David Cole On James Gunn
07/25/2018
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In Taki’s Magazine, David Cole writes:

Shouting “Pedo” in a Crowded Twitter
by David Cole

July 24, 2018

… [James] Gunn is the exceptionally successful writer and director of the Guardians of the Galaxy films, which have earned about $2 billion worldwide. He also executive-produced Avengers: Infinity War. The dude’s an A-lister, to be sure. But before he made the big leagues, he was immersed in the world of dumb, wacky, low-budget movies. He wrote and directed for Troma, an East Coast production and distribution company that makes bad films on purpose. Vulgar, lowbrow comedy-horror flicks. No joke is too base, no image too disgusting. …

That was James Gunn’s world before he lucked into directing one of the biggest franchises of the past decade. So, as one would expect, his old tweets are pretty raw. Jokes about rape, pedophilia, and trannies. Note that I said the word “jokes.” Are they funny? Not to me. …

Along with being not terribly funny, James Gunn is also an ideologue. He hates the right, and he lets the world know it. He hates Trump, he hates lil’ Benny Shapiro, and he applauded the destruction of Roseanne Barr after her Planet of the Apes tweet.

Last week, everyone’s favorite alt-right troll, Mike Cernovich, decided he’d had enough of Gunn’s two-bit leftist moralizing. So a-diggin’ he went, and he unearthed all those nasty old tweets. And Disney promptly fired Gunn from the next Guardians of the Galaxy installment. …

And his fate has divided the right into four camps:

(1) The Pizzagaters. These nuts believe that Gunn’s public tweets prove there’s a top-secret, organized cabal of pedophiles in Hollywood.

Because of course the way the top-secret, organized cabal of pedophiles in Hollywood keeps itself top-secret is by tweeting gross pedo jokes. That’s how you can tell who is a member of this carefully organized cabal: the more pedo jokes they tweet out to the entire random world, the higher ranking they are in this secret cartel.

(2) The Moralists. Their deal is, “Rape jokes are never funny! Pedo jokes are never funny! Firing Gunn was the right call.”

(3) The Schadenfreuders. “The bastard got what he deserved for cheering when the same thing happened to Roseanne. Maybe if enough lefties suffer because of these witch hunts, they’ll finally stop doing it to us.”

(4) Me. I’ll get to that in a minute.

My personal view has long been that employing underage children as actors in movies and TV is something we should probably choose to move beyond as a society over the next decade or two, just as we don’t employ 5-year-old boys as chimney sweeps anymore, and we are headed toward no longer importing or breeding chimpanzees for the entertainment industry, instead replacing performing apes with Andy Serkis in a motion capture suit.

The chance of sexual abuse is one part of why I’d like to ban child actors, but the distorting effects of child stardom are more general than that.

The animation business generally employs adults to do the voice-overs of child characters like Bart Simpson, and the technology is rapidly arriving to do something similar with live-action movies and TV. In fact, last year I cited a promising 2017 example that this could work:

Similarly, in this year’s hit Guardians of the Galaxy sequel, the movie is stolen by Baby Groot, an adorable toddler version of the sentient alien tree from the first movie who never says anything but “I am Groot.” Vin Diesel handles the dialogue, such as it is, while director James Gunn dances around in the Groot suit.

[Comment at Unz.com]

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