‘XCLD: The Story of Cancel Culture,’ and three other new political documentaries

Reviewing MSNBC’s new doc, along with ‘Girls State,’ ‘The Antisocial Network’ and ‘The Incomparable Mr. Buckley’

It’s been a big month for new streaming documentaries touching on politics. And the one I have to say the most about may be the one that says the least. 

XCLD: The Story of Cancel Culture

Last week, MSNBC debuted a new documentary called XCLD: The Story of Cancel Culture. It’s part of the network’s “Turning Point” documentary series, produced by Trevor Noah and directed by Ferne Pearlstein, who’s best known for an excellent 2016 documentary called The Last Laugh. That film focused on the thoughts of many expert individuals, led by Mel Brooks, about whether it’s okay to laugh about anything involving Nazis or The Holocaust. 

XCLD is also about, in part, questions of what it is and isn’t okay to laugh about. It presents a comprehensive view of the “cancel culture” phenomenon. Most of what it says is pretty familiar, and its running time of 60 minutes — 45, without commercials — is much too short for the subject matter at hand. 

As always, with analysis of “cancel culture,” the term “canceled” is highly nebulous. 

“Canceled” means a person was permanently shoved out of public life for a transgression. It also means… they were unfairly or disproportionately criticized for a few days, got bad press, or became enmeshed in a public controversy in which other people were mad at them. There should probably be different terms for those two things. 

Experts are interviewed, including many comedians, one of whom was Judy Gold, whose closest brush with cancellation came when she joked about an Orthodox woman’s wig and got some online blowback. 

But, of course, comedy might be more cancel-proof than any other profession. As journalist Seth Simons has pointed out repeatedly, modern comedy clubs will book just about anyone, no matter what horrible racism or sex crimes they’ve been accused of. And since the rise of cancel culture, the backlash is such that the sort of person who does those things has often been good for people’s careers,

The other big (and unsuccessful) element of the documentary is a “safe space” wood box, in which individuals can talk about whom they would wish to “uncancel.” Popular answers include Michael Jackson, whose music is constantly played on the radio and whose major Hollywood biopic is currently in production. And Dave Chappelle, who has continued to produce widely watched specials, for which he’s paid tens of millions of dollars, but he just gets criticized for spending large stretches of them saying cruel things about trans people.

The opinion of most comedians and comedy fans appears to be that Dave Chappelle, as a comedian, is entitled to freedom of speech- and that means that the people who are critical of his comedy, rather than having their right to free speech, should sit down and shut up. Which is not the position of First Amendment absolutism that they think it is. 

The most compelling comedian interviewed is Nimesh Patel, who made an edgy racial joke that got him kicked off stage at Columbia University. He could have cast himself as a cancel culture martyr and even had it be good for his career, but to his credit, he turned down that invitation to go on Tucker Carlson. 

But this attitude is everywhere. 

Wrestling manager Paul Heyman, who gave a speech last week when he entered the WWE’s Hall of Fame, spoke at the end about how he had been “canceled” repeatedly over his decades-long career but overcame it every time.

“Canceled,” in his definition, refers to the handful of times over many years that Heyman got fired from his job in one wrestling company and later went to work for a different one, but never for reasons of scandal or personal wrongdoing. And that’s a business where people get fired for all sorts of reasons all the time. 

Is cancelation permanent? The answer is that it depends. What did the person do, how bad was it, are they in jail, and who knows how many other factors. 

Which is how it’s always been. It was just the 37th anniversary of when the Dodgers fired executive Al Campanis for making racist comments about Black baseball players in a television interview. If that happened today, Campanis would likely be seen as a cancel culture martyr, chased off by the woke mob. 

I would like to see a more expansive exploration of this subject, but XCLD isn’t quite it.

XCLD aired once on MSNBC last weekend, but its streaming availability appears to be somewhat dodgy. I watched it on MSNBC’s website, and you can see it here. 

Girls State 

Back in 2020, the documentary team of  Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine released a film called Boys State, which was one of the first big documentary acquisitions by the then-new Apple TV+. It followed the Boys State model student government convention in Texas, and I wrote then that it “will give viewers hope, or perhaps terror, about what the next generation might do once they acquire the levers of power.” 

Four years later, the same two filmmakers are back with Girls State, which follows the all-female counterpart, this time in Missouri. The new film is better than the first one, partly because it captures a specific moment in time, before the overturning of Roe v. Wade. 

A handful of subjects have various backgrounds and ideologies. Still, the film has an ever-present air of the subjects believing that the political questions they’re considering will affect their lives. There’s also much discussion about the Boys State program having more resources than the Girls’ version; I don’t remember Girls State even being mentioned in the Boys State documentary. 

Like Boys State, Girls State is streaming on Apple TV+. 

 The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem

This documentary on Netflix is another rehash of things I’ve seen before. This is a shame because it comes from a duo that has done some fantastic work before. 

Giorgio Angelini made a fantastic documentary in 2018 called Owned: A Tale Of Two Americas, which is a way better version of several of the documentaries about racism and housing inequality that followed the killing of George Floyd- complete with strategically placed clips from Good Times.

Arthur Jones made Feels Good Man, which was about what happened when the creator of Pepe the Frog confronted the Internet jackasses who turned his character into a Nazi symbol. 

Angelini and Jones have come together to make  The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem. It follows the creation of 4chan, the notorious online message board, and what carried over into the real world, both with the hacker activist collective Anonymous, and later into much uglier stuff like QAnon, and the January 6 insurrection. 

I feel like I’ve seen better, more insightful versions of this, most notably Cullen Hoback’s Q: Into the Storm, which not only exposed QAnon as frauds, but unmasked who was behind it. Anonymous is slightly more interesting, I suppose.

It’s also not so great to confate the two. Anonymous mostly did harmless pranks — even though most of them were various flavors of illegal — while a QAnon-heavy mob tried to overthrow the government. 

Making a movie about the Internet isn’t easy, I realize. And this one doesn’t opt to fearmonger or hector, in the tradition of The Social Dilemma.  

 The Antisocial Network not to be confused with a Ben Mezrich book called The Antisocial Network, about the GameStop meme stock foolishness and was previously adapted into last year’s not-very-good movie Dumb Money. The documentary is streaming on Netflix. 

The Incomparable Mr. Buckley 

This documentary about conservative movement luminary William F. Buckley had one really, really great idea: It hired character actor David Costabile — Gale from Breaking Bad and Wags from Billions — to provide the voice of Buckley in narrating his memoir and other works. He’s got the perfect voice for it, bringing an air of malevolence from his Billions character that fits Buckley perfectly. 

The film is a cradle-to-grave telling of Buckley’s life, including his time at Yale, his founding of National Review, and his time hosting “Firing Line.” It explores his contradictions, from his proud elitism to his proclamation that he would “ rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.” 

That quote shows that conservative disdain for academia, specifically Harvard, is nothing new. And who knew Harvard had that many professors? 

The doc has one big strike against it: There was already a nearly perfect documentary about William F. Buckley, Morgan Neville’s 2018 Best of Enemies: Buckley vs. Vidal. It focused on Buckley’s series of debates with Gore Vidal during the Democratic convention in 1968, featuring Buckley’s most significant contribution to the lexicon: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddam face.” 

Both Buckley docs are streaming on PBS — the new one as part of American Masters – but the Neville one is much better.