DURING recent times, the notion that a person can be ‘cancelled’ – a word I must regularly accessorise with frilly quotation marks for my own sanity – has become a polarising topic of debate.
Generally, cancel culture applies to celebrities and public figures who make a bit of a faux pas or are perceived to have done something unacceptable, resulting in them being culturally blocked from having a prominent public platform and/or facing significant career-damaging fall out.
An example of this phenomenon in action is depicted in ITV’s latest mini-series Douglas Is Cancelled, which sees a respected television news anchor, Douglas Bellowers (Hugh Bonneville), fall from grace when he is accused of making a sexist joke at a wedding on social media.
This causes a public backlash fuelled by ‘woke’ Gen Z-ers, who subsequently call for Douglas to be cancelled.
To many people, this process of publicly calling for accountability and/or boycotting the person involved has become a form of social justice. It is a way of combatting, through collective action, some of the power imbalance which often exists between public figures with significant influence, particularly on social media, and the people and communities their words and actions may directly impact – a kind of virtual vigilante movement, if you like.
However, on the opposite side of the coin, others argue that cancel culture is a mindless form of social media ‘mob rule’ attempting to stifle people’s right to freedom of speech and opinion.
In a typical journalistic fashion, I sit somewhere in the middle. Whilst I believe it’s important to hold those with influence and power to account, I don’t think dredging up tweets from 2011 or calling for ‘heads to roll’ in the wake of a thoughtless or ill-advised throwaway comment is the right way to exercise social justice.
We all make mistakes, and we are all capable of saying or writing something which might be misconstrued, but such is the power of social media that it is no longer possible to deny, retract or explain – and, in many cases, the offending remark is taken out of context.
It is important to note that sometimes this approach to ‘cancelling’ doesn’t have the desired effect.
Take comedian Ricky Gervais, for example. He has faced intense criticism throughout his career because of his tendency to test the boundaries of comedy and lampoon closed systems of thought, making him one of the most consistently ‘cancelled’ individuals at the centre of the cancel culture debate.
Despite this, Gervais has released three Netflix comedy specials since 2018, with his latest offering Mortality set to be released in 2025. He continues to sell out stadiums both in the UK and USA, which clearly demonstrates that there are those who can apparently subvert their cancelled status.
Similarly, actor Armie Hammer – who was cancelled in 2021 after several allegations of sexual abuse and cannibalism were made against him – has also decided to embrace his cancellation. The case against Hammer was dropped last year due to insufficient evidence. In a recent interview he claimed that he found being cancelled “incredibly liberating”.
This suggests that receiving a guilty verdict from the court of public opinion doesn’t carry much weight if it’s not reinforced by a court of law – calling the value of cancel culture into question.
The beauty of embracing a cancelled identity is that it can imbue the cancel-ee with an aura of rebellious glamour. Rather than being seen as out of touch, or perhaps a bit of a bully, they become an outlaw. This exoticism allows them to eventually bounce back: their opinions quickly rinsed of offence, they become almost bewitchingly controversial.
It seems to me that a defining feature of cancel culture is not, as one might expect, silence, apology or shame. Instead, it is often (rather ironically) even more exposure than the guilty party ever received before.
In light of this, it will be interesting to see who eventually triumphs in the ongoing Strictly debacle…
