Celebrities Aren't Going To Save You

Blake Lively and the aesthetics of sympathy

Lately, I’ve been spending too much time thinking about Blake Lively, which, to be clear, is any time spent thinking critically about Blake Lively. You might know Lively from her Gossip Girl days, her famously playful marriage to Ryan Reynolds, her cameos in Taylor Swift’s Squad, or Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. For the last few weeks, Lively has made headlines for the oft-invoked, rarely powerful engine of the internet: cancel culture.

At the heart of the drama is Collen Hoover’s wildly successful novel turned blockbuster movie, It Ends With Us, which follows a young florist by the name of Lily Bloom who finds herself swept in a relationship with a dreamy doctor, played by the very dreamy Justin Baldoni, and struggles to leave when the relationship turns abusive. For many reasons, I have neither seen nor read It Ends With Us and don’t anticipate doing so. I generally find the antics of celebrities to be entertaining conversation pieces or in-flight entertainment, which is to say, a guilty pleasure, but Lively’s potentially career-ending media firestorm interests me despite myself.

Lively’s problems began with poor taste. To promote the film’s floral thematic preoccupation, Lively, who styles herself, decided it would be a fine idea to promote her movie in a parade of floral outfits that ranged from garish to genuine eyesores. I found the mushroom purse charming, but that’s a matter of personal taste. The internet didn’t waste any time slamming Lively’s outfits, with The Cut running a story asking: “Why is Blake Lively’s Dressing Like This?” Mockery mutated into a PR crisis when she began to face criticism for her failure to address domestic violence in her press for a movie structured around domestic violence. The PR is inarguably bad. In an interview with the BBC, she says, “This movie covers domestic violence, but what's important about this film is that [Lily Bloom] is not just a survivor and she's not just a victim, and while those are huge things to be, they're not her identity.” When asked what is the best way for survivors of domestic to approach her and discuss the film’s themes Lively sarcastically replies, “Like, asking for my address, or my phone number, or, like, location share… I’m a Virgo, so like, are we talking logistics, are we talking emotionally?”

On the other hand, the response of Lively’s costar, Justin Baldoni, offers a master class in flipping the narrative. Originally in the headlines for a rumored feud with Lively and Hoover, Baldoni is now the subject of copious media praise for his compassionate efforts to center domestic abuse survivors. In a perfect mirror to Lively’s obliviousness, Baldoni credits domestic abuse as the impetus for his decision to participate in the film: “If a Lily Bloom in real life can sit in this theater, and make a different choice for herself than the one that was made for her, maybe she sees herself on that screen and chooses something different for herself.” Staring earnestly at the camera, Baldoni hits all the right notes.

It is the function of tabloids and TikTok phenoms to litigate which celebrities deserve our sympathy. What interests me is the mechanism of viral outrage. In the weeks since the scandal unfolded, the internet has surrendered a brutal history of Lively’s tone-deaf interviews like clams surrendering their meat. The outrage machine’s favorite article of evidence comes from a 2016 interview (titled: The Blake Lively interview that made me want to quit my job) where Norwegian journalist Kjersti Flaa congratulates, then pregnant, Lively’s “little bump.” Immediately, Lively responds, “Congrats on your little bump,” and alternates between ignoring Flaa and odious self-absorption. Flaa’s moral victory is compounded by her admission that she is infertile, which Lively had no reasonable way of knowing. This interview has 4.6 million views.

I’m not interested in mounting a defense of Lively, but all this outrage feels a little specious. One of the most popular comments on Lively’s Instagram reads “not sure what happened between Justin and you, but as a well-meaning fan… we deserved better.” This is one of the most polite and thoughtful responses of the bunch, most of which criticize the actress as a real-life “mean girl” and gleefully reference the “little bump” exchange. I mention glee because it is this character of the public pile-on that most disturbs me.

For a news cycle that is ostensibly centered around a star’s failure to consider victims of domestic violence, the rabid desire to torpedo Lively quickly eclipses genuine advocacy for survivors. I can understand why Lively makes for an appealing punching bag. From her out-of-touch comments, famous blonde hair, and relentless self-promotion of her new hair-care-line she represents the parasitic celebrity, alpha of the capitalist Hollywood machine. My question is, why did we expect anything different? Remember, this is the same woman who was married on a plantation.

In the United States, one in four women has been the victim of severe violence from an intimate partner; over twelve million people in the United States are affected by intimate partner violence per year. I found these statistics on the National Domestic Violence Hotline’s website and Blake Lively’s Instagram story. Proffering a statistic in this way is an effective numbing agent. Awful, horrible, we think, but there’s something in a number that desensitizes us to the viscera of human tragedy. Accordingly, Lively’s use of these statistics was recognized as paltry and cheap, a failure of aesthetics more than morals. I don’t think anyone following the story can reasonably believe that Lively supports domestic violence, and her decision to star in and direct such a movie might even reflect a special sympathy with survivors. The outrage against Lively is not about her views, but, rather, her failure to express sympathy in the right way or not expressing it soon enough. In short, Lively behaved like someone prioritizing the promotion of a blockbuster movie. (Despite or, more likely because of, all the controversy It Ends With Us has been a box office hit.) Again, I ask, why should we have expected any different? Notably Reynolds and Lively only issued a public apology for their plantation wedding in the summer of 2020 when racial complicity had become publicly untenable. They also donated 200,000 to the NAACP.

Lively’s story was also the subject of breathless press coverage because of her proximity to the most famous woman on the planet, Taylor Swift. Lively is a member of Taylor Swift’s inner circle, and in the thick of the It Ends With Us fallout, Swift threw her a star-studded birthday party. Swift, herself no stranger to bad press, continues to evade public recourse for her most legitimate scandal, her carbon-curling use of her private jet, with a wall of public silence. Swift does not mock reporters, takes every opportunity to express her love for her fans, and lets her lawyer claim the jet-tracking accounts are “staking and harassing behavior.” Is this an example of superior morals or superior aesthetics?  

As a consequence of our generational government nihilism, we anointed an even more venal and less deserving class as our advocates: the celebrity. These are talented lyrists, vocalists, musicians, and actresses. Sometimes, their politics even align with our own. But their interests and profit margins differ from ours. When the outrage machine confuses entertainers with moral responsibility, they risk taking their eye off the elected officials truly charged with legislating social crisis.