Early Reviews of ‘The Flash’ Are Overwhelmingly Positive—And Totally Disregard Ezra Miller’s Problematic Past
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Shutterstock
Content warning: This newsletter contains descriptions of grooming, sexual violence and abuse.
Correction: A previous version of this article misgendered Ezra Miller. Friday Things regrets the error.
At first I thought the tweets were fake. They were so effusive in their praise of The Flash and more specifically star Ezra Miller that I genuinely wasn’t sure if this was a Twitter troll situation. (And the fact that they were coming from accounts with blue checkmarks didn’t help, tbh.) But no, they were real. The movie doesn’t actually premiere until June, but after a special screening at CinemaCon this week, people took to Twitter to unreservedly praise it. According to film critic Scott Menzel, “The Flash is hands down one of the best superhero films of all time. No joke, The Flash is the ultimate movie going experience as it has a little bit of everything! Action, emotion, heart, humor and plenty of nostalgia. Ezra Miller is phenomenal as dual Barry Allens… [Miller] is the heart and soul of the film. Ezra’s performance carries the entire weight of the story. It is a dual performance and really showcases Ezra’s incredible talent as a performer. They bring such rich emotion and depth to the role of Barry Allen.” Meanwhile, Deadline’s awards columnist, Pete Hammond, calls it “dazzling” and a “triumph for Ezra,” and Collider editor-in-chief Scott Weintraub says the movie is “fantastic.” “I know Ezra Miller has made a lot of mistakes but they are soooooo good in this movie,” he went on to say.
Just so we’re clear, this is the same Ezra Miller who has faced a variety of abuse and grooming allegations since 2020, which is what Weintraub is referencing when he says the actor has “made a lot of mistakes.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but… that’s fucked. This isn’t to say I think critics shouldn’t review The Flash, or that they have some sort of ethical obligation to dislike it. But the decision to ignore or downplay Miller’s actions because they liked the movie so much is an abdication of their wider responsibility to their audiences, and a very useful case study of who industry insiders believe are (and are not) worthy of protection.
A quick rundown of Ezra Miller’s grooming and assault allegations
First, some context: In April 2020, after a disturbing video of someone who looks like Miller choking a woman at an Icelandic bar surfaced online, a source at Prikið Kaffihús, the bar in question, confirmed to Variety that “this was a serious altercation at the bar, and that the man, whom they identify as Miller, was escorted off the premises.”
According to a later report from Business Insider, around the same time, Miller rented out some of Hótel Laugarbakki and started a short relationship with a young woman who was struggling with addiction. “Ezra basically said: ‘My room is your room. This is now where you’re going to stay.’ And I was like, ‘Cool,’” she said. “There was a lot of psychological abuse. Ezra was super manipulative. They kind of had us all under their finger. They were able to twist and pull everything that I thought I knew about the world. It was only six days, but it honestly felt way, way longer. I remember feeling, like, ‘Wow, I don’t know how I’m going to recover from this.’”
Fast-forward to March and April 2022, when Miller was arrested twice. In the first incident, they were charged with disorderly conduct and harassment after a physical altercation at a karaoke bar. In the second, they were arrested and released without charges after throwing a chair at a private party, which hit a young woman.
Then, in June 2022, Chase Iron Eyes and Sara Jumping Eagle, the parents of 18-year-old activist Gibson Iron Eyes, accused Miller of grooming their child from the age of 14, including trying to sleep in the same bed as Gibson, providing them with alcohol and drugs and encouraging them to drop out of school. When their parents visited their child in Vermont that January, Gibson had bruises on their body and didn’t have access to their own driver’s license, car keys or bank card. In response, Gibson released a statement via a now-deleted Instagram post saying their parents’ allegations were rooted in transphobia, that they dropped out of school after a friend died and that Miller “has only provided loving support and invaluable protection throughout this period of loss.”
Also in June 2022, the Daily Beast reported that a 12-year-old non-binary child in Massachusetts had been granted a temporary restraining order against Miller after a series of interactions that made them uncomfortable. According to the article, after meeting in February 2022, “Miller… return[ed] to pester the family on a number of other occasions, including in late April, in May, and on June 4, dressed as a cowboy. In April, both the mother and child maintain that Miller made the child uncomfortable by hugging them and pressing their body closely against them. During the June visit, the child expressed their interest in horses, and Miller said that they would acquire several horses so that the child could help them care for the herd on their Vermont farm, which also struck them as inappropriate.”
When those critics minimize Miller’s alleged behaviour, they send a message about who matters
These are very serious accusations, the kind of claims that could sink an actor’s career—but Miller has escaped largely unscathed, and these critics’ effusive praise is part of the reason why. It all functions as favourable PR, right? New headlines that are both positive and unrelated to the negative news stories of the past are a key part of image rehabilitation. And, since these ideas aren’t coming from Miller’s team, they read as organic and credible. (It’s basically earned media for alleged abusers.)
I’ve written before about the purpose and function of cultural critique, including how professional critics are overwhelmingly white men, which often means they miss important nuances in the stories they review. I am also very, very on the record about not believing cancel culture exists. But I dunno, here we go again, I guess? Because I don’t think it’s an accident that these white men were able to ‘separate the art from the artist’ just because they really liked a superhero movie. In fact, I think they are practicing an approach to criticism that basically guarantees they will always ignore what they believe is ‘extraneous’ information in an attempt to judge art on its own merits. Only, that information is not extraneous at all, because art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I mean, what an artist believes about the world, how they treat other people and what they believe they’re entitled to informs their creative decisions just as much as the other artists they are influenced by, the visual style they prefer or the themes they return to time and time again.
New York magazine critic Kathryn VanArendonk explored this idea in a 2017 column that I think is relevant here. She wrote it not long after the news of Louis C.K.’s sexual misconduct broke, and she was comparing his and Lena Dunham’s respective unflattering portraits of themselves. One of her arguments was that some artists’ work is always perceived as personal (women, queer people, racialized people, etc.) and can therefore never be separated from their real-life selves, while for other artists (white men), creative output is automatically perceived as separate and objective, which is why the messy Hannah Horvath and the messy-in-different-ways Lena Dunham feel like the same person, whereas C.K.’s jokes about masturbation weren’t about himself—even though they actually, literally were. VanArendonk explains that this style of criticism “likes to imagine art in a vacuum, ignoring authorial intent and historical context and anything else, focusing instead on the thing that’s right in front of you. Let’s try to set aside everything we’ve learned about who this person is, and instead just think about the art itself. I’ve always liked that idea of criticism. It’s clean; it feels pure. It lets critics off the hook — it suggests that we shouldn’t have to think about the artist when we think about the art. It’s literary critic Roland Barthes’s Death of the Author, which argues that once a work is out in the world, the artist doesn’t get to (or have to) control what happens to it. It’s a critical absolution from having to deal with all the messy background stuff,” she wrote.
But as she concluded back then, “the death of the author is a safe cover — it’s a luxury. Allegations against Louis C.K., against Kevin Spacey, against Weinstein and Roy Price and Woody Allen and anyone else involved in the production of powerful, well-financed, money-making cultural works, put the lie to that luxurious critical stance. They make it obvious that ignoring the artist as a person can also mean ignoring the power structures that actively harm people. It’s refusing to see the hierarchies that promote some art and some artistic voices and suppress others.”
Warner Bros.’ response has been embarrassingly predictable
When Menzel and Weintraub say Miller is “phenomenal” and “brings rich emotion and depth” to their role, they’re saying a beautiful story is more important than the things the actors does in real life, and audiences’ enjoyment of a film is more important than the people Miller may have hurt. They are essentially arguing in the primacy of the story over actual people, which I think is irresponsible. (And, I should note, a fairly new idea that emerged during the New Criticism movement in the early 1900s.) So sure, they can review and even love The Flash—though they don’t have to; io9 hasn’t written about any of J.K. Rowling’s intellectual property since 2020, for example. I just think it’s the bare minimum that every review of the movie should also mention what Miller is accused of, and acknowledge that Warner Bros. continues to employ him in spite of that behaviour. That is important context—and besides, audiences deserve to know what they are spending their money on.
And yes, Warner Bros. is another key part of the puzzle here. The company has functionally supported Miller since the very beginning of this alleged behaviour. According to Rolling Stone, in April 2022, executives from both Warner Bros. and DC held an “emergency impromptu meeting” to discuss Miller’s behaviour and what the studio should do—if anything. “According to a knowledgeable source, the consensus in the room was to hit pause on any future projects involving Miller including possible appearances in the DC Extended Universe.” But it was clearly only a pause, because Warner Bros. Discovery’s Q4 2022 Earnings call in February, the company’s CEO, David Zaslav, hyped up The Flash, saying, “We’re also excited for the release of four DC films this year. Starting with Shazam in two weeks and followed by The Flash, which James Gunn called one of the greatest superhero movies ever made; a masterpiece… I saw it and loved it, it’s a wow. I can’t wait for The Flash to hit the theaters in June.” He repeated those sentiments this week, telling the audience at the CinemaCon screening that he had watched it three times and “it’s the best superhero movie [he’s] ever seen.”
If this approach seems familiar, it’s because another Warner Bros. exec recently took a similar approach to the announcement that the company’s new streaming endeavour, Max (a merger of HBO Max and Discovery+) would be the home of a new Harry Potter series, which noted transphobe Rowling would executive produce.
When asked exactly how involved she would be in the production of the series, Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO of HBO and Max content, said, “No, I don’t think this is the forum. That’s a very online conversation, very nuanced and complicated and not something we’re going to get into. Our priority is what’s on the screen. Obviously, the Harry Potter story is incredibly affirmative and positive and about love and self-acceptance. That’s our priority—what’s on screen.”
In both cases, Warner Bros. is prioritizing potential profit over their own stated company values, which say they strive to “empower others, have courage and pursue equity” by “amplifying the voices of global storytellers to reflect audiences around the world, intentionally seeking out diversity, removing barriers and creating space for all to share ideas and be heard and actively listening and leading with empathy, integrity and transparency.” By choosing to work with Miller and Rowling, they’re saying they’re okay with alienating audiences and creating potentially unsafe work environments. But they’re also telling us that they don’t actually have a very high opinion of those audiences. If they don’t see abusers or transphobes as risks to their brand’s value, it’s because they don’t think anyone will care enough about their involvement to actually skip the show or movie.
Also… it would be irresponsible not to acknowledge race in this conversation
Lastly, it’s kind of jarring to read these glowing reviews of The Flash when we just saw Jonathan Majors’ swift (and very deserved) fall from grace after an alleged incident of domestic assault in March.
As Vulture broke down earlier this month, Majors has been dropped by his management and PR teams, as well as from the the film adaptation of the Walter Mosley novel The Man in My Basement. (He is still attached to several projects for now: Avengers: The Kang Dynasty (2025), Loki season two, Spike Lee’s Da Understudy, and 48 Hours in Vegas.) He’s no longer being considered for a role in an upcoming Otis Redding biopic, and has been dropped from brand deals with the U.S. Army and the Texas Rangers. He’s still a brand ambassador for Valentino, but won’t be attending the Met Gala next week. He has also stepped down from the Gotham Film and Media Institute board.
I’m not at all interested in comparing the severity of either actor’s offences, because I don’t think that’s useful. I’m also not trying to argue that Majors should be facing fewer consequences just because Miller has managed to avoid any severe professional consequences. But I do want to acknowledge that studios and other industry insiders believe some people are valuable enough to protect, and that type of decision-making always highlights existing inequalities. Miller is gender-nonconforming, which means they are subject to oppression and bias like all queer people, but they also hold racial privilege and that is definitely playing into how critics and other gatekeepers perceive their behaviour, and decide whether they’re eligible for a second chance.
In fact, in other circumstances, Weintraub (the “I know Ezra Miller has made a lot of mistakes, but…” guy) doesn’t easily downplay bad behaviour by calling it a mistake. After Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars, he tweeted that Smith “need[ed] to be severely punished” because his behaviour wasn’t “some small mistake.”
Isn’t it funny how that math works?
✨ Episode 6 of Making Our Own Way: Author Téa Mutonji ✨
The sixth and final episode of Making Our Own Way features author Téa Mutonji. I’ve been a fan of hers since reading her 2019 collection of short stories, Shut Up You’re Pretty, which follows Congolese-Canadian Loli on a messy, imperfect coming-of-age journey. Like all of Mutonji’s work, these stories explore friendship, sexuality, family, racism and belonging—and that thematic consistency is just one of the many things we chatted about in our interview. Other conversations include: Mutonji’s writing process, who actually gets to be messy in literature and why she still finds so much inspiration in Scarborough’s Galloway neighbourhood, where she, like Loli, grew up.
And Did You Hear About…
All of the very charming and lovely Wes Anderson-inspired TikToks.
This detailed breakdown of Tiffany Haddish’s weird, problematic behaviour, which has kind of been circulating on social recently, but I don’t think has been laid out so clearly.
Writer Halima Jabril’s smart analysis of the way the horror genre “subverts toxic ideas around women and food.”
How Spotify has changed the way artists make music.
This week’s episode of NPR’s Code Switch, which features the first public conversation between Hari Kondabolu and Hank Azaria since Kondabolu’s documentary, The Problem With Apu, came out in 2017.
This Twitter thread of parasocial enemies.
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