Disney Should Rehire James Gunn For Guardians of the Galaxy 3 ~ Daily news

An alt-right smear campaign has achieved its goal of getting Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn fired over behavior he'd long since apologized for - but it's not too late for Disney to rehire him. The campaign rolled out in the lead-up to San Diego Comic-Con 2018, where Gunn was supposed to be announcing a new project during the Sony Pictures panel. Within mere hours of the calls for Gunn to be fired gaining steam, Disney had cut all ties with the filmmaker.

The campaign was built around a collection of offensive and vulgar tweets, relating to topics like pedophilia, rape, the Holocaust, AIDS and 9/11, that Gunn had posted between 2008 and early 2012, before he was brought on board to direct the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

Disney's reaction was swift - so swift, in fact, that it's hard to believe the decision was made with a full awareness of the history behind those tweets, the history that proceeded him, and the motivations of the people who used them to take down Gunn.

This Page: Gunn Before Guardians of the Galaxy
Page 2: The Campaign to Get Gunn Fired
Page 3: Why Disney Should Rehire Gunn

Gunn Before Guardians of the Galaxy

When the news broke of Gunn landing the Guardians of the Galaxy directing gig back in 2012, many were surprised - precisely because of the kind of work he was known for. Gunn's career began at Troma Entertainment, a studio whose brand was making low-budget movies that were as vulgar, disgusting and offensive as possible. Tromeo and Juliet, the first feature film written by Gunn, ends with its protagonists discovering that they are siblings, getting married anyway, and having a series of horribly deformed children produced through incest.

Gunn's edgy brand of humor continued outside of his work at Troma. Back in 2008 and 2009, he and his brothers produced a series of comedy web shorts called PG Porn, which are basically exactly what they sound like (one short, Helpful Bus, is a parody of the "fake taxi" genre of porn, in which Sean Gunn and Craig Robinson play members of a crew who genuinely do just want to give people free rides to their destination). Gunn's 2010 black comedy Super, about a man who tries to become a superhero but just ends up violently murdering people, features a scene in which Ellen Page's character rapes the protagonist that's played for laughs.

When Gunn was hired to write and direct Guardians of the Galaxy, he had already built his career as a provocateur and purveyor of gross, bad taste comedy - a reputation that extended to his online presence, with tweets like "The Expendables was so manly I f***ed the s*** out of the little p****y by next to me! The boys ARE back in town!" The tweets are indeed shocking, but that was the whole point. They were posted at a time when Gunn was known for (and indeed, made a living from) shocking output, and also at a time when shock culture was very in vogue both online and off. In 2008, YouTube was flooded with videos of people reacting to the scat porn video 2 Girls 1 Cup. In 2010, one cosplayer made a few headlines by wearing a Pedobear costume to New York Comic-Con. In 2011, the gleefully offensive card game Cards Against Humanity was the number one selling game on Amazon.

Once Gunn was confirmed to be directing a Marvel movie, it was only a matter of months before some of his offensive writing was discovered and condemned - specifically, a post on his site titled "The 50 Superheroes You Most Want to Have Sex With," which was blasted for its sexism and homophobia. Gunn apologized in a statement to GLAAD in November 2012, saying, "I can see where statements were poorly worded and offensive to many. I'm sorry and regret making them at all." At the time, neither Marvel nor Disney even responded to the controversy. After all, Gunn's past wasn't exactly a secret.

Page 2: The Campaign to Get Gunn Fired

The Campaign To Get Gunn Fired

Six years later, Gunn crossed the wrong people by criticizing conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. This attracted the attention of the ring-wing political news site The Daily Caller, and alt-right figure Mike Cernovich. Cernovich was a ringleader in the Gamergate harassment campaign and went on to be a major proponent of the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory, which claimed that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was part of a secret child sex slavery ring run out of the basement of a pizza parlor. This wasn't Cernovich's first rodeo, and through Gamergate he and other members of the alt-right had already developed an effective playbook for smear campaigns.

The raw material - Gunn's old tweets - was already there, so the next step was to collect the most shocking tweets, frame them in the worst possible light, and then embellish the truth with hyperbole and misinformation. For example, after the tweets were discovered Gunn did a mass delete of anything that he had posted prior to working for Disney - about 10,000 tweets in total. This was swiftly used to claim that all 10,000 tweets had been rape and pedophilia jokes (the actual number appears to be a few dozen tweets posted over the course of 3-4 years). Another popular myth that was quickly disseminated was that Gunn had posted child pornography on his personal blog (the video, which had the joke title "100 Pubescent Girls Touch Themselves," was actually of the Belgian girls' choir Scala & Kolacny Brothers singing the '90s pop song "I Touch Myself" by the Divinyls). The Daily Caller's article headline claimed to have uncovered "Incidents Of Sexual Assault Against Children," but the incident in question was Gunn recalling a story someone else had told him about a monkey masturbating in front of a child actor on the set of Max Keeble's Big Move.

Far from being driven by genuine outrage, the campaign was designed to give liberals a taste of their own medicine - especially in the wake of Roseanne Barr being fired from the recent revival of her show for a racist tweet attacking former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett. Gunn, a vocal critic of current U.S. President Donald Trump, was the perfect target for punishment. Disney - whose top executives may have been genuinely unaware of the extent of Gunn's online shock antics prior to his being hired, reacted quickly, and less than 24 hours later Gunn had been fired from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

The Implications Of Firing Gunn

On the face of it, firing Gunn may have seemed like an easy decision: Disney, a company known for its family-friendly brand, taking a hard-line stance against someone in their employ having made jokes about pedophilia in the past. Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn statement described the jokes as "offensive... indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values." It was a way for Disney to protect themselves against accusations of hypocrisy by people comparing Gunn's tweets to the tweet that got Roseanne Barr fired and the Roseanne revival canceled.

But far from covering Disney's back, the decision has actually painted a massive target on it, opening the studio up to a potentially endless string of similar campaigns. Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi previously directed offbeat indie comedy Hunt For the Wilderpeople, in which there's a running gag about the public at large believing that Sam Neill's character is a pedophile. Waititi is currently making Jojo Rabbit, a movie where he plays Hitler, so it won't be long before there are convenient pictures of a Marvel director wearing a Hitler mustache on the internet.

A tough stance against offensive jokes is going to become even more difficult to maintain once Disney's purchase of Fox goes through. This year's Deadpool 2, which was produced by Fox, features a scene in which Deadpool finds himself face to face with a man's genitals and exclaims, "Scout Master Kevin?" Later in the movie, Deadpool is regrowing his legs after being sliced in half and flashes his toddler genitals at the camera, Basic Instinct-style. "I was worried that you saw some baby balls in there, and we would get rejected by the MPAA," Reynolds recalled at Comic-Con.

Given the enormous scope of Disney's operations, there are countless other stars and creatives who would be fired if the same standards applied to Gunn were applied across the board. Donald Glover, who recently played Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story and had a smaller role in Spider-Man: Homecoming, has had careers in rap and stand-up comedy that are replete with offensive content (sample lyrics: "I got a bunch of jackanapes at the back of me/That'll lacerate anyone in the back of a matinee/And laugh while they masturbatin' all over your beaten body"). Sarah Silverman, who voices Disney Princess Vanellope in the Wreck-It Ralph movies, started out as a stand-up comedian known for her edgy humor, with jokes like "I was raped by a doctor. Which is, you know, so bittersweet for a Jewish girl." And Robert Downey Jr., the poster-child of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, spent more than a decade battling severe addiction to drugs and alcohol that led to numerous arrests and time behind bars.

Downey is a particularly important example because if the MCU can be said to have an emotional core, it's one of redemption. And the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, in particular, are about "a-holes" who are trying to become better people.

Page 3: Why Disney Should Rehire Gunn

Guardians of the Galaxy As Gunn's Redemption Tale

"[Rocket is] 100% the most personal character I've ever written," Gunn told Buzzfeed in 2017. "He's the most me. I can't even really talk about it much. Definitely. Definitely. He's me."

The character in question is a talking raccoon who was created by scientists through genetic experimentation. We first meet Rocket as a bounty hunter whose only friend is Groot, a sentient tree whose vocabulary is limited to the words "I am Groot." Rocket is crude, misanthropic, and violent, and cares only about landing his next big paycheck. He's also a very weird character, that a lot of filmmakers wouldn't really know what to make of. "I was definitely the skeptic going, Uh, so, raccoon?" The Avengers director Joss Whedon recalled in Gunn's Buzzfeed profile. "And James came in and was like, raccoon!"

Guardians of the Galaxy was, despite its odd premise and characters, a fairly typical Marvel adventure, but in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 things got surprisingly sincere and emotional. It's a film that deals with the pitfalls of ego and performative meanness, and about characters overcoming those instincts. But the films were more than just a redemption tale for the characters in them; they were also a redemption tale for Gunn. Reacting to his brother's dismissal on Twitter, Sean Gunn (who plays Kraglin and provides motion-capture for Rocket) explained, "I've heard my brother say many times that when Quill rallies the team with 'this is our chance to give a shit'--to care--that it's the pep talk he himself needed to hear." James Gunn himself opened up about this aspect of his Marvel work in the Buzzfeed profile:

"I felt like Guardians forced me into a much deeper way of thinking about, you know, my relationship to people, I suppose. I was a very nasty guy on Twitter. It was a lot of f***ing edgy, in-your-face, dirty stuff. I suddenly was working for Marvel and Disney, and that didn't seem like something I could do anymore. I thought that that would be a hindrance on my life. But the truth was it was a big, huge opening for me. I realized, a lot of that stuff is a way that I push away people. When I was forced into being this" — he moved his hand over his chest — "I felt more fully myself."

And what's "this"?

"Sensitive, I guess?" he said. "Positive. I mean, I really do love people. And by not having jokes to make about whatever was that offensive topic of the week, that forced me into just being who I really was, which was a pretty positive person. It felt like a relief."

Gunn's admission that Rocket is essentially a self-insert character makes one exchange in the movie particularly poignant. After becoming isolated from his friends by his combativeness and vicious insults, Rocket's vulnerabilities are laid bare by Yondu, Peter Quill's adoptive father. "You play like you're the meanest and the hardest," Yondu sneers. "But actually you're the most scared of all... You push away anyone who's willing to put up with you, because just a little bit of love reminds you how big and empty that hole inside you actually is."

Deflated, Rocket asks glumly, "What kind of a pair are we?" "The kind that's about to go fight a planet, I reckon," Yondu replies.

Why Disney Should Rehire James Gunn

James Gunn wasn't the first to be targeted by Cernovich and the alt-right mob. MSNBC presenter Sam Seder was fired after Cernovich dug up a tweet from eight years prior, which contained a dark joke about Roman Polanski, and Cernovich responded to the success with glee. "Thank you to everybody who emailed MSNBC," Cernovich said in a Twitter video afterwards. "You're heroes because you emailed MSNBC and you let them know about the tweet. You let them know the people will be heard." A couple of days later, Seder was rehired when it became clear that the tweet had been shared out of context.

Newly emboldened by Disney's firing of Gunn, the mob have already begun moving on to new targets. Patton Oswalt, who has a recurring role in Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, is now facing the same tactics over a tweet from 2013 that said, "My dong is super friendly and loves getting rubbed by children #CareerEndingTwitterTypos." As with Gunn and the video of the girls' choir, those targeting Oswalt are deliberately ignoring the hashtag that explains the joke and claiming that the tweet is Oswalt proudly admitting to being a pedophile.

The comparison that Disney no doubt fears is between Gunn's dismissal and that of Roseanne Barr - but firing Gunn was the real hypocrisy. Both Gunn and Barr were given second chances at Disney despite their colorful past (Barr was a vocal proponent of birtherism and Pizzagate, and in 2013 described then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice as "a man with big swinging ape balls"). The difference is that while Barr squandered her second chance, Gunn made the most of his.

Not only has Disney's decision to capitulate to the manufactured controversy completely failed as a means of placating the mob that started it, it's actually set a dangerous precedent, and emboldened that mob to continue with similar campaigns. Gunn's firing was a decision made in haste; a reaction to something that had been public knowledge for years, which Gunn had long since apologized for and appears to sincerely regret. Gunn spent six years making good on his 2012 apology, bettering himself as a person, and making films that carry an important lesson about the perils of using vulgarity and tough-guy posturing as a defense mechanism. To fire him now is to send the message that apology, atonement and self-improvement are meaningless. Is that message consistent with Disney's values?

More: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: Every Update You Need To Know

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