The implosion of the awards juggernaut Emilia Pérez is extremely watchable. Honestly, this is a five-star controversy for a three-star film. Each day brings a new piece of hilarity, as a hurt elite entertainment community – who were simply trying to do the correct and approved thing – now struggles to navigate the possibility that actually, they might all have been involved in a big old shitshow. Take Zoe Saldaña, whose Oscar campaign has been simply ruined by her marginalised-community co-star’s historic attempts to marginalise some other communities. As she heroically put it yesterday: “I’m allowing myself to still experience joy.”
Me too, Zoe. Like many, I have given myself permission to be amused.
If you’ve missed this one, Emilia Pérez is a movie musical about a transgender Mexican drug lord, acquired after its Cannes premiere by that adorable indie-outsider-that-could, Netflix. Along with its lead star, Karla Sofía Gascón, the film has been nominated for masses of awards, and Gascón declared at the Golden Globes: “The light always wins over darkness … I am who I am, not who you want.” Alas, it has since emerged via a trawl of her old tweets that she’s quite a committed marginaliser herself. Muslims, George Floyd, Chinese people – they all came in for a pasting. But probably the worst thing she did in the eyes of the marginalised community she’s seeking to impress – Hollywood – was criticise the Oscars. “I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M [Women’s March],” she opined of the 2021 Academy Awards. “Apart from that, an ugly, ugly gala.” OMG. Actual sacrilege.
Emilia Pérez took $13.5m (£11m) on a budget of $25m (not including marketing), so it’s fun to keep reading that it was a hit in cinemas. But as the world’s TV channel, Netflix has different metrics for success, and it’ll do well enough for them on the platform. What Netflix craves, though, is movie awards, so I’d love to know what the full-time Emilia Pérez awards team – who will have numbered in double figures – were doing instead of deleting Gascón’s old tweets. That’s day one, guys! You have to detonate the entire shaft before the offence miners get there. Failure to do so means Netflix is now engaged in a ludicrous rearguard attempt to firewall the movie’s other awards prospects. They’re even taking Emilia Pérez out of the Emilia Pérez posters. Amazing.
Or is it? Many people will find themselves so lost after the cultural contortions of the past few years that they might think that counts as trans erasure. But it’s happening over a movie that a lot of people think was involved in some kind of Mexican erasure? Even though everyone’s given it every award nomination out there, when they tipped all over the author Jeanine Cummins for her deeply-researched 2020 novel American Dirt, because she wasn’t Mexican? Oh dear. What a muddle. It’s almost as if things haven’t been as simple as we’ve been told to believe for so long.
Which brings us to why the Emilia Pérez controversy is most interesting. It has blown up at precisely the moment that a necessary conversation is being had about the blowback or logical end of the cultural politics that has defined the past decade or so.
A few months ago I was chatting to the pollster James Kanagasooriam about something, and he noted that “the left tends to issue-bundle”. Which feels a good way of putting it. Many people will have felt the increasingly illogical strictures of this all-or-nothing deal in recent years of supposed progressivism. It’s as though you can’t consider each subject or cause on what you, personally, judge to be its individual merits. Instead, you must buy the entire suite of opinions off the shelf, and you have to agree with all of them, or you are “on the wrong side of history” with the ones you don’t. This was odd, James pointed out, because outside the small minority of the hyper-politically-engaged, most people in the world are not actually like this. His example was to say that most people in the UK are extremely pro gay rights, but a substantial proportion of this group might also support the non-progressive cause of the death penalty.
Anyway: Emilia Pérez. A trans story! Latin actors! Big-swing cinema! It’s all good, right? Except: no. Apparently Mexicans hate it. Apparently trans people hate it. Now old-skewing liberal Academy voters – who loved it – have seen these controversies and know they have to do a 180 and hate it too. For all its superficial whimsy, Emilia Pérez feels like an issue-bundled movie, and the implosion of its star’s awards campaign feels like the absurd logical end of this prescription for looking at the world. It was pitched as a progressive triumph – now it’s on “the wrong side of history”.
On which, before we conclude, a note: I can’t stand that infantilising, hectoring phrase, which has spent the past decade being the laziest but most successful way to force someone to agree with you. Ditto the idea that if you share any opinion – at all – with people on the other side of a supposed divide, then you should just consider what that makes you, and fall back into line with your tribe. What bollocks.
In fact, the present political climate in the US seems to have been exacerbated by people performing their endless taxonomy of what is and isn’t on the wrong side of history. It’s enough to make you feel that the left, who bang on about polarisation the whole time, are actually more invested in it than the right. The movie industry could always come up with a big-swing, important movie which explores that. And maybe, more people would go out and see it.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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