of Rowling and Cormac and what it means to cancel
Last year, I reviewed each of the Harry Potter books1. I’m very lazily turning these into a book by adding reviews to the movies. I may also add the Fantastic Beasts movies because why not. Let it become a book about all the Wizarding World.
These reviews caused a lot of people to unsubscribe and at least a few to say not very nice things to me or about me.
There are various ways to respond to people who angrily email you but the way I have largely dealt with it is by ignoring them because, ultimately, who cares.
Before writing about Rowling and Harry Potter, I pre-emptively wrote about my feelings with regard to bad people who make art you might like.
I’ve gone on to toe around with canceling people as a concept, with one piece that addresses the alleged cancelation of JK Rowling2. And so I return to the concept and to Rowling because of some recent news.
“We are proud to once again tell the story of Harry Potter — the heartwarming books that speak to power of friendship, resolve and acceptance,” the statement continued. “J.K. Rowling has a right to express her personal views. We will remain focused on the development of the new series, which will only benefit from her involvement.”
from Can Harry Potter HBO Series Overcome JK Rowling’s Transphobia?
For more on JK Rowling’s commentary on trans people, you can check out Contrapoints’ discussion.
a canceling that never took
Now, there are several very obvious reasons why HBO would keep Rowling involved in the Wizarding World adaptations and projects. For one, I imagine her contract has some binding language in there that they can’t just decouple her work from her. This isn’t typical in media contracts, but most authors are also not billionaires who live in castles.
While I’m sure fandom sites and pundits will claim this is another sign of how terrible the world will become now that Trump became president, I think it’s clear that she was involved long before November 6th. They cite the 20+ year relationship between Warner and Rowling and that she’s been involved in selecting the writers and directors who will adapt her work, so let’s set all that aside.
There are a few very obvious reasons, I think, as to why they would want Rowling involved. And if you’re someone addicted to twitter, this may surprise you.
For one, JK Rowling is still immensely popular. If you go to a Barnes and Noble—which is effectively the bookstore for most Americans—you will find a decent chunk of the store devoted to Harry Potter. You can buy the books in a dozen different versions and styles, from the pocketsized to the deluxified. There are shelves of Lego sets and puzzles and various other kinds of merchandise related to Harry Potter. You can buy a dang wand or a Gryffindor scarf or Hufflepuff sweater or whatever else. And Barnes and Noble keeps this much floor and shelf space for Harry Potter because of how well they sell.
So if all you’ve heard about Rowling for several years is her transphobia, you might be surprised to find out how few people would even know what you’re talking about. My wife, for example, told me that I was the only person she’d ever heard about this controversy from.
The videogame from last year that many videogame news sites refused to cover sold over 30 million copies.
There’s a new Harry Potter theme park at Universal Studios that is drawing in massive crowds and has kicked off at least one tiktok trend about how hot the Deatheaters there are.
This by itself means one of two things:
People don’t care about the controversy
People are completely unaware of it
And I imagine the answer is really a mixture of both. Many who have heard about Rowling’s anti-trans activism don’t care and many people have simply never heard anything about it because they don’t spend their lives staring at their phones.
Of course, one potential big reason for the lack of broad backlash against Rowling has to do with the fact that many people simply agree with her. You may not like it, but polling shows that most people are fine with certain behaviors of the trans community and very against other behaviors. And if you look at that polling, a lot of it lines up with what JK Rowling has said about trans people.
Now, I do think money is the biggest factor here. Warner Discovery is looking for a cash cow and Harry Potter is the fattest cow on the lot by quite a wide margin. The rights are also a lot clearer than, say, The Lord of the Rings.
But we do see a distinct divide, I think, between your average person who might read or watch Harry Potter and the class of people who write about media, which is why the internet feels almost monolithic in its condemnation of Rowling while Rowling’s wealth and popularity seem to be growing.
I do think there has been fallout from Rowling’s stance here. I think The Fantastic Beasts series would have a fourth movie out and maybe fifth movie in the works had she remained quiet about all this. Many people point to the diminishing returns at the box office, but I think the big drop has more to do with bad scripts and the inclusion and subsequent firing of Johnny Depp than it does with Rowling. Even so, the three movies have made nearly 2 billion dollars. And while critics hated the second and third movies (which, again, I think had more to do with Depp than anything else), audiences viewed them pretty positively.
Not exactly failures.
And had the third movie made $800million instead of $400million, this wouldn’t even be something we’d have to speculate about. More movies would be in the works.
Now, it’s possible that she has lost out on other opportunities here and there due to her statements, but opportunity lost is not the same thing as losing wealth. Because I remember many articles from the last two years stating that Rowling’s wealth was bleeding due to her anti-trans activism.
I’ll remind you: 30 million videogames sold, enormous theme park, hundreds of millions of books sold.
But we also must discuss cancelation a bit as a social and political concept.
speech and who it’s for
The Double Axe and Other Poems is the fourteenth book of verse by Robinson Jeffers published under the Random House imprint. During an association of fifteen years, marked by mutual confidence and accord, the issuance of each new volume has added strength to the close relationship of author and publisher. In all fairness to that constantly interdependent relationship and in complete candor, Random House feels compelled to go on record with its disagreement over some of the political views pronounced by the poet in this volume. Acutely aware of the writer’s freedom to express his convictions boldly and forthrightly and of the publisher’s function to obtain for him the widest possible hearing, whether there is agreement in principle and detail or not, it is of the utmost important that difference of views should be wide open on both sides. Time alone is the court of last resort in the case of ideas on trial.
—Publisher’s Note to The Double Axe and Other Poems by Robinson Jeffers, 1948
Throughout WWII, Robinson Jeffers remained adamantly against the war.
You can imagine how unpopular this was. It’s the kind of thing disallowed in polite society. I just read biographies of Oppenheimer and Einstein and you’d be surprised by how restrictive political pressures could be on a life at that time. Which is why Random House felt the need to essentially say that they disagree strongly with Jeffers but stand by his right to say them.
While Jeffers was popular enough during his lifetime, he was nowhere near someone like Rowling, which is why I think his publisher made such a stance public. They felt the need to protect an artist who would not be able to protect himself against being silenced.
Rowling’s wealth makes her essentially immune to cancelation, as does the popularity of her books and movies and merchandise.
And so many have seen her stance as an act of bravery. Because she could have remained silent or even spoken for trans people, against her own internal morality. But because she was invulnerable to being canceled, to being silenced, she waded waist deep into a culture war.
Those who have read my many pieces about the culture war can probably imagine what I think about such a decision, but this is the one she made and it’s one certain types of people applaud.
I’m not here to tell you how to feel about Rowling. You can make it up for yourself. I think I made myself quite clear over the course of my Harry Potter reviews, but to put it short: I find it a very impressive work that is deeply flawed and often deeply weird in unpleasant ways.
While most discussion of cancelation surrounds media figures, I think it’s worth understanding that the people who really pay the largest price are regular workers. People who try to start unions. Janitors at universities who commit microaggressions against students. Professors and students who speak out against US policies.
And for this reason, canceling people is deeply unpopular and looked upon with great skepticism. The chattering class would like you to believe that this is because of the misogyny or transphobia or racism of the average person, but I think it has much more to do with the fact that they’ve seen who actually gets canceled.
They’ve also seen how DEI initiatives are often meant to protect the companies that employ them rather than pull down systemic barriers. If you’ve read Robin DiAngelo’s widely read and popular White Fragility, you may not have noticed how the goal is to individualize transgressions. This takes the responsibility off the company and puts it onto some random colleague.
It actively breaks worker solidarity, which makes life much more comfortable for the executive class. Hard to get people to form a union when they go to seminars designed for them to all point fingers at one another for perceived wrongdoing.
Ironically, we’re seeing this exact thing play out with the ACLU and the NLRB.
to cancel unto Death
The literary world was, as the kids say, shook by a long piece in Vanity Fair that describes the apparent relationship between Cormac McCarthy3 and Agusta Britt, a woman who he met when she was a 16 year old in foster care and he was 42, who he went on to have a sexual relationship with when she was seventeen.
You can read the whole thing here.
Many people have attacked the writer of this piece, saying that his terrible prose distracts from the very serious story. The writer,
, is also apparently on substack and got access to Augusta Britt because she liked his review of The Passenger, so don’t let nobody tell you nothin about starting a newsletter for a small audience.But what are we to make of this?
Should you still read Cormac McCarthy?
What should you think of a man who would do this with a young woman?
Well, this is where all this discourse gets tricky. Many are saying McCarthy groomed and raped her. Britt disputes such a thing.
And while we need to believe women, to believe victims, what do we do when the alleged victim denies her victimhood? I mean, she’s not young now and has had her whole long life to reflect on this relationship that both of them maintained for nearly fifty years.
What do we do with a main character who doesn’t behave correctly?
Well, we can still cancel ol Cormac and never read him again, throw his body of work into the ocean.
But my guess is that this will matter a whole lot to a very small amount of people and most will either never hear about it or they won’t care. The troubling aspects of this are fifty years old and ol Cormac is dead.
If Augusta Britt won’t mourn for the child she was, why should anyone else?
what now?
You must decide for yourself how to feel about any of this, all of this. You must decide what you’ll do.
If you stop reading Rowling or McCarthy because of who they are, that’s fine. You may do whatever you want. It’s your life.
But you also then must decide what it means that so many people continue to read Harry Potter and The Road, to watch Harry Potter and No Country for Old Men.
What the howling indifference of people means in the face of these things?
For what it’s worth, I wish Rowling had not said what she said and I wish McCarthy had not done what he did, but I also don’t feel any need to cut certain works of art from my life.
Free books:
I’ve written a lot about him too:
I will read Harry Potter and Cormac McCarthy over and over again for the rest of my life. They are great stories written by fallible humans. That’s good enough for me. Great essay.
The entire cancelling controversy, every instance of it, from perceived violation / infraction to aspirational shaming and profuse pearl clutching, including outraged reactions, is so ridiculously performative. Thanks for the perspective and the info about Jeffers. I wish you’d have the final word but we’ll see it again. And again. And again.