role in the movie Emilia Perez, teaches us that for your success in showbusiness, what you do on social media is more important than your competence of work experience. If your Twitter account shows a different side of you than Netflix would like us to see, you’re in trouble. To think it all started so wonderful, with her Oscar nomination as the first transgender actor to ever be on the list. Well, apart from Bette Davis. Just kidding.
There are few things America likes more than milestones to show how not self-absorbed, hypocritical and performative they really are. It happened with Halle Berry and Michelle Yeoh already: another box to tick for the Academy. What happened with Gascon was a hiccup in their chase for the next step in the eternal quest for inclusivity: after fighting for their rights on so many fronts, transgender people finally touched down on the most important red carpet of showbusiness as nominees.
That’s why this wave of cancellation is all the more perplexing. It shows the true face behind DEI: minorities fit their agenda like a glove as long as they’re in line with whatever Hollywood needs them to be. As soon as they go off script, there’s a whole damage control machinery and you either shut up and play ball or pack your bags since they’ll find another obedient transgender if you’re not willing to bend over. Look what happened with Snow White after Peter Dinklage: a huge mess already sentenced to death on Rotten Tomatoes.
In other words, they need a cardboard cut-out instead of a human being. An industry where you earn a fortune by repeating someone else’s words is inherently prone to stunts like these. There’s a reason acting schools are sometimes mocked as schools where people are taught how to fuck: it’s a part of the job. People shocked by Weinstein’s casting couch have either no experience in showbusiness or no idea how business works in other high-profit branches of economy.
Life isn’t fair and the brightest don’t always get the corner office. There was a comment under a video called The Myth of Hard Work by Adam Conover that addresses the lies hiding behind many things, where a woman complained about being homeless despite her education. You could apply it to the inclusivity narrative as well. It’s all about luck and there are limits to how far it takes you. If the roof over your head is a tent, there’s only one color you see: dollar green.
As soon as it turned out that Gascon can’t be reduced to a gender but has many opinions which, according to Hollywood, a transgender person isn’t supposed to have, they had no more use for her. The idiot is no longer useful so now they’re trying to protect the project while pushing her into the background.
The disgraced actress had thrown lots of shade on Muslims and the BLM movement and, boosted by enthusiastic media coverage,it exploded like a gall bladder. Afterwards, she exercised the usual self-flagellation in the form of a public apology but it did nothing to extinguish the fire, somehow the hole she was suddenly stuck in kept getting deeper and deeper. It sends a disturbing message: the Big Brother is watching and you better cover up your Twitter tracks otherwise all you say can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion.
This isn’t to say that her views on Islam, which she labeled as an infection, or George Floyd whom she reduced to a drug dealer, are aspirational. It’s just a proof of how complex humans are and that bigotry or discrimination aren’t exclusive to white heterosexuals, especially not only straight white men. Before we call things thrown at her internalized, maybe try and give someone enough credit to say they’re perfectly capable to think for themselves and be messed up in their own right.
Victim porn had to reach a limit sooner or later, and while the anticlimactic heroine of Emilia Perez is lauded as the embodiment of transgender affirmation in the film industry, now the tune has changed almost to the point of betrayal. This reductive view of other people shows us how inclusivity turns you into a hostage of unrealistic expectations. The very fact her opinions are aired like dirty laundry means actors shouldn’t be treated as opinion makers.
If you’re prepared to judge her about anything but her acting maybe you aren’t the sharpest tool in the box. There’s not a single person in Hollywood that has anything worth hearing to say unless it’s on the big screen on your local cinema. And when I go to see something, their politics is the last thing on my mind. Actually, the fact showbusiness was so instrumental in the election campaign is partly a reason why Democrats were so resolutely rejected.
However, don’t take any of this as my opinion about the movie since I really don’t feel compelled to see it. There’s too much out there and I prefer sticking to a cup of hot cocoa with cozy murder mystery. Not that there’s anything cozy about murder, but neither is character assassination and that’s happening right now to Karla Sofia Gascon. Not every woman is a #MeToo ally and there’s no shame or malice in it. They simply can’t be bothered.
Maybe this is the advent of a change that the woke left still has to endure. Will she be turned into a cautionary tale and thrown under a bus by her own production team? It seems so. Some cows are still sacred and she’s far from being the golden calf of the highest order. Instead, her primary appeal could be her identity, another box to be ticked and that’s the point where DEI goes to die.
Representation is a good thing, but not all by itself: it has to be organic and authentic, otherwise it’s performative and fake. The point should be in who, not what you are. It reminds me of a friendly and rather handsome guy in my gym who’s also the waiter at my favorite bar. He’s polite, smiles at you and sometimes he even treats me with a free piece of their tasty banana bread. What’s not to like? Well, as it turns out, on his Facebook profile, he’s a practicing Muslim. Nothing wrong with that.
The problem lies in some of the opinions he’s advocating, scattered between his ads for personalized fitness and diet routines since he’s a gym coach as well. Hamas isn’t really a terrorist organization, it seems. The rest sounds like motivational speech through the lens of the Quran. It also makes me a little uncomfortable because I don’t know if he’d be as polite to me if he were aware of my sexual orientation. But let’s not jump to conclusions, that’s another woke trap I refuse to fall into. No taking of offense on someone else’s behalf or assuming discrimination on your account because that’s what the mainstream discourse suggests to you. Anyway, no need to overshare my private life outside the closest circle of friends. I’m not closeted or at worst, my closet’s door is wide open. We live in a world of oversharing due to social media enabling us unprecedented access to people we don’t know but feel entitled to because they’re famous.
The time when celebrities had an air of mystique about them is long gone. Elon Musk, Madonna and your mommy have Twitter accounts or Telegram which is lauded as a platform with an exceptional privacy protection. How curious its CEO is Pavel Durov, a Russian developer and counterpart to the Silicon Valley triumvirate seated front and center at Trump’s coronation. They created a world where we dig through digital waste in search of incriminating material against others. It’s petty and hurtful. A bit like pointing a finger at my high school photos and the fact my clothes didn’t properly fit me. Did I change in the meantime? Of course. My wardrobe today comes in only two sizes: the proper one and wishful thinking. Did Gascon learn a lesson in the meantime as well? Hopefully she did. The lesson that she doesn’t owe them a damn thing, let alone an apology for having an unscripted opinion. No matter if we approve of it or not.
