Thumbs up, thumbs down: The cycles of 'cancel culture'

There's a scene in Ridley Scott's 2000 film Gladiator where the emperor's son, Commodus, considers whether he will let General Maximus Decimus Meridius live or die. As Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) wavers between lifting or dropping his thumb, the camera pans around the Colosseum. The crowd is on its feet, chanting "live". With reluctance, the thumb is raised: Maximus (Russell Crowe) is saved. The crowd roars as orchestral music soars.

It's a scene that speaks to some of the strains of our contemporary climate: the sense of the masses directly influencing traditional institutions of authority, of "cancellation" being in the mere flick of a wrist, and of the ethics of seeing choices about a life and livelihood served up for mass consumption.

Two separate but in many ways similar statements, signed by some of Australia's and the world's most significant cultural leaders and published last week, have intensified the debate about these subjects, which are often lumped together under the catch-all phrase "cancel culture".

While neither letter specifically mentions "cancel culture", they share an interest in questions of free speech, censorship and how and who chooses when the thumb turns up or down.

Eliza Scanlen on the set of Mukbang.Credit: Harri Sharp

In Australia, cultural heavyweights published a statement in response to the controversy surrounding debut director Eliza Scanlen's Sydney Film Festival prize-winning Mukbang, a short film about a schoolgirl binge-eating food online as part of a trend that has been popular in South Korea for the past decade.

On Twitter, actor and writer Michelle Law accused the film of being culturally insensitive and reflecting a "white supremacist" tendency in the Australian film industry due to its exploration of Mukbang and a now-deleted scene that showed a drawing of the white schoolgirl protagonist violently attacking a black schoolboy.

In response, the 27 signatories – including Indigenous filmmakers Warwick Thornton, Rachel Perkins, Ivan Sen and Darren Dale, writer Andrew Bovell and Hollywood star Joel Edgerton and his director brother Nash – argued that "something is dangerously askew in the way that we are talking about race in the arts in this country, we feel that it is time we spoke up."

"The current focus on public shaming and 'burning down' the industry is misguided and ahistorical. Even if it started as an attempt at genuine critique, in the divisive and polarising world of social media, it has quickly descended into online bullying," the statement read.

While acknowledging structural racism within the arts industry, author Christos Tsiolkas said one of the key reasons he signed the letter was because he was alarmed by the "ugliness of the rhetoric at the moment" and the "annihilation" of an individual's dignity.

"I feel sympathy with a lot of the people on Twitter. I don’t believe censoring and shaming is the way forward. I think it has been incredibly destructive historically and my fear now is people get caught up in their bubbles and they must be sick of it," Tsiolkas said. "Everyone is throwing stones and no one is taking a moment to think."

One of the filmmakers involved in writing the statement, who asked not to be named, described the Sydney Film Festival as a beloved institution and said a video call involving industry leaders was held as the debate about Mukbang unfolded online. There was a shared sentiment, the filmmaker said, that figures who should be allies in the campaign for greater diversity were “eating each other in a very public way”.

The question of whether to include white arts leaders as signatories was a topic of considerable discussion, but the group came to the conclusion that "this is an issue for our whole industry, and white people have to be part of that discussion".

“There was a lot of talk about trying not to make it inflammatory, to keep it cool-headed,” the filmmaker said. “We didn’t want to inflame things further – but of course that’s not what happened.”

On the same day the letter was published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, 153 prominent writers, activists and academics across the political spectrum, including J.K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, released a letter in Harper's Magazine.

The Harper's letter was a broader rallying cry for "justice and open debate", arguing that the "exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted". But as with the Sydney Film Festival letter, it took aim at "the swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought" and the "vogue for public shaming and ostracism".

Both letters copped swift and severe criticism for being paternalistic, out of touch, overblown, hypocritical and complicit with structures of racism. The signatories, it was pointed out, were well-resourced figures of cultural authority who had easy access to major news outlets and no real risk of being "cancelled".

Arab Australian poet Omar Sakr said it never surprised him when people "with a great deal of access can't see the problem, or think things are going swell".

"It felt wrong to me that a collection of older, for the most part, established figures in the arts would, under the banner of the SMH and to an audience of millions, publicly try to shut down an argument put forward by one, or a small group of people, on Twitter of all places."

While the media "indulged in the fantasy of free speech debate", Sakr said other key voices and issues were denied. These included discussions about the need for greater diversity in media, including at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, which has been criticised for appointing five freelance cultural critics, all of whom were white (two of whom resigned in protest over the lack of cultural diversity among the five critics). Michelle Law was among those who were critical of the appointments.

Sakr also said the media attention given to the letters revealed how legacy outlets attempted to control the terms of debate, highlighting how on the flipside Australian media outlets would not publish a statement, signed by more than 700 academics and writers, against Israel's planned annexation of the West Bank.

Dr Michael Mohammed Ahmad, founding director of Sweatshop Literacy Movement and author of The Lebs, said the Sydney Film Festival letter was a "distraction which derail our attempts to hold white people and white institutions, including the institution that published the letter, accountable for their role in systemic and structural racism".

The swift backlash to the letters was followed by some swift mea culpas. One signatory to the Harper's letter, author Jennifer Finney Boylan, made a complete U-turn, issuing an apology for signing the statement.

While those arts leaders who signed the Sydney Film Festival letter said they didn't intend to fan the flames of "cancel culture", they were prepared for criticism.

“One of the reasons there are so many names on that list is that people were afraid of being attacked individually,” said the filmmaker who didn't want to be identified. “It’s so easy to take down one person and destroy them, their ‘politically correct’ credentials. People are scared, totally scared.”

In a story published on the website Reason, another signatory to the Harper's letter, journalist Jesse Singal, criticised the heated response, saying: "there was no sane connection between the text of the letter and such a reaction".

The Macquarie Dictionary crowned "cancel culture" its 2019 word of the year – describing it as "the attitudes within a community which call for or bring about the withdrawal of support from a public figure" – but it is a slippery term that persistently refuses a stable definition.

"The label 'cancel culture' turns attention to these discussions and debates but frames them as problematic, and I think that really is not particularly helpful," University of NSW Associate Professor Tanja Dreher, a media and communications academic, said.

"It is an overly simplistic term and a little alarmist. There are lots of really interesting discussions and debates taking place, and to simplify them all in that term 'cancel culture' actually hides more than reveals."

J.K. Rowling, who has clashed with critics on social media for her posts on gender and sex, signed the Harper's letter.Credit: AP

University of Sydney cultural studies expert Dr Benjamin Nickl said contemporary "cancel culture" had developed over several years, although protests, boycotts, public shaming and erasure had a long history.

Nickl said the current strain was a media and youth culture phenomenon often related to clicktivism, social media warriors, hashtaggers and keyboard courage. And while debates about the phenomenon have ebbed and flowed, he said he thought it had reached a new point in its evolution.

Nickl said the rapid "cancellations" of public figures had offered individuals a "glimpse of power that people can have to overturn the authority", and he said the criticism of the open letters had the potential to "initiate a profound change in the perception of cultural institutionalisation and the canon".

"However, cancel culture won’t change much if it’s just performative and replaces Caesar’s thumbs up or down during the Romans’ bread-and-games pastime sport. That was to see even the emperor, a massive authority, decide at least in part swayed by the large audience mob’s and people’s opinion," Nickl said.

Dreher said generational difference also contributed to the nature of contemporary "cancel culture", as the conversations played out in different ways on social media and in legacy media outlets.

"In some recent cases what we are seeing is commentators who have some platform – and that is derived from a long-term involvement in media and cultural institutions – in conversation with a generation of advocates and activists and practitioners who have really developed in the social media environment and are very adept at using the affordances of social media for discussion, debate and activism, and so in a sense we've got different models of how to have these discussions and debates and sometimes they are rubbing up against each other," Dreher said.

But to attempt to unpack "cancel culture" is in many ways an unwitting reinforcement of the phrase. Dreher said the concept has become a stuck point and pushing the discussion beyond the frame is necessary.

"We really need to think that if we set aside the cancel culture debate what other conversations could we have? What would we be talking about?"

with Karl Quinn