The anti-James Gunn pile-on has found a new, unsurprising supporter: Roseanne Barr. The fired ABC star tweeted on Tuesday, “I’m disgusted to read all of the support for James Gunn’s pedophile jokes—as the same people supported blacklisting me for a joke they didn’t even understand.” It was a brief message, but a loaded one—and perfectly aligned with the campaign to get Gunn fired from Marvel Studios in the first place.
Disney axed Gunn, who directed both Guardians of the Galaxy films for Marvel Studios, on Friday, after right-wing media figures Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich surfaced old tweets the director had posted between 2009 and 2012—most of which were distasteful jokes about rape and pedophilia. This week, Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon was also forced to apologize for an offensive video he made in 2009, after being targeted by far-right trolls. (Adult Swim is, so far, sticking by Harmon, and although Disney might have been quick to fire Gunn, the Guardians cast is not so eager to distance itself from their leader.)
Although the jokes themselves might have been in terrible taste, Barr’s comparison of herself to Gunn is a false equivalency at best. As Vulture’s Mark Harris noted in a piece published Monday, the differences between Gunn and Barr are plentiful—starting with the fact that while Gunn’s jokes were years old, the tweet that got Barr fired was brand new. And as Harris pointed out, the rage over Gunn’s revolting jokes seemed to be not sincere offense, but weaponized anger: “The outrage with which Cernovich went after Gunn is a calculated posture, a way of saying, ‘If you can get someone fired by saying their words are offensive, we can too,’” he wrote.
Barr’s tweet about Valerie Jarrett was also more than a vague, racist joke: it was a targeted attack on a specific person from a marginalized community, centered on her race. And while Barr has claimed that her critics “didn’t even understand” her joke, it seems that Barr may not have understood it either. The ex-Roseanne actress has excused and defended the tweet in various ways since unleashing it and quickly deleting it. First, she blamed Ambien: “It was 2 in the morning and I was Ambien tweeting—it was Memorial Day too—i went 2 far & do not want it defended—it was egregious[.] Indefensible. I made a mistake I wish I hadn’t but . . . don’t defend it please. ty,” she said. Elsewhere, Barr claimed that her Planet of the Apes reference was an allusion to “the anti-Semitism of the Iran Deal. Low IQ ppl can think whatever they want.” She’s cried and said she didn’t want her tweet defended, and she’s screamed to come to her own defense with an entirely different explanation: “I thought the bitch was white!”
Gunn, on the other hand, has long been consistent in his response to his bad tweets—even before they surfaced last week—and has asserted that he no longer stands by them. He repeated that message on Friday, both on Twitter and through a public statement, in which he wrote, in part, “My words of nearly a decade ago were, at the time, totally failed and unfortunate efforts to be provocative. I have regretted them for many years since—not just because they were stupid, not at all funny, wildly insensitive, and certainly not provocative like I had hoped, but also because they don’t reflect the person I am today or have been for some time. Regardless of how much time has passed, I understand and accept the business decisions taken today. . . . To everyone inside my industry and beyond, I again offer my deepest apologies.”
As Harris points out, firing Gunn carries worrisome implications—and could forecast a future in which calculated projections of outrage are used as a cudgel against perceived political opponents. As one 4chan user wrote regarding Harmon, “If they get to take scalps for someone making racist jokes, we get to take scalps for them making pedophilia jokes.” There you have it: an eye for an eye, a scalp for a scalp—or, in this case, an apple for an orange.
