Dear Ezra,
Let me introduce myself. I am Joel Neutra, the founder of Avocado Freedom, the world’s first post-cancellation management collective. We don’t try to repair reputations: such a limited, tactical approach is bound for defeat. Avocado Freedom’s strategy, instead, is reputation renovation. Imagine your reputation as an apartment with good bones, in a cool neighborhood, but with blood stains all over the cigarette infested wall to wall carpeting. Buying a new sofa at IKEA will not solve the problem. You need to gut the place, knock down the drywall, build out something new: something designed.
Some examples of our renovations: Avocado Freedom helped Louis Székely knock down the decrepit infrastructure of Louis CK and build out his famous new Louis Jacket persona. Avocado Freedom worked with Johnny Depp to create a series of brutally honest and violent films and simultaneously become a billionaire, freeing him from ever having to play a drunk pirate. Avocado Freedom is how Kanye West became president (of the United States of America). Now Avocado Freedom wants to work with you, Ezra.
We would like to make you the new Orson Welles. You are already a little older than Orson, but everyone ages slower now, so it works out. Welles built up his reputation in three moves: an edgy reinterpretation of a classic (Voodoo Othello), a hoax using new media (War of the Worlds) and then a perfect first movie (Citizen Kane.) We’ll take the same model for your Avocado Freedom strategy.
Your edgy reinterpretation will be a “postdramatic” theater production of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, performed in a bunker in the outskirts of Berlin, in German, with English subtitles, focused around an investigation into mass child sexual abuse within capitalist-managerial-patriarchal society. The chief collaborator for the performance is Jacqueline Rose, the author of “The Case of Peter Pan: The Impossibility of Children’s Literature.”
You have already started the “hoax using new media.” All of the negative allegations against you, the events in Hawaii, the most recent round of accusations: all of this is the prologue to an absolutely devastating work of life performance: a work that will end with the destruction of the two pillars of Hollywood domination: the exportable superhero-action movie and child sexual abuse.
Let’s call this piece “Ezra Miller Infowar.” Because this is what it is: an infowar between you and WB. WB wishes to silence you, somehow write off the Flash, recast the role, and move forward with stars who are more under their control and influence. You, on the other hand, wish to use your fame and clout to bring justice and (possibly) global communism. To succeed in this, you will have to take control of your own fame and augment it considerably, while gaining prestige, respect, and operating without the strictures of megabudget productions intended for wide release in Asia and America.
Currently, it is probable that your address has been released to the public on Reddit and sites such as the Kiwifarms. Your personal safety is likely not under threat, though there are reasonably credible reports that you are well-armed. This is advisable. But, over time, attention will possibly wax, and become a crisis of its own, with its own logic. Being surrounded by a crowd is not a tenable position. On the other hand, it might simply wane. The infowar between you and Warner Brothers has a curious dimension where the actor with the most resources does not wish to see you in the public eye.
In order to overcome this, you must act quickly and think laterally. The attacks from without are currently mere smear pieces written by low-credibility tabloids like Rolling Stone. What if they were to amplify?
I propose that the first act in the Ezra Miller Infowar involve your abduction by unidentified state agencies. Stories will circulate on the internet that you have been arrested by the FBI, or ATF, or some other hateful division of the American gestapo. But instead you are in Berlin, passionately and creatively working on the aforementioned postdramatic production of Peter Pan. When you are revealed, it will come complete with a harrowing escape narrative, caught and filmed in guerilla style, with harsh realism imposed on you the artist as you truly do escape from a voluntary confinement. The completed piece may never be seen by the public. Instead, it will be released in partial snippets to maximize credibility. There’s never 90 minutes of well shot footage of anything in real life. Liveleak is your channel for such a release.
Your work on Peter Pan is not about the desire to remain young forever. Instead, it is about a truth that you have grasped through a number of revelatory experiences. Something you know and understand acutely is that the society we live in actively endangers children. Having worked in Hollywood’s upper echelons with known and likely abusers, you are a witness who can never testify. Even admitting the knowledge is dangerous.
The danger facing children grows out of the fact that many children are perceived either as burdens, shackles, or a resource to exploit by their parents. This denial of their subjectivity and casting them as something to be cast off, used to harm others, or burned like fuel for wealth is hateful. It creates a spiritual and moral danger more than any physical one.
Your production of Peter Pan will capture and exorcise the demon within you, while growing your credibility and fame as an artist. Your disappearance and resurrection will make you mythical. And the damage you have done to Warner Brothers, when paired with this piece, are a shot across the bow.
The last act involves widespread recognition of patriarchal sexual abuse, revelation of the deep state’s role in both the JFK and 9/11 events, and ten million purchases of your $10 behind-the-scenes documentary. This money goes to funding your perfect film: Davey Thunder: Corporate Terrorist.
How can one person bring down the entire corporate-managerial system? You can find out. Davey Thunder is a reputationally damaged Millennial filmstar, canceled in the initial #MeToo wave, he’s been living low, until he gets recruited by a mysterious Chinese secret society to go undercover on a reality show. In this show, Davey Thunder will portray a foreign film star hired for a new megaproject that will revitalize the fortunes of Chinese culture worldwide—but he has instead attended to the emergent spiritual and personal emergencies that appear before him, one after another, creating a wake of scandal and negative press that threatens to sink the heartless movie studio.
How does this end up with the end of corporate-managerial capitalism? We have an answer but cannot reveal it here. Like any magic trick, the prestige must be kept secret.
Davey Thunder will not be as good as Citizen Kane. Why? Because something perfect has no duplicates, and is excelled by nothing. Davey Thunder can, however be rich in a currency that goes far beyond the aesthetic. Power. Modern art is often simply a combination of a formal approach with a political message. This is because artists have been integrated into the corporate managerial system. They seek power, as any agent in this system does. They are kept from it—because there is no such thing as ideological power in corporate-managerial world.
Art is handcuffed by its integration with corporate-managerial power. But there is a loophole. A way out. We live in a world where art seeks political power, but is frustrated by the spaces and conditions it is made in. Art can accrue political power, but only if it acts outside the ethos and conditions of the corporate and managerial. Why did Welles’ career fall short? He peaked too early, and in the wrong place. He got to the finish line in his twenties, in a studio system that is every bit as ruthless as the one you operate in now. But no conquest is enough for a true artist. Welles hungered for more, and never stopped hungering. Why else did he get so fat? He was never sated.
For you, and any artist, a good career should take you to the battlefields of creativity as often as possible, for as long as possible, until you die a noble death doing what you love. But Davey Thunder will be good enough to inspire the end of the contemporary metasystem and the beginning of a communist mimetic cascade. This will be the process by which, upon seeing your success, people liberate themselves by striving to become like you. The same way that film is in a sense many people trying to reinterpret the career of Orson Welles, to reproduce a perfect movie following his example.
Ezra, I know you don’t know what many of these words mean. That’s why you need to get in touch and let my representatives explain everything.
They can be reached at pityless @ tutanota dot com.
Yours,
Joel Neutra