Culture

Dave Chappelle, Netflix, and the Illusions of Corporate Identity Politics


The Twitter account @Most is the self-described “home of Netflix’s LGBTQ+ storytelling.” Peppy and incessant, with a companion account on Instagram, @Most is tasked with promoting the queer (or tacitly queer) programming that can be found on the streaming platform, usually through the tried-and-true vehicle of the closed-captioned screen grab (a still from “Glee,” say, during a rendition of Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl”). Created in 2019, @Most is one of several special-interest Netflix accounts. @NetflixGeeked promotes the platform’s sci-fi/fantasy and otherwise “genre entertainment.” @contodonetflix is for Spanish-language and Latinx content, and @strongblacklead is for “for the culture” (Black culture, that is). Where the main Netflix account tends toward a drier, more adult enthusiasm in promoting the platform’s sprawling catalogue, the niche accounts adopt the familiar vernacular of the Internet (“friendly reminder,” “queen,” “good morning,” “happy spooky szn”)​​. On Wednesday, October 13th, many of the accounts were going about their usual business, but @Most had fallen into silence. “sorry we haven’t been posting, this week fucking sucks,” the account tweeted.

It was no secret why. At the beginning of October, Netflix had released “The Closer,” a new hour-and-change comedy special from Dave Chappelle, his sixth under a deal he had signed with the streaming service, in 2016. The earlier specials are principally remembered for their odd preoccupation with trans and queer identities. In “The Closer,” Chappelle continues in the same vein—“Gender is a fact” and “I’m team TERF” are two phrases that he says at one point—and also goes meta about the ire his work has elicited. (Trans people “want me dead,” he says.) The least imaginative material of Chappelle’s to date—and his last special “for a minute,” he claims—“The Closer” may have hardly nudged the dial if not for the stir it caused at Netflix internally. The day after the special went online, Jaclyn Moore, the showrunner of “Dear White People,” announced on Twitter that she was “done” working with the platform “as long as they continue to put out and profit from blatantly and dangerously transphobic content.” Five days after that, The Verge reported that Netflix had suspended three employees, one of whom had criticized the company’s choice to release the special, after they’d crashed a meeting that was intended for director-level management. (They were reinstated shortly after the story broke.) The company’s trans* employee resource group organized a virtual walkout, and soon enough the leader of that group was fired—Netflix said that the cause was data leaks, including records, published on Bloomberg on October 13th, revealing, among other financial details, the high price the company had paid for “The Closer.” (The employee, B. Pagels-Minor, identified themself on Tuesday and denied leaking to the press.) On the day of the demonstration, after almost a week of inactivity, @Most tweeted, “brb walking out.”

The saga of Netflix and Chappelle is hardly needed to illustrate the capriciousness and contradictions of corporate identity online. Accounts such as @Most and @strongblacklead, after all, are only following the example set by companies such as Denny’s and Taco Bell, whose social-media managers pioneered the appropriation of Internet vernacular in the service of moving units. “The insouciant, lower-case voice became the mainstream, corporate voice,” Kate Losse, a writer and early Facebook employee, wrote in The New Inquiry, in 2014. “Just as corporations have become ‘persons’ in law, they have also become ‘persons’ on social media, bearing all the fruits of personhood while retaining all the massive advantages of being an entity.” These accounts launder the financial interests of their proprietors with emojis and GIFs and allusions to stan culture. ​​Behind the accounts are real people, whose priorities may not align with the company’s. But the past weeks’ events suggest how even in moments of internal turmoil the human element is readily exploitable. Did @Most’s acknowledgment that it had been a sucky week represent the voice of affronted staff members or the P.R. strategy of a canny social-media manager? That and other cheeky references to the Chappelle controversy—“ok you can go back to yelling at us now”—do not breach the corporate fourth wall so much as fortify it.

Courting audiences on the basis of racial, ethnic, and sexual identities invites a certain awkwardness. Often, it’s as if the jubilant stock rhetoric that plasters storefronts during the various heritage months had been released from its calendrical borders and sprinkled haphazardly into Twitter feeds. Earlier this year, for instance, @strongblacklead declared its appreciation for “Black women speaking Italian” by showcasing Daniela Scattolin, an Italian actress from Veneto, speaking her native language. (Imagine praising Zendaya’s command of English.) At other times, you can see the accounts straining to make Netflix programming speak to their intended demographics. On the Con Todo account, a recent post pounced upon the feverish popularity of “Squid Game,” the hit South Korean drama, by Photoshopping a picture of a character to wear the accessories (hoop earrings, red lip) of a well-groomed tía. This strategy, too, comes straight from the toolbox of giant food brands, which often interact with one another on Twitter, each cannibalizing the other’s perceived cachet.

The pickle that Chappelle got Netflix into is most telling not for its lessons on cancel culture or comedy but as a window on the streaming platform’s broader approach to so-called content. In a company-wide memo sent on October 11th (and obtained by Variety), Netflix’s co-C.E.O., Ted Sarandos, wrote, “We are working hard to ensure marginalized communities aren’t defined by a single story.” He rattled off several Netflix titles—including “Sex Education,” “Orange Is the New Black,” and Hannah Gadsby’s standup—presumably as evidence of the platform’s good track record on queer storytelling, and went on to defend “artistic freedom.” (In response, Gadsby wrote, on Instagram, “Fuck you and your amoral algorithm cult.”) Some might chide the hypocrisy of a company that champions—or, rather, markets—queer characters and actors alongside the work of a comic who relishes antagonizing queer people. But the disonnance makes perfect sense when you consider that, in the Netflix paradigm, “Black” and “queer” stories are just two more among the platform’s toothless commercial categories.

In case you haven’t noticed, trawling through Netflix is hell. The platform’s interface is crowded with such numbing designations as “Ensemble TV Comedies,” “TV Shows About Friendship,” “Emotional Movies,” or “Watch in One Weekend.” It is hard to say which is worse, the keyword soup of, say, “Family Watch Together TV” or the suggestion that these metastasizing categories upon category exist, in the parlance of the platform, for you—yes, you, whatever your (profile) name is. (One of those millennial moochers, I have neither a private Netflix account nor my own profile on a borrowed account, and as such cannot offer up my horoscope by way of Netflix’s tailored suggestions.) The concept of genre is inherently limiting; even the most high-minded audiences rely upon what they know they can anticipate from “horror” or “noir,” even when artists set out to disrupt those very expectations. But on Netflix this useful arrangement is warped by the demands of algorithmic marketing. Under the “Movies” and “TV Shows” tabs, a “Genres” drop-down menu features “Action,” “Thriller,” and “Sci-Fi” alongside “Black Stories” and “LGBTQ.” Identity becomes a genre unto itself. The approach typifies the impoverishing way in which storytelling has consolidated around identity politics across many forms of culture.

In his memo, Sarandos wrote that “key” to Netflix’s diverse programming is “increasing diversity on the content team itself.” Last week, he also apologized—“I screwed up,” he told Variety—and reiterated the company’s commitment to “creative freedom and artistic expression.” His remarks called to my mind something that the novelist Percival Everett said, in a recent interview, on the subject of diversity in publishing, an industry that has suffered its own very public bumps and bruises on its path to enlightenment by way of greater inclusivity. “If it were all about art, a lot of those things would take care of themselves,” he said. Black editors aren’t there to accept Black work, he added; “they’re there to accept art.” At Netflix, a company that inhales more and more oxygen within the film and TV industries, the mandate is different. Not unlike in this era of Chappelle’s comedy, identity is too often a shallow fixation, and there’s plenty of bad art to go around.


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