The Four Color Media Monitor

In the first item here about the disgraced comics and book writer Neil Gaiman, the Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan wrote several weeks ago about an exchange he had in past years with Gaiman, who really left Linehan with a bad aftertaste:

I may have asked why he wasn’t speaking out on behalf of JK Rowling, who was undergoing one of her regular cancellations for refusing to pander to the spoilt brats who loved her books but missed their meaning. A big name like his might have shifted the conversation and given her some much-needed support. He might perhaps have persuaded some of his fans to give the matter another look. This was when I assumed people like him acknowledged biological reality but worried about ‘coming out of the closet’, as it were. It took me years to realise that almost every celebrity mate of mine believed, or was pretending to believe, in the fashionable, American mind-cancer of ’gender’.

But back then, I was still astonished to find that he was a carrier of the virus, the mass delusion that by sheer coincidence, turned up after the arrival of the Internet. Whether it was Bill Bailey or Neil Hannon, Robin Ince or Matt Lucas, Arthur Mathews or Jimmy Mulville, it was always the same story. A sudden cloud of amnesia would form around my celebrity mates, a real peasouper, from which they suddenly could not see why we need female-only spaces, or why unhappy teenage girls will not find a miraculous cure for their woes in a double mastectomy. Far from sharing any of my urgency in the need to stop children from being irreversibly harmed in gender clinics, they instead downplayed, deflected and dismissed. “I never ask you to join in with my animal activism” grumbled Neil Hannon on one of the occasions I begged for his support.

“Couldn’t you pretend women and children are animals?” I thought.

My usual trajectory during these conversations saw me shifting from gobsmacked disbelief to fury and despair. The disloyalty made me angry, but knowing my friends did not care about their own daughters, wives, sisters and mothers was, and continues to be, destabilising in the extreme.

Gaiman went one step further. I can’t find the tweet, so I may be paraphrasing, but he said

"I hope you're kinder if your daughter ever hopes to transition."

I can think of no uglier thing to say to a parent. For girls, ‘transition’ means double mastectomies in their teens, hysterectomies in their mid-twenties, early menopause and a four times greater chance of having a heart attack than males of the same age. To have this decaying goth wish that horror on my daughter was more than I could bear. I wanted to rip his throat out.

Like a pair of grappling cowboys falling off a rooftop, our fight spilled into email. I sent Gaiman this article about the Tavistock. It was clear when he wrote back that he hadn’t absorbed it Like most celebrities in this fight, he appeared to have lost the ability to read.

“As I said before Graham, I hope that you'd be kinder if it was one of your kids who wanted to transition.“

He actually said it again. The piece was right there, detailing exactly what was happening to the children unlucky enough to wander through the Tavistock’s doors, and he chose to repeat that disgusting thing. Why?

Gaiman's contempt for parents is definitely horrific, to say nothing of his contempt for girls themselves. And in light of what he now stands accused of, it takes on a whole new meaning. I'm most terribly sorry Mr. Linehan has had to go through all this terrible stuff, with Gaiman proving one of the worst of the lot that's been turning a deaf ear and blind eye, selectively or otherwise, to one of the latest forms of sexism.

The second item is a review of Coraline's 2009 animated adaptation in the UK Guardian, which was "remastered", where the reviewer says:

Henry Selick’s 2009 animated supernatural fantasy Coraline is now rereleased for its 15th anniversary; it is based on a novella by Neil Gaiman, the author now the subject of sexual assault allegations. This stop-motion film looks as amiably creepy as it did when I saw it first – though, as with The Nightmare Before Christmas, another of Selick’s movies, which was produced by Tim Burton, the chills are mixed with adventure, exotic strangeness and comedy, certainly a recipe that has entranced audiences. As before, though, I wondered if this story might have been more frightening if it had been filmed in conventional live-action with regular human beings showing us their eerie smiling faces with buttons for eyes. But straight-up scariness may not be the point.

Well I'm glad to see they're acknowledging the charges made against Gaiman, but isn't that why whatever impact this cartoon might've had years before has been dampened now? Even if you can separate the art from the artist, the point can be made that the blush is off the rose, and the product now stands tainted in the sense that, who in the right frame of mind wants to pay money for tickets that could end up going into Gaiman's pockets via residuals? If Gaiman hasn't taken part in promoting the new screenings of this animated film, that figures, since what he now stands accused of makes it difficult.

In addition to the above, an interview with animator Selick was published by Total Film, but it looks like they've avoided any mention of the sexual assault allegations made by 5 women so far, as the director notes that sequels to Coraline are unlikely, as is an adaptation of Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane:

"It’s been discussed forever at various times in the past. I was told 'Oh, we want to do a sequel, but it has to be CGI' and I said 'No, absolutely not,'" explains Selick. "But you don't want to ruin something by, killing the golden goose. Doing a sequel or a prequel can destroy that. I mean, by the time of Jaws six, the shark movies, they'd really beat that shark to death."

So what about a Coraline sequel? Well, Selick reveals that there have been talks about that as well, but nothing has ever come of it. In fact, just this year it was announced that Selick would take on another one of Coraline author Neil Gaiman’s stories, The Ocean at the End of the Lane movie, which the director has previously called the almost sequel to Coraline. But it looks like that isn't going ahead anymore.

"It's something I love and have danced around," explains Selick. "It's almost come together a few times. I would hope that it might still come together, but I have no predictions." Well, with no Coraline or Nightmare adaptations on the horizon, we guess we’ll have to get our Selick animation fix from the Coraline remaster.

How curious they won't mention the case or the likelihoods of why the adaptation of the latter was cancelled. Of course, if memory serves, Games Radar, the news site this is part of, along with Newsarama, hasn't spoken about the case either, if at all. What good does that do? As I may have said before, refusing to acknowledge the case only suggests it's much worse a situation than we may think, and makes it look like they care far more about the movie prospects than they do about Gaiman's victims. One more reason it'd be better to avoid the new screening of Coraline, and hopefully, there are moviegoers who've cancelled their reservations. Gaiman's legacy is gone, and if he's still fleeing from social media use, he's bound to remain away for a long time, because what he's now been accused of is very serious, and as the above news hints, the studios that were considering more adaptations of his work thankfully realize how serious this all is. So, it won't be surprising if his last book publications, in example, will be his last, because anybody who's learned about this case so far is unlikely to buy them. For now, if anything remains to be seen, it's whether the New Zealand police will pursue charges against him. We must certainly hope they do.

Labels: animation, golden calf of LGBT, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, politics, violence