For a full minute in Ellen DeGeneres’ new Netflix special, DeGeneres says, “I’m a strong woman.”
DeGeneres soaks in the applause, looks up into the rafters of Minneapolis’ Orpheum Theater as if she’s witnessing a holy miracle, and the entire audience rises to its feet. This is one of the more absurd things happening for your approvalA night of taped comedy that DeGeneres and Netflix are promoting in response to the comedian “Kicked out of Hollywood.” Catching a comedy special on one of the biggest entertainment platforms on the planet should probably disqualify someone that they’ve been “kicked out of Hollywood,” but we don’t live in a world where sentences make sense. (Netflix reportedly paid DeGeneres $20 million For his 2018 set related to.) Instead, we have a packed-house show by a Hollywood outcast filmed for Netflix, with the audience hooting and hollering for a 2016 girlboss platitude.
What the former talk show host meant by being “kicked out of Hollywood” was that his brand took a hit. DeGeneres, who was blacklisted and shunned in the industry after coming out in the ’90s, should know the difference between those things better than anyone.
The severity of DeGeneres’ second “cancellation” is controversial. In 2019, DeGeneres put actress Dakota Johnson on her eponymous show, and the interview quickly became a meme. The host quizzed the actress about her recent 30th birthday party, claiming she wasn’t invited, prompting Johnson’s famous reply: “Actually, no, that’s not true, Ellen” — in fact, DeGeneres skipped the festivities. (It was later discovered that DeGeneres was hanging out with George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys game.) The back-and-forth went viral, prompting a semi-humorous examination of whether DeGeneres is actually a nice person, which built into a more serious report. toxic work the environment Ellen showAccused of racism and sex. Finally, Ellen show May 2022 was quite literally cancelled.
DeGeneres doesn’t get into specifics on this particular. To her applause-ready audience (at one point they cheered when DeGeneres name-dropped a producer named “Andy”), she glossed over Fallout’s more serious parts, saying simply that the reason she was kicked out of the industry was because people didn’t understand her. Generosity is part of acting.
“You can’t be mean and be in show business,” DeGeneres deadpans. “No sense show business people.”
DeGeneres paints herself as a less kind person came We watch on TV, complaining from his wife Portia about how he is ridiculously impatient. He admits he was rude at the party, saying his talk show trained him to only pay attention to segments.
When it comes to allegations of a toxic workplace, he explains that he doesn’t really know how to be a boss, which he attributes to his love of playing pranks on producers. He also talks about how complex it is — diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention-deficit disorder — and how it can manifest as a bad manager.
At the same time, DeGeneres insists that she is definitely kinder and nicer than the person we read about in the news. He can’t stop wanting to help lost animals, he says, and he finds beauty in how caterpillars liquefy themselves and turn into butterflies. It ties in with what he gives about his peaceful, post-talk-show life: He’s doing more gardening, probably surrounded by butterflies and tending to chicken coops. DeGeneres also revealed that she wears sweatpants at home and once she puts them on, she can’t take them off, not even for “Mick” (like Jagger).
“I’m 66 years old,” he told the audience, who responded with applause. DeGeneres followed that statement up with a joke about how the font size of the restaurant’s menu made her feel old.
All the time he spent imagining a single hatched butterfly or the seemingly brainless organization scheme of his car’s dashboard or how the width of two “bankrupt” panels lined up next to a million-dollar panel. wheel of fortune Unfairly, DeGeneres rarely examines the obvious question about her “beauty.”
“Nice” wasn’t just a byproduct of being Ellen; DeGeneres eventually became the mastermind behind one of Hollywood’s most lucrative business ventures. And he did so after gaining first-hand knowledge of what it’s really like to be professionally blacklisted.
At one point in particular, DeGeneres compares this current period of her career to the period after she went public. The comedian announced that she was a lesbian The Oprah Winfrey Show Just before his titular character came out in his sitcom, came, same year He also famously appeared on the cover of Time magazine, with the cover line reading, “Yes, I’m gay.” This was, no doubt, new ground for the country, and a bold claim of its own. later”puppy episode,” as told, DeGeneres said she struggled to find work — a rejection based on who she was even if the sitcom character wasn’t exactly her.
During DeGeneres’ turn as a talk show host, she became less like herself and more like a sitcom character. Her terminal beauty became her identity. There was no balance to what people said about him being gay — he showed audiences across America that he was a wonderful man, first and foremost, who happened to be gay. He rose above prejudice.
It was honor politics, expanded and transformed into a highly rewarding career.
It must have been difficult to do what DeGeneres did, sanding the edges and smoothing out the wrinkles of her entire identity, fitting into the mold of this TV host and appealing to those who rejected her. But this was his business, more important than being a TV show host, producer or comedian. Behind the scenes, it seems, he dropped the ball. After years of playing nice, DeGeneres just couldn’t get her act together.
Instead of admitting that error or claiming that there is a stark difference between being unpleasant to work with and ignoring a toxic work environment. For your approval, DeGeneres is driven to talk about how society is harsh on women in the workplace — holding them to impossible double standards and locking them into roles designed to fail. While those factors were certainly at play, it’s a little vague — if not purposefully hollow — to use these social issues to inflate the more serious charges that drowned his show. I’m not sure these are the kinds of excuses and obfuscations you want to hear from a beautiful person, but DeGeneres will admit that she was never that beautiful to begin with.
