11/11/2018 2 Comments James Gunn Done In 2010, James Gunn was still just an up and coming director making low budget films, searching for his big break. Today, he has directed two extremely well-received Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy films and has just been fired from his job. Four months ago, Disney was directed to James Gunn’s twitter feed from back when he was still relatively undiscovered. There the company found a plethora of highly inappropriate tweets referencing molestation, pedophilia, and other unspeakable deeds. These tweets were not formatted in an obvious joke format and it was very hard to understand, especially in today’s culture, how this man had not been publicly shamed yet. Disney, realizing that this man could be roasted by the internet at any moment if these tweets were picked up by the wrong person, promptly fired him without any chance of him coming back on with the company. The miscommunication here occurred with Gunn’s motive, tone, and intent behind these tweets. Apparently, back in the day, James Gunn had a very ‘shock humor’ personality. Similar to South Park, he would say things merely to get a reaction out of people. Therefore, it can be seen that these extremely inappropriate tweets were just posted to get a rise out of anybody for the purpose of comedy, yet Disney was protecting it’s image from people who may think that Gunn was a filthy human with disgusting values. Looking at the situation rhetorically, it is easy to see why there was this disconnect and what caused the tension and drama between Disney and the Gunn supporters. Gunn saw his audience to be anybody online, but he mainly viewed it as the people who followed him on twitter. Disney viewed this the same way, but with more emphasis on the ‘anybody online’ part of the vantage point. Gunn’s purpose for posting those tweets was to shock the people who saw the tweets and hopefully get them to laugh in the process, while Disney saw it as him supporting or advocating for these things, or at the very least, not condemning them. The context is the most important part of this miscommunication and why this is even an issue to begin with. In 2010, nobody really cared what you said online. It was a place to troll, laugh, be vulgar; there were a lot less rules. Today, everything you say online matters, and within a second, your whole life can be destroyed because somebody didn’t really like what you said, even if it was a joke. One can also note that because Gunn now works for Disney, he isn’t just promoting his own brand when he maneuvers online anymore, but he is promoting Disney and their beliefs as well. There was obviously no way for James’ Gunn to know in 2010 that what he was saying would have been taken in today context, but there is nothing he could could really do about that except have deleted what he said after he was hired by Disney. A good amount of people actually sided with James’ Gunn, which is odd for today’s culture. They believed that since James had finally found his calling and could put his talents to good use, that Disney should at least give him another chance and rehire him now that he is grown up and not James Gunn from eight years ago. Here are some tweets from James’ brother as well as from some of the cast members from the Guardians movies. Because the context of these two incidents are so vastly different, and the choices James would have made today would have been so vastly different, I have to agree with his brother and the cast of the Guardians films in casting my vote for giving James another chance. But because of today’s culture, that’s probably not going to happen for a long time.
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November 2018
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