Introduction

In the critically acclaimed film Baby Driver,¹ Kevin Spacey plays Doc, a powerful and wealthy crime boss who employs a revolving cadre of uniquely talented bank robbers to do his bidding. One of the few fixtures in Doc’s criminal squad is a young man named Baby (Ansel Elgort), on whose virtuosic skills as a getaway driver Doc comes to depend for his heists. In debt to Doc and bereft of other options, Baby finds himself held captive by his employer, who is at turns flattering, manipulative, appreciative, and cruel. Doc’s exploitative treatment of Baby might be understood as analogous to—albeit hyperbolically so—the kind of toxic “mentoring” that many young performers experience as they attempt to create names for themselves in various entertainment industries dominated mostly by powerful white cis men, including Spacey himself.²

As if to confirm this allegorical reading of the film, Baby Driver links Baby’s phenomenal driving skills to his passion for music and dance, staging each car chase scene as an intricately choreographed ballet between drivers, automotive technologies, urban landscapes, and perfectly timed musical accompaniments. Throughout most of the film, Doc tortures Baby, breaking promises and threatening the lives of those Baby loves in order to keep him on the payroll, but, building toward the film’s conclusion, Doc feels sympathy for Baby, who has both fallen in love and found himself under attack by another bank robber. Doc engineers Baby’s escape and sacrifices his own life in the process. As such, Baby Driver gives Doc something of a second act in his final moments, redeeming this character, who humanizes himself with the admission that he, like Baby, had been in love once too.

It would seem that in his Twitter response to Anthony Rapp’s allegations of sexual assault, Spacey had also hoped to engineer something of a second act for himself—following his (supposed) apology to Rapp with his own coming out statement in the latter half of his tweet. This rhetorical move suggests an opportunistic attempt to deflect attention from the allegations against him, framing Spacey in relation to cultural narratives about the traumas of living as a gay man in a homophobic culture and the salvific capacities of coming out. These kinds of stories of liberation from trauma through disclosure have abounded in both sanitized Hollywood narratives that wed coming out tropes with those of the American Dream and of American exceptionalism (while also deflecting attention from persistent structures of inequity and discrimination that make life harder for LGBTQ people and queers of color, in particular) and in extratextual rhetoric about celebrities who have come out, achieved success, and confirmed that “it gets better.” As such, it makes a certain kind of (perverse) sense that Spacey (and his PR team) might imagine that this already-familiar narrative could work in his favor—a calculation that would, of course, prove to be decidedly (and thankfully) off the mark. It makes a certain kind of sense precisely because stories like the one offered by Baby Driver—about a cisgender white man who uses his power and privilege to manipulate and control a more vulnerable person—have been too often dismissed or rationalized in U.S. public discourse.

In fact, Spacey’s tweet evinces some of the very strategies that such powerful figures have used to discredit those who dared to speak out against their abusers. For example, analysis of Spacey’s word choice reveals the word “story” to be the most frequently used term in his apology-cum-confession (beyond such functional parts of speech as articles and conjunctions and, tellingly, the word “I”). In his supposed apology, Spacey describes Rapp’s experiences as a “story” he was “beyond horrified” to hear, and he then goes on to discuss this tale in hypothetical and conditional terms, expressing his guilt “if” Rapp’s story was in fact true. In the second half of his tweet, during which he comes out as a “gay man,” Spacey references the “stories” that have been “out there” about his sexuality, which he says were “fueled” paradoxically by his desire to protect his privacy. This...