Seth Rogen’s Admission That His Movies Can Be Homophobic Is More Interesting Than It Seems

In a new interview with The Guardian, Seth Rogen has admitted that some of the jokes in his older films are “blatantly homophobic”. Currently on a junket promoting Bad Neighbours 2, Rogen explained that thanks to “the lenses of new eras and new social consciousness” he has realised the impact that his films (specifically Superbad), can have.

“They’re all in the voice of high school kids, who do speak like that,” he said. “But I think we’d also be silly not to acknowledge that we were also, to some degree, glamorising that type of language in a lot of ways.”

Seth Rogen has been praised a lot today for being ‘woke’ enough to acknowledge the power that casual homophobic and sexist jokes can have, and for making himself accountable when rich, powerful white men in Hollywood rarely are. This is a great thing! In a recent profile on Rose Byrne for New York magazine, it was revealed that during the filming of Bad Neighbours 2, Rogen was very responsive to Byrne’s request to change throwaway sexist lines and this actually led to the hiring of female writers to join the previously all-male team. (By all accounts, Bad Neighbours 2 is a more interesting film than its predecessor.)

But the stark takeaway from this interview is how rare it is to see a famous person casually acknowledge fault — in a filmed interview, no less — when they aren’t being forced to apologise due to mounting public pressure/the threat of a court case. This criticism has been made of Seth Rogen’s films before, but it’s not exactly trending.

When you think of celebrity apologies (semi-recent ones that come to mind are Lena Dunham, Trevor Noah, Jonah Hill and Justin Bieber) let’s say for discriminatory language and casual prejudice, the road to get there is usually littered with outraged tweets and slam blogs on Gawker. They fuck up, the hard rains of the internet fall down upon them, they apologise and after a while (and if they continue what the internet constitutes as good behaviour) they are redeemed.

Jon Ronson wrote about this in his book So, You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. He argues that outrage has become the dominant form of communication on the web, and that Twitter has transformed from a “Garden of Eden” to a circus for catching out the wrong type of behaviour. “Since my book came out, a few people said to me, ‘I’m gonna send this book to my children, so they’ll think twice next time they make some sort of joke that could be misconstrued,’” he told New York. “And I’m like, That’s not the behaviour change that I’m advocating, because that’s like saying, ‘Don’t wear short skirts, girls.’ It’s like victim blaming.”

Although the book is concerned with non-celebrities who have generally messed up online due to ignorance and naivety, the cycle of public outrage and ‘calling out’ culture has become so commonplace that we don’t even think about it that much anymore. Being able to identify and criticise racism, sexism and homophobia on the internet is a good thing; it amplifies voices that are often ignored and forces people to become accountable for damaging attitudes. But we’ve also seen it doesn’t always work: celebrities apologise as a knee-jerk reaction, not because they’ve fully metabolised their critiques, and some internet users use anger and outrage as their default response to anything and everything they see on Twitter.

Jezebel writer Jia Tolentino discussed this last year in a piece which examined the ways the site/women on the internet generally often come under fire for either being not feminist enough or not feminist in the right way.

“There’s a large gap between ‘this is bad’ and ‘you should be offended’ that seems to vanish on the internet,” she writes. “And the harder we try to widen it on this website, the more we are constrained by that lingering expectation: that Jezebel exists, as some have always imagined it to, for the infantilising purpose of telling women when they should get mad … Criticism exists for its own sake, while offence has larger goals — to extract an apology, to shore up moral superiority, to browbeat the offender into changing her life.”

Right now the internet is at an interesting crossroads. People who (accidentally or on purpose) make bigoted statements are sometimes caught out with a “GOTCHA!” reaction on social media and apologise to get the whole thing over with. But what if occasionally, a celebrity was criticised for something, used social media as a way to work through these ideas over time and form a more nuanced and educated view?

Rogen’s change of heart has no doubt been prompted by reading things that force him to see an experience outside of his own, meeting people who help him recognise his own blindspots and you know, just growing up (he’s no hero for identifying it, but it’s obviously positive). The hard truth is that, whether online or IRL, we’ve all said things that we regret. It’s just so rare to see a celebrity admit this without first having to put their Twitter account on private.