“So don't sit back, kick back and watch the world get bushwhacked. News at ten, your neighborhood is under attack. Put away the crack before the crack put you away. You need to be there when your baby's old enough to relate. So don't delay, act now, supplies are running out. Allow if you're still alive, six to eight years to arrive. And if you follow, there may be a tomorrow. But if the offer is shun, you might as well be walkin' on the sun.”
– Accelerationist Anthem 'Walkin’ on the Sun' by Smash Mouth
The future is cancelled– and now the past too
What do The Handmaids Tale and Madmen have in common?
They’re both ‘woke’ television programs that feature a powerful woman defying the odds and micropolitically resisting the uberpatriarchy from the inside of a hyper-alpha-male dominated leviathan; one is an ironic-critical reflection of a ‘dystopian’ past, the other a paranoiac-critical look towards a dystopian future - and considering the way nostalgia operates within cultural trends, we can easily imagine one lapsing into the other for eternity, like a TV programming montage fever dream.
This one message between the two shows is as morose as it is commonplace in humanist oriented political rhetoric – the past was really bad, and the future, in its similarity to the past, will be really worse unless we learn from (or stop repeating) the past, and you better start now or you’ll be ‘on the wrong side of history’ (which retroactively runs both ways these days).
Through depressing gestures such as these, the present is reduced to a kind of purgatory suspended between two absolute hells, a gesture which sets the scene for an elevated and manic obsession with the need to act swiftly and immediately as to make up for or prevent an already-always happening (or happened) doom – climate change, drug epidemics, territorial and populist disputes along neighborhood lines, etc., all that was mentioned in the above Smash Mouth 90s hit. If we don’t act now by eradicating the ‘bad’ then it’s all over (serious Y2K vibes).
Against all the advice of reasonable historians and historiographers, these 'woke' shows aim to cancel the past by appealing to the categories of the present, and cancel the future by appealing to categories of the past (this is both good and bad - time get's all scrambled...).
Scientology, Pop-feminism, and Identification
What is more interesting is that the woman character in both The Handmaids Tale and Madmen are played by actress Elisabeth Moss, a relatively devout, practicing scientologist. Why is someone who practices scientology - a cult that despite its stated positions is clearly antithetical to women, never mind feminism - playing a feminist themed character in two of the biggest television shows to air in the last two decades you ask? Coincidence? Innocuous, unrelated facts?
Unlikely. Based on not only scientology’s own teachings but also on the reports of their past members, scientologists are strongly encouraged if not outright required to join highly visible and profitable media projects – film, TV, charity, etc. - in order to have a platform to spread scientology and recruit new, high value members such as other celebrities and cultural influencers. Nothing new here, just the time tested marketing ploy where an interest group attracts a big name celebrity to endorse - implicitly or explicitly - whatever it is they are selling - ideas, objects, lifestyles, whatever - either through person to person interactions, or on a grand scale through media networks.
It's important to note that this isn’t isolated to Moss. Laura Prepon who plays a significant character in Orange is the New Black, another clearly 'woke' television show centered on the struggles of woman prisoners, is also a scientologist. And out of the 23 episodes of Scream Queens – a show hailed as a feminist riff on the trend in horror movies for woman to be victims of violence –almost half feature Kristie Alley, another scientologist (and to a lesser degree, Alanna Masterson who played a girl power type character on The Walking Dead). But why these shows? And why these characters? Maybe directors tend to write feminist characters anyways, and some of the women cast as feminist characters just happen to be scientologist?
Perhaps, but let’s entertain another idea: If you were a big cult leader who needed to push your creepy agenda as to garner the support of cultural icons who could tip the scales in your world dominating favor where would you look first? I know I would look for what’s popular in the culture at large. Something that’s both rebellious but agreeable, malleable enough to reach various populations but rigid enough to maintain a core audience, and free of critique - or so inoculated against it - that if critiqued, the critique is likely to be discursively preconceived as archaic, conservative, immoral, unethical, sexist, etc. From the onset this rules out controversial or divisive things such as support of gun rights, police, and military, and niche (but still popular) past times such as sports or trades. We don’t see scientology appealing to Kurt Schilling, Chris Kyle (when he was around), or Mike Row. And after all, everyone goes to the movies, everyone has a TV, and not everyone keeps up with politics, sports, and trades. So, if I (as a creepy cult leader) am looking to spread ideas, why not coopt 'woke' culture like the pop-feminism of TV that’s likely to reach the avid fan and the casual watcher, the political and apolitical, alike?
In other words, it is likely that Elizabeth Moss (Prepon and Alley too), as a good scientologist drone, is memeing scientology into feminism; using feminism as a cultural mechanism to broadcast scientology not unlike how Jim Jones – a cultist and self-proclaimed revolutionary Marxist - used religion, something Marx, as the banality goes, called the opiate of the masses, as a mechanism to spread his own vulgar 'Marxism' and therefore his own cultist agenda.
Here’s how this kind of memetic contagion (see my old post on memes and cultural viruses) works via some bootleg Freud:
1: Media consumer sees Madmen or Handmaiden’s Tale (ideally both); consumer identifies with politically charged heroic or admirable character(s);
2: consumer, conflating character’s values with actress’s values, Googles actress who plays character and now identifies with actress (fantasy is now transferred into reality);
3: consumer, curious and wishing to nourish the identification as to increase the good feelings that come with identification, researches actress’s life (fantasy further into reality);
4: consumer is now in contact with scientology and, acting on the mania of phantasmal identification or continuing to conflate the character with the actress and the actress’s beliefs with the consumer’s (and also conflate fantasy and reality), may consider, implicitly or explicitly, scientology’s tenets or values (psychoanalysts refer to these dynamics as transference, when fantasies, feelings, thoughts, and models of behavior associated or for one person are transferred by and through association to another).
1: Media consumer sees worldwide Marvel film Guardians of the Galaxy; consumer identifies with cool heroic or admirable characters;
2: consumer, now conflating character’s value – or in this case the euphoric feelings one gets from the film – with the actor’s values, or in this case the director James Gunn’s, identifies with the ‘people’ behind the fantasy;
3: consumer, curious and wishing to nourish the identification or obsession with superhero culture, researches the people who made the film possible such as James Gunn;
4: the consumer is now in contact with some old controversial, provocative, and explicit Tweets from Gunn’s Twitter profile and a platform – so the theory goes – has now been given to these bad tweets by association with the popular film. Per this kind of thinking, if Guardians of the Galaxy is an international, multibillion dollar market object with high visibility, it drags with it into this level of significance the ‘nasty’ tweets of the director (hence the 'woke' metaphors of amplification, platform, voice, spotlight, etc.).
'Woke' and 'cancel' culture (whatever these wishy-washy ideological buzzwords mean...) both work through identification and contagion (which isn't always of ill will, or inappropriate, but can be misapplied).
Scientology, Antipsychiatry, and Culture Wars
This kind of sloppy reduction – if A can sometimes correlate with C and if A can also sometimes correlate with D, then C must be also be correlated to D - is the ‘guilt by association’ phenomenon that 'Cancel Culture' operationalizes. If you have worked on a project a bad person has worked on you may be next on the chopping block (seen most recently in the Twittersphere in its extreme form when journalist Luke Turner blocked everyone and anyone, including accounts who have never heard of or interacted with the guy, associated with publisher Urbanomics - if you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re blocked by him too).
So if scientology is ‘problematic,’ to use the nomenclature, then why weren't Handmaid’s Tale and Madmen (not to mention Orange is the New Black and Scream Queens) all cancelled for being not-woke, i.e. associated with Scientology, a cult that by Cancel/Woke Culture’s own rules is harmful to women? This is not to say that the left hasn’t criticized The Handmaiden’s Tale. They have, but rather than calls for cancelations, they’ve engaged simply in low-stakes, left on left criticisms, claiming that that the show shirks away from real feminism or fails at intersectionality – criticisms that inoculate one from any real contact with a critical outside. And it’s also not enough to say that the 'woke' wouldn’t cancel themselves, as they have, after all, what could be more woke than canceling yourself? So, what about this particular case makes it resistance to self-cancelling?
The short answer is that pop-feminism is too woke to be cancelled. After all – and this is the closet we can get to a ‘control variable’ - they cancelled Danny Masterson, brother of earlier mentioned Alanna Masterson of The Walking Dead, for sexual assault allegations related to his scientologism. And the point is not that he shouldn’t have been cancelled – who gives a shit about Danny, I don't know any details about the case, but I'm sure he probably committed the crime! – the point is that the pop-feminism of the media, even if clearly associated with unwokeness, makes for an entity more resistance to cancellation than any other 'entity.'
In an unconscious utilitarian gesture so characteristic of the modern humanist political agenda, the imagined good derived from Woke-Cancel Culture outweighs whatever bad would or could come from its possible associations to or appropriation by the unwoke. The longer answer is that the overlap here between scientology and feminism is precisely the point of collision – or near-schizophrenic narrative collapse - between Woke Culture and Cancel Culture which are so often tandem and unified in their approach to cultural objects. That is, Woke Culture and Cancel Culture are two parts of the same machine that work towards performing the same function, they are connected but disjunctive: The woke are not cancelled; the cancelled are not woke; the woke do the cancelling; the cancelled do not do the wokeing; the cancelled may become woke; the woke may not become cancelled in that if the woke were to be cancelled they would incorporate and ‘own’ their cancelling and use it as evidence of their wokeness.
That is, Scientology is an object that is enigmatic to the rhythmic mechanistic thrust of ‘Woke -> Cancel -> Woke -> Can…etc.’ This is because Woke-Cancel Culture is not only not inconsistent with Scientology, but almost complicit with it, and therefore ultimately impotent against it. Why? Scientology predicates itself on both moral and legal law - both of which it games almost flawlessly to its own benefit - the same bipedal approach as Woke-Cancel culture. It does everything by the books and plays the role of good guy who’s critical of the ills of society. For example, Scientology, suspicious of the bad intentioned nature and hegemonic position of psychological and psychiatric explanatory models, while also appealing to its own psychological and psychiatric methods and models, perfectly mirrors the anti-psychiatry movement – a movement closely allied with feminism and proto-wokeism - of late 50s to mid-80s Europe which also, like scientology, engaged in psychological and psychiatric treatment while maintaining a critical distance to hegemonic norms. And to this effect, it’s no surprise that Elisabeth Moss plays famous Scottish anti-psychiatrist and Acid Marxist R.D. Laing’s wife in the film Mad to Be Normal, AND a supporting character in High-Rise, a film centered on a medical professional aptly named Dr. Robert Laing, clearly a reference to R.D. Laing, who lives in a skyscraper that is a too-on-the-nose metaphor for classist society. In short, Woke-Cancel culture can’t cancel that which already claims to itself be more woke and in charge of the cancelling – Woke-Cancel Culture and Scientology are friendly competitors, not enemies.
I end with this – as I mentioned earlier, I have no interest in the culture war, nor in defining or exploring 'woke' or 'cancel' culture. These are buzzwords that capture the reactions that tired and stale ideological camps have towards each other, and I have no wish to reify them.
With that said, there is something going on here that is hard to articulate, so I end with a meme;
Broke: Cancel-Woke Culture, in being similar to what it critiques, is hypocritical.
Woke: Hypocrisy is itself a polemic of Cancel-Woke Culture (whatever that is...) that overemphasizes cognitive processes and misunderstands desire, and furthermore, Cancel-Woke Culture (which I have no definition for...), like Scientology, is a cult that operates like a religion and because of this cannot generate the critical distance required to develop the appropriate tools to combat that which it both hates and simultaneously identifies with.
