A Lack of Compassion
Let's examine The Hollywood Reporter's soft-focus profile of Gina Carano.
In 2021, Disney/Lucasfilm fired actor and ex-MMA fighter Gina Carano from The Mandalorian for an offensive post on social media where she sent out a photo from the Holocaust of a terrified Jewish woman being chased by a boy with bat; the caption read “How is this any different from hating someone for their political views?”
Three years later, and The Hollywood Reporter and reporter Seth Abramovitch have clumsily tried to retrofit this into a story of “cancel culture.” Through this lens, where Carano tells her story with no pushback whatsoever, she is a victim of having political views that are unwelcome in Hollywood. Because she shared those views on social media, she was unjustly fired, and she welcomes the backing of Elon Musk in suing Disney for wrongful termination.
In Carano’s telling, the “woke mob” came after her for minor infractions like listing her pronouns as “boop/bop/beep,” not keeping up a black square on her profile during the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020, and refusing to put certain hashtags in her profile. While Carano says that the pronoun thing got her an angry call from Disney that mandated sensitivity training, even The Hollywood Reporter can only cite the reaction to the second two as people were mad at her online. That’s fairly weak reasoning considering popular actors, especially ones attached to a property as high-profile as Star Wars, are always going to have angry fans. Hell, even non-famous people saying innocuous things gets people on social media riled up.
What both this profile and Carano herself seem to keep missing is that Carano has no awareness of others beyond her self-interest. There’s little curiosity of why people would be upset, nor is there any deeper inquisitiveness about those who are backing her right now. Carano says she remains stridently anti-vax, and she was anti-masking during the height of the pandemic. She cheerfully backed up Donald Trump’s claims about voter fraud by saying, “make voter fraud end in 2020,” despite no evidence of any fraud.
The Hollywood Reporter and Carano want to render these into banal political views no different than anything someone would hold on the left, except we know that both of these views are harmful, especially when someone famous like Carano can send them out. We know that when people turn away from vaccines, sickness and death follow. We know that when people no longer believe in democratic institutions, they’re willing to engage in violence to overthrow the democratically elected. But Carano isn’t being asked, “Are you pro-measles?” and “Do you believe the January 6th insurrectionists should have been successful?” The framing is, “Hey, I just said some opinions online, and I lost my job for it,” with the implication being, “and it could happen to you.”
Except…no. What Carano and THR are arguing here is that Carano is entitled to a role in Star Wars, the fame and power that come with it, and no consequences for her actions. It is the inverse Spider-Man rule that with great power, comes no responsibilities. It’s not like Carano is some obscure figure harassed by an online mob for a bad joke. Nor is she being persecuted simply for holding right-wing views as if she had been saying, “We need to institute a Fair Tax system, and to remove the regulations that impede business!” For Carano, it’s unfair that she said things that were harmful, and then held accountable by her employer because she had a public-facing role.
It feels like Carano overestimated her value to Disney, and is appalled that the studio deemed she was more trouble than she was worth. That’s not the woke mob coming to get you; that’s you saying things that were so unpopular that the PR headache was a drain on studio resources. Carano is a middling actor (there’s a reason Stephen Soderbergh made sure she was surrounded by high-caliber talent in Haywire), not some acclaimed figure with a controversial past. If someone like Mel Gibson couldn’t be cast in Star Wars, what made Carano think the studio would deem her valuable enough to deal with the fallout every time she wanted to compare herself to Holocaust victims?
And yet the entire focus of both Carano and the piece is that she’s the only person that matters. Abramovitch doesn’t talk to people who lost loved ones due to COVID. He doesn’t talk to poll workers that were harassed because of Trump’s Big Lie. The only Jewish person he asked about her Holocaust comments was right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, who isn’t an objective third-party since his company, Daily Wire, hired Carano to appear in its films. Abramovitch and Carano also are indifferent to the fact that Elon Musk is a raging white supremacist. This quote from Carano kind of gives the game away:
“I think it’s pretty incredible what he is doing,” she says. “A lot of billionaires put their money into buying islands and building bunkers. Elon Musk is using his money to fight massive injustice battles.”
This is the massive injustice? An actor said offensive things on social media and lost her job, and now a billionaire will back her lawsuit against a major corporation? It’s such a small worldview where injustice is something that affects Carano personally, not something that can be systemic or perpetrated against minority groups. The profile wants to cast Carano as someone who was treated unfairly, and now she’s fighting back. It never answers the question why she shouldn’t have to suffer consequences for her actions. If her positions are innocuous, then Carano and Abramovitch should have to say why. If it’s just a fight for free speech, then why call Musk your “guardian angel” when he frequently bans and dismisses speech he doesn’t like on Twitter? If free speech is tantamount, then what about the speech of those who find her comments offensive?
The problem for both Carano and THR is that they need a protagonist. In the simplistic rendering of this profile, Carano is a victim of cancel culture (whatever that means at any particular time), but now she’s fighting back (with a billionaire in her corner who has his own agenda against Disney). Carano’s ability to say whatever she wants with no backlash is treated as the highest good. It is too much to ask a famous person to think for five seconds about anything they might publish. Carano is not a victim here; she made choices, had multiple opportunities to stop and think about people she was hurting. As this profile shows, she still doesn’t really think they matter as much as she does.
Well done Mr. Goldberg. Insightful article and right on.