Netflix is woke but cares more about profit
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 causes dear to the identitarian Left’s heart. During the Black Lives Matter protests last year it promoted on its platform just about every movie about racial injustice ever made.
A few years ago it 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 US$5 million last year to Democratic candidates in elections.
Dave Chappelle is a comedian and, by most critical appraisals, an unusually gifted one. In 2017 Netflix signed him to an exclusive deal with the platform. His latest contract committed him to three hour-long standup performances for a fee that is reported to have averaged more than US$22m for each show.
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, he 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.
None of this provokes much outrage. 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. He addresses this in
The Closer, approvingly citing J K 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 that seems to have been deemed unsayable even by a standup comic.
Netflix employees have denounced their employer and demanded the cancellation of the show. On Wednesday a number of them walked off the job and protested outside the company’s headquarters in Los Angeles. As a handful of counter-protesters calling for the defence of free speech attempted to disrupt the proceedings, the crowd listened to speakers attacking Netflix, including Joey Soloway, the 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-chief executive, 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 10 shows.
The lessons are twofold. First, in modern pop culture the rules about speech are tightly drawn. You can attack 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 speaker’s identity; if you’re a minority you have 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 trouble whoever you are. 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, as expensive as he was, is bringing in perhaps millions of new subscribers to Netflix. He is great for the bottom line and that used to be about all that mattered. But modern companies are required to be social justice warriors – that is, promoters of ecological sustainability, racial equity, limitless gender and sexual choices. The trick is to keep the virtue-signalling as cheap as possible.
This is often easy: Fire the occasional employee for thought crimes; post the right messages on Instagram; make a show of pronoun inclusivity. But at times the need to make money clashes with the need to be good. Reassuringly, Netflix seems to be signalling it’s still a capitalist organisation after all.