On Karl Lagerfeld, John Wayne, and Canceling your Ancestors

We are living in the cancelocene. So it has been called. We, living in a society, determine who is in and who is out. Transgressions against the socio-cultural hegemony will put you on the out — even to the point of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, the sacrificed man, without rights or home.  

Today, fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld died in Paris. He was 85. While he lived as a career fashion insider, immediately after the news of his death, Twitter and other social media platforms took form in cancel-movement. Lagerfeld was a misogynist, Lagerfeld disliked immigrants and refugees. Vox publishes “Karl Lagerfeld’s long history of disparaging fat women,” Yahoo “Karl Lagerfeld doesn’t deserve a hall pass for the things he’s said and done,” et cetera. In 2017, Lagerfeld even spoke out against Angela Merkel’s refugee policies, which got him in trouble.  

Lagerfeld, for all of his shortcomings, was a man of another era, who didn’t play the games one is required to today in the public sphere. Without overly praising the man, he did occupy a role culture that was authentically transgressive at times, and at the very least continued a small hope that one could speak his mind, even in a hyper-progressive arena such as fashion.  

A far cry from Lagerfeld is the American cowboy John Wayne, now under heat for comments he made in an interview with Playboy from May 1971. Wayne’s comments are pretty repulsive, out of touch, and certainly antiquated even for his time. Stating “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility,” is never a good look, and there’s no way to spin that to not be out-and-out racist. Also personally annoying to me are his disparaging remarks on Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider, two filmic staples of the 20^th century that encapsulates an era. Nobody is cooler than Dennis Hooper. Nevertheless, the important thing here is not what he said but how we respond to it.  

Can you cancel a dead man? Reading the news today, it does seem possible in the peoples’ court. But to judge history is not to retroactively condemn its individual figures for their inane comments—Wayne might seem like he was of this era because of his proximity, but he wasn’t. You can hate him, but you shouldn’t stop watching his movies or take down your True Grit (1969) poster. We cannot rewrite the past, and however dark it may seem to some, the past produced great works of art—including Wayne’s films.  

Getting worked up about an actor’s comments in the 70s about an issue he knew nothing about (Angela Davis?) is a poor investment of energy. Watch True Grit and judge the movie for its merits; try “The Karl Lagerfeld Diet” and see if it works. Leave the judging for the Gods.