Up until last week, “Emilia Pérez” looked like a narrow Oscar frontrunner, in part because of its political resonances. Sure, the character of Emilia — played by Karla Sofía Gascón — did not become a better person after transitioning (in fact, her cruelty drives the action of the film up until the final scene). But a viewer in a generous frame of mind can see in the mere fact of Emilia’s transition, and the project she puts her cartel-obtained resources toward afterward — on top of Gascón’s presence as a pathbreaking trans Oscar nominee — as a rebuke to the politics of prejudice emanating from President Donald Trump.
After last week’s excavation of years’ worth of bigoted tweets from Gascón, it’s uncertain how many viewers remain in that generous frame of mind. And suddenly, this candidate who seemingly refuses to listen to advice from advisers, offers long-winded and nonsensical explanations for bad behavior, and paints herself as the victim of unnamed conspiracy looks very familiar. Karla Sofía Gascón may not be running for office, but her off-the-rails Oscar campaign has sucked all the energy out of this year’s award season — and made her look less like the anti-Trump and, well, more like the 45th and 47th President himself.
In an Oscar-season meltdown unlike anything that’s been seen before, Gascón has taken it upon herself to do a going-rogue press blitz, one that is not sanctioned by Netflix, the “Emilia Pérez” distributor. Her CNN en Español interview this weekend followed a lengthy Instagram self-defense. Both contained within them apologies, but were also larded with baffling asides (as when Gascón, said on CNN that her kindness extended to the animal kingdom, as she refuses to kill spiders in her home) as well as her florid, conspiratorial claims that she is being purposefully sabotaged.
It’s hard to overstate how entirely without precedent the CNN interview in particular was, as what may be the final blow to Gascón’s campaign, and possibly that of the whole film — assuming she can stop herself in the future. Gascón, whose many, many tweets included a racist reference to George Floyd, declared that her current predicament is akin to Black people in the Jim Crow South. “I feel and very much identify with the people who were thrown off buses for the color of their skin, with the people who did not want them to study at university, for the people who were hated simply for existing, like how I am hated in this moment,” she said.
In the midst of what was meant to be an apology, Gascón went on: “I believe I have been judged, I have been convicted and sacrificed and crucified and stoned without a trial and without the option to defend myself.”
During this barrage of self-aggrandizement, her party — that is to say, her film — has begun distancing themselves from her, with fellow acting nominee Zoe Saldaña declaring last week, “It saddens me that we are having to face this setback right now” without using Gascón’s name.
Holding our attention through an emotional appeal that utterly lacks reason: Gascón’s is the Oscar campaign for the Trump age. That a trans European performer best-known up to this point for her work in Mexican telenovelas is the one whose rhetorical style (and whose stated a-pox-on-every-house political commitments) most mirrors the president’s is one of those little ironies that makes life interesting.
But it doesn’t feel coincidental, either. Say this much: Gascón and Trump both spent years sharing their every random and casual thought on social media, a format that incentivizes both frequency of posting and heights of drama or oddity. (Strangely, Gascón never seemed to go viral — there’s a reason no one at Netflix knew about her posts until last week — but she sure seemed to try.) Gascón’s tweet in which she muses about Adolf Hitler, in translation, reads that Gascón does not “understand so much about the world war against Hitler, he simply had his opinion about Jews”; her position on the late George Floyd is similarly underbaked, and she concludes her thoughts on that matter by saying that, when it comes to both racists and defund-the-police activists, “They’re all wrong.”
These read less like deeply held core values — Gascón literally says she does not understand Hitler, and she is definitely correct about that — than like the musings of a born shitposter and troll ineptly grasping for a novel take, any novel take, and surprising herself with how unthinkingly nasty she’s able to be. (Oddly, she posted more harshly about the Oscars themselves, with her declaration that they had become an “Afro-Korean festival,” than our current, entertainment-obsessed president ever has, although he did at least note that the prizewinning emancipation-revenge fantasy “Django Unchained” was “racist” in its Oscar year.)
As for Gascón’s sustained campaign against Islam over years, another lesson social media teaches its most rock-bottom users is that finding a bit can provide one material during fallow periods. No one but Gascón knows what is in her heart, but — despite her protestations — her tweets certainly read like the work of someone with deep animus toward Islam, and toward Muslims. But they also read like the work of someone whose mind was warped by the incentive structure of social media and who found a bit that worked for her. They were, for her, what tweets about Barack Obama’s birth certificate were for Donald Trump — a place to return again and again.
Granted, Trump’s expression of resentments and hatreds only made him more popular, while Gascón’s has likely made her unemployable going forward, at least in the U.S. Her doubling down, and then doing so again, proves she’s a creature of social media. That’s what makes Gascón hard to look away from — and that makes her, like Trump, the current defining force of the race she’s in. In the social media age, shame only holds you back; second thoughts keep one from achieving elusive virality. Gascón’s future, both in the short term as this Oscar race wraps up and in the longer term as her career plays out, are likely to indicate that there are still corners of the world where social-media brassiness doesn’t play well. But, if absolutely nothing else, Gascón is, for reasons no one at Netflix might have anticipated, a star who has met this moment.
