The American Far Right Hates Harry Styles. Why is Everyone Laughing? — Part 3: That’s Cinema, Uh Huh
In September and October 2022, New York City cracked in half, cratered, and released goblins that had been living in a second, underground New York City into the wider world. By this I mean — Harry Styles timed a 15-day residency at Madison Square Garden to line up with Venice and Toronto Film Festivals, and Brooklynite intellectual queers who hated him lost their minds.
(Okay, so, technically they weren’t all from New York — but “Is Harry Styles a Good Actor? A Conversation,” “Harry Styles, Actor: What Would Make Him a Good One?” “It Turns Out Harry Styles Is Really Bad at Acting,” “It doesn’t matter if Harry Styles can act. The real question is should he?” and “Is Harry Styles a Movie Star?” were all written by New Yorkers so, I’m just saying. I have Thoughts about the Flow Of Information In Journalism is all.)
Despite the relative obscurity of My Policeman in comparison to Don’t Worry Darling, the movies will be forever intertwined by their respective festival release dates — September 11 and September 5. Their festivals would be compared in publications, as would Styles’ performances, which were both criticized to an extreme degree. Both individual think piece writers and panels of entertainment journalists used his name for clickbait in the fall, typically posing the question — “Can Harry Styles Act?”
In my opinion, this is entirely the wrong question to ask. I think there is something lurking under the floorboards when people are having this conversation. Here is the question I pose instead: “Why did Harry Styles’ attempt to be a leading man make so many people so angry?” The follow-up answer isn’t that complicated — it’s because he’s queer.
Let’s discuss.
Note 1 — Due to the wide interest in the discourse surrounding these films, I have tried to make this essay as standalone as I could. However, I think that reading the section on Rolling Stone in “Part 2: All That Glitters” will really help contextualize some things, so I do recommend taking a few minutes to read it if you haven’t already.
Note 2 — Content warning for homophobia, transphobia, femmephobia, and biphobia. Bi people especially — please be gentle with yourself reading this, it’s rough.
Note 3— This essay series exists primarily to contextualize Styles’ online abuse for people who are fans of or neutral about Harry i.e. the generally well meaning. I would appreciate it if the essay was not shared with bigots as a “gotcha” on social media as just writing it already puts me at risk for harassment. Thank you!
Don’t Worry Darling
On August 24th, Rolling Stone released an exclusive clip from Don’t Worry Darling as part of their promotion for “How Harry Styles Became the World’s Most Wanted Man.” The official Don’t Worry Darling Twitter account, Harry Styles Daily (HSD), and Film Updates reposted it to their page on the same day. In the clip, Styles (as his character Jack) was telling his wife to stop overreacting, saying that they were at risk of losing everything. His accent was not any different than the way he usually spoke — Manchester with a hint of LA. The online backlash was immediate. HSD’s post received 4,100 mocking quote retweets, the official Twitter received 5,600 mocking quote retweets, and Film Updates received over 10,000 quote retweets.
In the mainstream media, the story quickly became that denizens of Twitter had decided Styles’ accent was bad and were criticizing his performance as an objective critique of his acting. However, looking at the quote retweets from the time shows a much different story. Numerous Twitter users that day hypersexualized him, claiming that Styles was “too busy fucking the director” to do a good job, and that he was “selling dick and balls for acting roles.” Other users encouraged Styles to “stick to the queerbaiting” instead of trying to pursue an acting career. Of course, they made fun of his clothes and his comments about gay sex. I am certain that most of the people watching the clip and saying “the acting is so bad” or “his accent is off” were not processing the emotional place this came from. It’s possible that some people had genuinely never heard someone from Manchester speak before. But, as we shall see, people are very susceptible to believing videos show something that they do not. A 19-second clip is not really enough to judge a performance — but for Styles, that was all it took.
Regardless of the quality of Styles’ performance, all of these comments are both ludicrous and dehumanizing. Styles didn’t date Olivia Wilde to get roles (he was cast before they dated), there are no reports of him having sex with her on set, and, as we’ve discussed, Styles is visibly queer because it makes him happy, not as “bait” for weirdos on the internet to enjoy. These insults — that Styles is hypersexual, opportunistic, and a sexually provocative plaything — are based out of biphobic stereotypes. Before anyone had even seen the film, the conversation about Don’t Worry Darling’s press tour was already steeped in biphobia, brimming with hatred for Styles’ relationship with Wilde and deeply colored by the public shaming of Styles’ comments on gay sex and sexuality that I discussed in “Part 2: All that Glitters.” This biphobia led to widespread discrediting of his abilities, intelligence, and character throughout the promotion and release of Don’t Worry Darling.
The cast of Don’t Worry Darling attended Venice Film Festival on September 5th. A lot happened that day; I’m going to first zoom in on Styles’ activities as they have been widely mocked with zero mainstream pushback. I will then juxtapose his behavior and treatment with co-star Florence Pugh’s. This is not a “call out” post for Florence Pugh or an attack on her fans; I simply feel that she, as a feminine straight woman who was disinterested in promoting the movie was treated very differently than a feminine queer man who did promote the movie. Whether or not her behavior is ”justified” — that’s a call I can’t make, because she never said why she was doing this. However, the double standards the media ascribed to these behaviors are entirely unjustifiable so — let’s talk about them.
On September 5th, Styles took a red-eye flight to Venice from New York City so he could attend the premiere of Don’t Worry Darling. He gave two interviews — a panel that included Olivia Wilde, Gemma Chan, Chris Pine, and himself, and a q&a between himself, Chris Pine, and an interviewer. Styles walked the red carpet and signed a bunch of autographs for his fans. He went to the theater, hugged his friends, sat down next to Chris Pine, and watched Don’t Worry Darling. After the film was over, Styles kissed Nick Kroll out of happiness and gave him a hug. Then, he left Venice.
Pugh’s September 5th was very different. Prior to Venice Film Festival, it was reported that Florence Pugh could not attend the cast panel for Don’t Worry Darling because she was busy shooting Dune 2. However, Pugh did arrive in Venice that morning in time to sit on the panel. Instead, she drank alcohol in the courtyard. Her style team wore “Miss Flo” t-shirts mocking video footage of director Olivia Wilde leaked by known violent abuser Shia LaBeouf. She spent time with her grandmother and then walked the red carpet signing autographs for her fans. Pugh did not interact with either the main lead, Styles, or the director on the red carpet, and promoted cinematographer Matthew Libatique exclusively in her red carpet interview. She watched the film and then ran out during the standing ovation. Then, she too left Venice.
The post-Venice attitude towards Styles was one of naked contempt. The thoughtful q&a where Styles talked about bell hooks, toxic masculinity, and women’s bodily autonomy was chopped up and turned into a meme about movies that felt like movies. Chris Pine was framed as a bored saint who had to dissociate to cope with Styles’ stupidity. Styles was baselessly accused of spitting on Pine, a conspiracy theory that was so infectious that Olivia Wilde had to address it on The Late Show. [Ed. Note 1] His (non-consensually filmed) kiss with Nick Kroll was labeled “queerbait” and “2 straight guys kissing each other for attention.” A humble answer to a question about his shift from music to acting was removed from context and misreported as “I don’t know what I’m doing” to imply he was talking about his own abilities. Reviewers claimed that it was “impossible to take him seriously” in the role, that he was “cute, but a dud,” and that any merits of his “gawky” performance were likely “unintended.” On Letterboxd, the most popular review of Don’t Worry Darling is, “my favorite thing about the movie is that it feels like a movie. it feels like a real like, you know go to the theatre, film, movie.” The Daily Beast, in ranking who came off worst in the “drama,” placed him below Shia LaBeouf, claiming, “he was unable to string together any coherent responses to questions he was asked” and that spitgate was, “the cherry on top.”
Shocking but true: the right-wing was not any nicer than the mainstream media. The Daily Wire published three articles about Styles between September 6th and September 7th: “Harry Styles: ‘I Have No Idea What I’m Doing’ When It Comes To Acting,’” “WATCH: Did Harry Styles Actually Spit On Chris Pine At Venice Film Festival?” and “’A Complete Fabrication’: Chris Pine Swears Harry Styles Did Not Spit On Him.” We’ll zero in on the first one as it was the most popular and the most contemptuous. The article was written by (who else?) mother, wife, and conservative ghoul Amanda Harding, who claims he is “faking it until he makes it,” and that Styles “appear[s] insecure.” The 31 comments on the article are largely transphobic or belittling of his intelligence. Right-wing pages shared the article to Facebook 19 times, all of them either belittling his performance or dog whistling about the childishness of the phrasing “play pretend.” Overall, this reached a total CrowdTangle follower count of 16,256,402 people and was interacted with 1700 times.
Also on September 7th, the unfunny conservative comedian Greg Gutfeld did a five-minute segment on his show Gutfeld! called “Did Harry Styles pull a Will Smith but with spit?” He suggested that next time Pine and Styles should solve their issues via an “televised oil wrestling match,” and that Styles should “be a man, next time, swallow.” His cohosts suggested the two men were going to get “checked for monkeypox,” which receives a round of applause from the audience. Of course, they insulted Styles’ clothes as well. Gutfeld! was the only late night TV show in September that was watched by more than 2 million people. His video was reposted to YouTube where, to date, it has 232,000 views and 6,800 likes. What started out as “jokes” on Twitter ballooned into a round of homophobic right-wing ridicule at Styles’ expense.
(I know that was a lot, so I recommend taking a break. Go drink some water and stretch your legs a little bit — the essay will be here when you get back.)
In contrast to Styles’ mockery, the internet fawned over Florence Pugh’s behavior and performance. Pugh was labeled “iconic” for not attending the panel (again, even though nobody knows why she missed it.) The video of her toasting the camera with her aperol spritz in the courtyard went viral, and many tweets celebrating it have tens of thousands of likes. A tweet supporting her leaving the standing ovation early has over 100,000 likes. Reviewers said that Pugh had “graduate[d] to fully fledged movie star,” that she had “mastery of [the] technical aspects of acting,” and that “her devotion to the film has been uncertain during its release, [but] Pugh’s commitment to the role is far harder to question.” I personally thought both she and Styles were fine, but I’m not a professional movie critic. Perhaps I am simply not educated enough in the art of cinema to perceive Florence Pugh’s “severe back pain caused by carrying this ENTIRE MOVIE” like the 13,000 intellectuals who enjoyed that Letterboxd review. The Daily Beast, in ranking who came off best in the “drama,” said that refusing to do “any additional promotion” for the film “earned [her] a place near the top.”
On August 29th, Breitbart celebrated Pugh’s refusal to promote Don’t Worry Darling. In the words of columnist John Nolte, “Pugh [is] beloved in Hollywood. Everyone likes [her]. So Wilde’s already losing that PR battle in a big, big way.”
Don’t Worry Darling had a second press conference on September 19th that was streamed into the movie theater where it was going to premiere. Attendees reported that their theaters were laughing at Styles answers at the press conference, claiming “he genuinely can’t answer a question to save his life.” (In the clip linked previously, he very much did answer the question the interviewer had asked.) When Don’t Worry Darling premiered to the general public on September 23rd, many people reported that theatergoers were laughing at Styles. People openly admitted to attending to laugh at him on purpose. I am not an expert in acting, so perhaps my belief that Styles was good in the movie is wrong, but it seems to me that some people attended the movie expecting for him to be bad and responded to his performance based off of that assumption.
By mid to late September, numerous publications were speculating that Styles’ acting career was dead in the water. We’ll get to these articles in time but first — let’s step back and talk about My Policeman’s release and reception, which was somehow happening at the exact same time as everything you just read for the past *checks Word document* four pages.
Fall 2022 was certainly not boring!
My Policeman
On September 11, the day that My Policeman came to Toronto International Film Festival, user amodioemma wrote a five-star review for the film on Letterboxd. In it, they said, “It’s certainly interesting watching this in a room full of mostly old straight people. Where I was sobbing, I looked over and watched a man yawn and heard another laugh at a somber moment. I think this was my first experience watching a queer love story in a cinema and I was taken aback by the apathy in the room.” Over the course of the following month and a half, stories like this appeared out of festivals and theaters all over the world. In October, I saw My Policeman at NewFest LGBT Film Festival, IFC Center, and Cinepolis in New York. [Ed. Note 2] At NewFest, the audience gasped like it was an episode of Maury; at IFC, people laughed at the scenes of gay intimacy. I went to see it twice at the mercifully quiet Cinepolis to get the bad taste out of my mouth.
I start the story off this way, because the predominant narrative surrounding My Policeman was one of ulterior motives. If the biphobic role Styles was cast into in the Don’t Worry Darling press coverage was the hypersexual opportunistic bimbo, the My Policeman version of Styles was the attention-seeking deceitful interloper. Styles was accused of playing gay for the sexual enjoyment of his fans (specifically, the fans who have created literal conspiracy theories about his life) in Buzzfeed News, The LA Blade, The New Yorker, and Vulture. Indiewire accused Styles of having a “lack of personal relationship to the material,” which made “his performance [feel] only like half of one.” The Daily Beast stated that “My Policeman will likely exacerbate claims that Harry Styles is engaged in queerbaiting.” One would think that perhaps these journalists did not hear that Styles was receiving mockery for portraying explicit gay sex onscreen — but one would be wrong. A reviewer for Buzzfeed News claimed that Styles desired the “giggles and whoops” that occurred at his screening of the film because My Policeman was intended to “[fulfill] a crucial part of [his fans’] mythology onscreen.” Harry Styles was so attention-seeking and opportunistic that being laughed at while having sex with another man was all part of his grand plan to turn “speculation [about his sexuality and relationships] into a bit of theater.”
Discussion of the sex in the movie was a strange mixture of prurience and doubling down on prior criticisms of Styles. Indiewire claimed that My Policeman was “rawer than Styles seems to think, from a close-up on Styles’ face, awash in ecstasy, while Patrick goes down on him for the first time, to an overhead shot of Patrick appearing to be topped by Tom, digging his hands into Patrick’s back.” The Sydney Herald’s opening paragraph stated, “If the sight of Harry Styles standing in front of a gorgeous window in Venice is what you have come for, My Policeman might suffice. Did I mention that he is resplendently, defiantly naked? No doubt about it, that boy is pretty.” Them.us insisted that Styles did not understand his own movie, claiming that “[the sex scenes] do not simply show ‘two guys going at it,’” that the film was “hot and heavy.” They also said that their readers would surely imagine Styles himself “getting horizontal with a real-life Tom or Dick” while watching the film. In contrast, his gay co-star, David Dawson, did not receive similar comments about his personal life or real-life fuckability — in fact, his vision for the movie was rarely considered by reviewers despite the many interviews he gave about his own feelings. The virulent, pervasive biphobia towards Styles forcibly centered conversations about the film around his personal life again and again, turning his sexual fluidity into a lurid spectacle to be debated, degraded, and fetishized.
“Critics Slam Harry Styles’ LGBT Drama ‘My Policeman,’ Call It ‘A One-Note Study Of Gay Martyrdom’” was written by Amanda Harding for the Daily Wire on October 21. Harding pulled negative reviews of the film and emphasized its 40% score on Rotten Tomatoes. She mentioned that, “some fans argue that casting Styles in the lead role was a mistake, as the former One Direction singer has been notoriously vague about his sexuality and may not actually be bisexual.” She also mentioned that the romcom Bros was a box office flop. There are a lot of dog whistles at play here — painting LGBTQ people as self-martyring, claiming bisexuality might not exist, and rejecting the gay agenda. So, the article received 144 comments, many claiming that the woke agenda of the movie was its downfall. Users of the site also called it perverted and were generally homophobic to Styles and the film. The article was posted to conservative pages 12 times to a CrowdTangle total of 14,446,900 followers. Ben Shapiro claimed on Facebook that all critics of the film might be labeled “homophobic weirdos.” If right now you’re thinking that this doesn’t seem a whole lot worse than what I listed before the Daily Wire got involved. . .yeah, I don’t even know what to tell you on that one. It’s bad, and I wish it wasn’t. My Policeman deserved a lot better than it had.
“Harry Styles Can’t Act”
On November 2, them.us released a My Policeman review called, “My Policeman Is a Tired, Predictable Waste of Harry Styles’ Star Power.” This article has a lot of obvious problems (most notably, the prurience and fetishization I mentioned previously) but I want to focus on something subtle implied by the article that I’m not even sure the author realized was there. The writer notes that, “Styles is not a hetero hunk in the mold of Jake Gyllenhaal or Heath Ledger” and that “Hollywood tends to favor leading men who conform to particular masculine conventions, somewhere on a scale between butch beefcakes like Dwayne Johnson and emo waifs like Timothée Chalamet.”
One would think the conclusion would be that perhaps Hollywood is ready for a new kind of leading man — but one would be wrong. The article closes out with the statement that, “the contrast between Styles’ public persona and his role in My Policeman outstrips the formulaic drama on screen” because he is “playing against type” by “trading in feather boas for a bobby’s pressed uniform and suspenders” and that the solution to this is for Styles to find “a story closer to his own heart — a story about blurred boundaries and unclassified desires, that looks forward with excitement rather than backward with rue.” While on first read this may seem progressive, subsequent reads had me squinting with suspicion. This author was, in effect, suggesting that Styles should stop attempting to be a leading man, and should instead play roles where he is more visibly queer. For this author, Styles was too queer (and specifically, too sexually fluid and gender non-conforming) to be believable or enjoyable as a gay masculine leading man, and he would be better off not trying.
This attitude, once you look for it, can be found all over the place. In the Polygon article, “Harry Styles isn’t a bad actor, just a bad talker,” the British author described his speech as “camp” (a homophobic insult in the UK that likely flew under the radar for Polygon’s non-UK readers) and noted that it caused “a big derisive laugh from the audience in the screening [he] attended” and suggests, “he’s likely to find more suitable expression in roles where his heart is permanently on his sleeve.” In the AV Club article, “The trouble with Harry (Styles),” the author noted that “Styles dares to be himself on and off stage, and that self is a gorgeous, androgynous performer,” and concluded the article saying, “perhaps he’ll connect with a director [one day] who can channel his live concert performing skills into screen acting prowess.” (In a case of textbook biphobia, the AV Club, while suggesting he is too queer to play Tom, also accused him of stealing roles from “real” gay actors.) In the Daily Beast article, “It Turns Out Harry Styles is Really Bad at Acting,” the author circled around saying he was “fashionable,” that “nothing about him seem[ed] ordinary,” and that “it may be that he’s just simply not really right for either of the roles in which he’s been cast” before concluding that his movies have not considered “how out of place he is in their worlds.” Mashable suggested he should do “musical theater” because “he’s not an auteur of film or acting.” I could go on, but I feel like the message is clear. The issue with Harry Styles being a film star is not his talent, behavior, or character. It’s because he is visibly queer, and a leading man who is visibly queer offscreen makes people subconsciously uncomfortable. They might not have noticed it, but their brains did.
Up next — Beto O’Rourke, a breakup, and QAnon.
Series: “The American Far-Right Hates Harry Styles. Why is Everyone Laughing?”
Ed. Note 1: For more on the way memes can be used as tools of dehumanization, check out the short video The White Internet’s Love Affair with Digital Blackface, the longer video on the same topic by Khadija Mbowe, or this even longer video on Cringe by Contrapoints, who discusses it in the context of queerness specifically.
Ed. Note 2: Only God can judge me.
