When a Rebel Isn’t a Rebel
Cinestate’s REBELLER blog and publishing label is full of takes that make one question if that word means what they think it means
(Note: This article, amazingly, contains spoilers for Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man.)
“YOU CAN’T CANCEL CULTURE” is emblazoned at the top of a recent announcement from film blog and media label REBELLER. It accompanies the news that the label has released their first book, the novel They Called Me Wyatt by author Natasha Tynes. The book follows a Jordanian woman who is murdered and reincarnated into the body of a three-year-old boy with speech difficulties, and was due to be published last year before, uh, some things happened.
Tynes came under fire in May 2019 for publishing a social media post in which she criticized a woman of color for eating food on a Washington, DC metro train —against the rules of the metro — and provided information to the woman’s employers in what appeared to be an attempt to get her fired. The backlash against Tynes, who herself identifies as a woman of color, was as swift as can be in this day and age. Mass outrage on social media, one-star review bombing on Goodreads from people who hadn’t even read the book, and calls to Tynes’s publishers to distance themselves from her led to They Called Me Wyatt being pulled from publication.
Do I think social media outrage culture is the way to handle things like this? Of course not. I’ve been subject to it before, if you saw the piece I published on the Soska sisters last year, and even on the relatively small scale I was involved, it was disheartening and frightening to say the least. But I also don’t condone how REBELLER picked up publication of Tynes’s novel this year, seemingly only because its author had been subject to “cancel culture”. They tout the story as a critically acclaimed novel, citing Goodreads reviews from the days before Tynes’s controversy (and ignoring the one-star reviews from those who read the book and derided it as “remarkably bland” and“strange, awkward, and frustrating”, as a publisher is like to do).
I had this bit of news brought to my attention a few weeks ago when a retweet from user Josh Goldbloom (@cinepocalypse) came across my timeline, captioning a screenshot of REBELLER’s press release email with “A rebeller is punk rock, not a dorky right-wing film blog publishing books that vilify “cancel culture”.”
So let’s talk about Rebeller (yes, I’m just as annoyed as you are with the all-caps at this point) and what they’re really about.
Rebeller is an imprint of independent film distributor Cinestate, who also own the revived version of horror publication Fangoria and who recently bought Birth. Movies. Death. from Alamo Drafthouse. Rebeller, for its part, identifies itself as a website dedicated to what it calls “outlaw cinema” — action, thrillers, and the like that major studios are apparently too afraid to give a chance to.
“Outlaw Cinema is made by people working outside the system, a system that has grown stifling and conformist, dominated by a few huge brands putting out a limited number of blockbusters every year. The films that fall under the Outlaw label are those that are appreciated by people looking for something a bit different than what is currently offered at the multiplex. They are the movies that tackle subjects some execs consider too hot to handle, that some distributors won’t dirty their hands with. They’re the movies that don’t hit the requisite action beats exactly when Robert McKee or Syd Field say they must, the movies with scenes that linger and superfluous-seeming dialogue that is extraneous only if you consider things like mood and tone unimportant.”
Rebeller’s first original release, a thriller called Run Hide Fight about a teenage girl caught in a Die Hard-style scenario when a group of students begin committing a mass shooting on her school campus, aims (sorry) to be just as provocative as the films that inspired their creation.
So who are the people behind Rebeller, anyway? Cinestate is owned by independent mogul Dallas Sonnier, a champion of independent and ultra-weird films that might not get an audience without his involvement. The editor-in-chief of Rebeller itself happens to be culture writer, film critic, and conservative commentator Sonny Bunch, formerly executive editor of right-wing publication the Washington Free Beacon. Many of you are already turning up your noses at this, but hold on; Bunch has expressed his displeasure with the world of politics and hopes to make Rebeller a cinephile’s paradise first without political stances getting in the way, while Sonnier has positioned himself as a media-first figure, having stated “I tell no one how to behave.”
Seems pleasant enough, until you dig even slightly deeper. Rebeller has compared itself to the Drudge Report in its method of aggregating articles from various sites it thinks people will like, but provides a plethora of original content that betrays its mission. Rebeller seems to think that being a “rebel” is just taking a stance that goes against what a lot of people think.
We’ve got a review of Woody Allen’s memoir, claiming him “Effortlessly Funny (and Unapologetic)”, rebelling against the public perception of him as a child molester. We’ve got a thinkpiece calling Jerry Seinfeld “America’s Most Unlikely Culture Warrior”, rebelling against pretty much everyone I know thinking he’s not funny, relatable, or relevant any more. We’ve got multiple pieces by John Bloom (writing as Joe Bob Briggs, of course) in a series called “Joe Bob’s America” with such useful titles as “If I Need a Cop, I’m Not Calling Zuckerberg”, “That’s Not What You Really Mean (and I’ll Prove It In Court)”, and “Our Throw-Away-The-Key Culture”, the latter of which could easily have been in response to the backlash to Bloom’s own writing for Taki Magazine, a publication easily sympathetic to neo-Nazis and white nationalists.
And then there’s Bunch himself. This media rebel is a firebrand, demanding the public’s attention with his spicy hot takes such as questioning the protagonist of 2020’s The Invisible Man for killing her obviously abusive and controlling husband at the end of the film:
“…there’s something pretty interesting here about a #MeToo-inflected movie executing for our pleasure and for our cheers someone who may very well have been entirely innocent of what we see onscreen. We can debate all day about whether or not the movie offers enough context to say for sure that Adrian was or wasn’t the man in the invisible mask. But what about the events that take place offscreen — the events that Whannell lets us fill in on our own? Because, after all, we DO know for sure that Adrian viciously tried to drag Cecilia back to the house. It’s obvious she lived in terror. It’s obvious he has a history of violence. And equally obvious that there was no way for her to prove that he was the monster she made him out to be.”
Bunch doesn’t stop there; his Hot Ones Last Dab-level thinkpieces include one on how the coronavirus pandemic will “hopefully” put an end to being “frivolously outraged” about people like Woody Allen (“We’ll kick the coronavirus’ ass, eventually. But before we do, let’s also hope that one of its victims is the sort of cheap and easy outrage that social media trafficked in for so long.”), another on how the advice of actors and scientists to stay home is equivalent to saying “we want you to be unemployed”, and most recently, a column whose title says it all: “Bryan Adams is Not Racist for Tying Coronavirus to Wet Markets”. I’m going to take a quick break from writing this piece to go and get some ketchup for all these harsh browns he’s serving.
Is this what being a rebel is now? Am I part of The Establishment™ for believing that Woody Allen isn’t innocent? Should hardcore punk bands be writing songs with lyrics like “Jerry Seinfeld is the king of comedy”? Should we be publishing zines about how Joe Bob Briggs is God and nothing he says should be criticized? I personally can’t wait for a group of people claiming Cecilia is the true villain of The Invisible Man to take up arms and storm Hollywood without proper facial protection. Coronavirus be damned, right?
The last time I checked, the Establishment was the highly-paid executives that allow people like Allen and Seinfeld, who I would typically not equivocate (I mean, Seinfeld’s 17-year-old girlfriend when he was 38 may or may not bring a certain director’s adoptive daughter-wife to mind), to continue to work despite the public outcry against them. Even if I believe in Sonnier’s mission to bring outsider films to the forefront, I don’t believe in Rebeller living up to their name one bit.
The publishing of They Called Me Wyatt serves as what appears to be another example of rebellion in name only — Natasha Tynes is just too spicy of a personality for any normal publisher to handle, so Sonnier gave her a shot, subject matter be damned. I’m sure there’s a place for a novel about a Jordanian student’s murder and her resulting rebirth as a speech-impaired Seattle toddler, but in allowing the controversy over its creator to overshadow the book itself, Rebeller is just doing the same thing the online mob did, pointed in a different direction.
Outsider cinema is a beautiful thing — I wouldn’t have become a filmmaker myself without being inspired by directors and producers who threw up a middle finger to the system and told them they’d do this thing on their own if no one else would help them. I‘ve made movies on my own too, and I look forward to making more ridiculous no-budget content. I live to find a place where this kind of filmmaking is championed. And Rebeller, with its halfhearted misunderstanding of the word “rebel”, is not that place.
