Tuesday, March 1, 2011

John Galliano’s rant : Are people being too hard on him



I don’t really follow fashion and like most people have an impression that a lot of people in the fashion industry are snobbish, arrogant, pretentious (the list goes on but you get the idea). I also do not really know who John Galliano is beyond that I have heard his name a few times and vaguely remembers him as being a fashion designer or something.

So when I recently saw, from many news sources, headlines like “John Galliano loves Hitler” or “his Anti-Semitic tirade”, and all of them making such a big deal about a video clip of him recently, judging from the coverage I thought this guy must have been screaming, cursing and swearing at some Jewish people or caught on tape professing his love for Hitler’s ideology and how he totally agree with the final solution. Wanting to find out, I went and watched the clip.



 
Having seen the clip however, I am very surprised at the amount of heat he is getting. I mean I have heard voice recordings of Mel Gibson, now that is a rant and considering what was said they were far more serious.

But this, I honestly didn’t feel that it was Anti-Semitic, if anything you could make more of a case that he is Anti-non-blond? or perhaps Anti-Ugly-People? Even then I felt that his anger was purely with the people behind the camera. Now I don’t know if he has a reputation for being hateful to Jewish people before and that is why the incident was deemed extremely serious, but if his reputation was built up on incidents like these then it would seem a bit harsh.

I mean I don’t know why they (the people behind the camera) would be filming in the first place if they didn’t know who he was (or if they were news reporters themselves trying to film such clips), and they seem to be quite happy that he started saying rude things to them as well as trying to lead him on to say even more. We also did not get to see the entire incident, whether they didn’t film the entire conversation or just showed the part that would create the biggest story I do not know, but it is hard to deduce the context of things.

When the clip starts Galliano was clearly very drunk and they clearly have already been arguing for some time, so it is hard to deduce why it started, but like with any argument after a while people just start saying nasty things to each other just for the sake of it. John can be heard saying something like “I like beautiful people”, to which the people filming asked “are you blond”. Perhaps John was trying to be mean before by calling the filmmakers ugly and somehow the fact that they are not blond had something to do with it. At this point John said “ No, but I love Hitler, people like you would be dead”, this is the line that I think got this clip so much attention, but I am not sure that when he said “people like you” he really mean the Jewish people (in fact nothing about the Jews were mentioned in the video). He could have meant that Hitler would have killed the people behind the camera because they are “ugly” or because they are not “blond”. We also do not know if John suddenly brought Hitler into the conversation or if it was mentioned earlier in the argument by the other people. We also do not know why he got so angry with the couple, if they had been rude to him before or said similar nasty things to him.

So all in all if this was the court of law the evidence would be inconclusive at best. I can understand however why everyone associated with him are cutting ties with him as fast as possible. When it comes to incidents like these a public figure’s image can be damage severely, rightly or wrongly, in the court of public opinions…unless maybe you are Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears, then driving around intoxicated putting everybody else’s lives at risk is good for work.    

No comments:

Post a Comment