Netflix is a proud tribune of progressive causes. Its public statements and postures are so determinedly woke its eyes must be held open with matchsticks.
Its programming regularly promotes the causes dear to the identitarian left’s heart. During the Black Lives Matter protests last year it loudly promoted on its platform and elsewhere just about every movie about racial injustice ever made.
A few years ago it very publicly fired a senior executive for using the forbidden “n” word, even though it happened in what everyone acknowledged was a purely descriptive way. The chief executive, Reed Hastings, and his wife, donated more than dollars 5 million last year to Democratic candidates in elections.
Dave Chappelle is a comedian and, by most critical appraisals, an unusually gifted one. He is certainly successful. In 2017 Netflix signed him to an exclusive deal with the platform. His latest contract committed him to three hour-long stand-up performances recorded in front of live audiences for a fee that is reported to have averaged more than $US22 million for each show.
For comparison, the company paid $US21 million for the entire series of the South Korean hit Squid Game, which has just become one of the most successful in Netflix’s history.
Chappelle is black. His routine is, like much good comedy, lacerating in its satire - but he’s an equal-opportunity offender.
In his latest show, The Closer, which began airing this month, Chappelle is characteristically unsparing. Many of his targets are safe enough, the people the modern elite universally disdains: the white working class and the stores and restaurants they frequent; Trump supporters; religious preachers. But he goes further: Jews, Asians, women, fellow African-Americans, military veterans.
Recounting how he had recently survived symptomless Covid, he notes that he spent a lot of his mandated isolation watching television news, including about the rash of brutal attacks a few months ago on Asian-Americans by mostly black offenders across the country. “Brothers beating up Asians,” he said, and, in an unspoken reference to the Chinese origins of the virus, added: “That’s probably what’s happening inside my body.”
None of this provokes much outrage. Some people are surely offended but, as a black man who can recount many instances of prejudice he has suffered, Chappelle enjoys more latitude. Cancel culture has not yet claimed him. But Chappelle seems now to have crossed the line.
One aspect of his humour that has long attracted criticism is the derision he directs at transgendered people. In The Closer he addresses this, approvingly citing JK Rowling and describing himself as a member of “Team TERF”, the acronym coined by critics for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”. But then, in a comment clearly intended to be understood without satire, he lights the blue touchpaper: “Gender is a fact.”
It’s this statement - until about five years ago almost universally viewed as an expression of empirical scientific truth - that seems to have been deemed unsayable even by a stand-up comic.
Netflix employees have denounced their employer and demanded the cancellation of the show.
On Wednesday a number of staff members walked off the job and protested outside the company’s headquarters in Los Angeles. As a handful of counter-protesters with placards calling for the defence of free speech attempted to disrupt the proceedings, the crowd listened to speakers attacking Netflix, including Joey Soloway, creator of Transparent, a trans-friendly comedy that aired on rival Amazon.
“Trans people are in the middle of a holocaust,” Soloway said, underscoring that although humour may be off-limits in Hollywood hyperbole certainly isn’t.
Netflix has awkwardly straddled the controversy. It has defended Chappelle’s right to perform while condemning transphobia. Earlier this week Ted Sarandos, the company’s co-CEO, told employees he had “screwed up” his initial response to the controversy when he defended the show by saying: “Content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.” But so far it’s just words. As of Thursday, The Closer was still trending in Netflix’s US top ten shows.
The lessons of this episode are twofold. First, in modern pop culture the rules about speech are tightly drawn. You can get away easily with attacking obvious targets; in fact it’s more or less mandatory with white people, Trump or Brexit supporters. What’s more, the limits on speech are expanded depending on the identity of the speaker; if you’re a minority you have much more freedom than if you’re a white male cisgendered member of the patriarchy.
But there seems now to be a citadel of identity, the breaching of which will get you into serious trouble whoever you are. As it stands this citadel’s boundaries are marked not just by the rights of trans people but by the pseudo-science that rejects the very idea of natural gender.
The other lesson is about the limits of wokery for the woke corporation. Chappelle is enormously popular - as expensive as he was, he is bringing in perhaps millions of new subscribers to Netflix (the company doesn’t break down the performance of individual shows). He is great for the bottom line and that used to be just about all that mattered. But modern companies must now operate by new and shifting priorities.
They are required to be social justice warriors; promoters of ecological sustainability, racial equity, limitless gender and sexual choices. The trick in all this is to keep the virtue-signalling as cheap as possible. This is often easy: fire the odd employee for thought crimes; keep posting the right messages on Instagram; make a big show of pronoun-inclusivity. But sometimes the need to make money clashes with the need to be good. Reassuringly, Netflix seems to be signalling that it’s still a capitalist organisation after all.
The Times
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