Respectability Would Ruin It No. 0003

Nobody asked a retired backup center to save the WNBA from a problem that does not exist.

Enes Kanter, shut the fuck up.

I would ordinarily work my way toward that conclusion. Establish the facts. Consider opposing arguments. Maybe offer the man a little grace before arriving at the part where I ask him to please stop talking.

But Kanter has already received more consideration than he has ever given the WNBA, so let’s not waste anybody’s time.

For the past few weeks, Kanter has been pretending that he intends to enter the 2027 WNBA Draft. He even submitted a letter and recruited Royce White. One unemployed former NBA player making an ass of himself was not enough. Kanter claims he has spoken with several other former professional players about doing the same thing. Good for the ones that bang that call. 

This is all supposed to expose some grand loophole in the WNBA’s eligibility rules. Kanter says that if the league believes transgender women are women, it must allow a 6-foot-10, 250-pound retired NBA center to check a box and start posting up A’ja Wilson.

That is not how any of this works. Kanter knows that. Royce White knows that. Every television host giving them airtime knows that.

The stupidity is the point.

You Do Not Give a Fuck About the WNBA. The quickest way to tell that somebody does not care about women’s sports is when the only time they mention women’s sports is to talk about transgender people.

They cannot tell you who won the championship. They do not know who is leading the league in scoring. They were not around when the women were flying commercial, sharing practice facilities, and fighting for basic investment. They did not buy tickets when the league needed attendance. They did not buy jerseys when the players needed visibility.

But let the word transgender enter the conversation, and suddenly these niggas are Pat Summitt.

Kanter is not advocating for better pay, better travel, expanded rosters or improved facilities. He is not using his platform to celebrate the women actually playing basketball. He has made the league the backdrop for his latest conservative-media audition.

The WNBA is not the cause. It is the set.

And the women are props.

Kanter showed up courtside for the Chicago Sky and Indiana Fever wearing a shirt displaying the dictionary definition of a woman. During the game, he got into an exchange with Natasha Cloud, stepped toward the court, and was removed by security as the arena booed him. He immediately ran to social media and claimed that he had been kicked out for “supporting women.”

No, Enes. You were kicked out after bringing your traveling culture-war circus into somebody else’s workplace.

Supporting women would have required you to watch the women play basketball. You came to make sure everybody watched you.

Here is the part that makes this entire performance especially pathetic: there is no transgender player attempting to enter the WNBA.

Not one.

There is no former NBA center demanding a roster spot. There is no 6-foot-10 woman destroying the league. There is no championship being overturned, no player being pushed out, and no locker room under siege. The WNBA has said there is no current eligibility dispute and described the campaign surrounding this issue as a bad-faith effort to create division.

Kanter had to invent the threat before he could volunteer to protect women from it.

That is how this machine works. Find a scenario that is not happening. Describe the most absurd possible version of it. Become furious about the version you invented. Then demand that everybody else abandon reality and argue with you inside your imagination.

It is less like political commentary and more like watching a dog bark at itself in a mirror, except the dog eventually gets tired.

Kanter has declared himself eligible for a draft that has not asked for him, in a league he cannot play in, to protest a player who does not exist.

Sir, go home.

He gives interviews. He appears on national television. His social-media posts reach millions of people. He can write letters, hold press conferences, attend rallies and purchase courtside tickets. Nobody has taken away his ability to speak.

The problem is that he believes freedom of speech means freedom from anybody telling him that what he said was stupid.

It does not.

You are allowed to talk. Natasha Cloud is allowed to respond. Fans are allowed to boo. An arena is allowed to remove you when your performance spills toward the court. And the rest of us are allowed to notice that the man screaming about being silenced somehow never shuts the fuck up.

Kanter has legitimate reasons to understand political repression. His criticism of the Turkish government came with actual personal consequences. He has also spoken publicly about human-rights abuses in China when many people connected to the NBA would have preferred silence. Those positions required something real from him.

That history makes this version of Kanter more disappointing, not less.

He knows the difference between state repression and getting booed at a basketball game. He knows the difference between risking your safety and risking a bad night on social media. He has simply discovered that treating them as the same thing is profitable.

Enes Kanter’s NBA career ended years ago, but he has finally found a system willing to guarantee him minutes.

The conservative grievance circuit does not require defense, foot speed or a dependable jumper. It only asks that you identify a group its audience already dislikes, call yourself brave for antagonizing it and return after every backlash to announce that you have been canceled.

In that league, Kanter is an All-Star.

But none of this is about protecting women. Protecting women requires listening to them even when they do not say what you want to hear. It requires investing in their work when there is no controversy attached. It requires seeing them as complete people rather than fragile scenery in a man’s political performance.

Kanter is not defending the WNBA. He is using it.

He is using its players, its growing audience and the attention surrounding women’s basketball to keep himself in a conversation that had largely moved on without him. He manufactured a crisis, appointed himself its hero and showed up courtside hoping someone would give him the confrontation he needed.

Then someone did.

Now he gets to tour the internet telling everybody how dangerous it is to stand up for women while the actual women return to work.

So, yes, Enes Kanter: you can speak. You can write another letter. You can declare for every women’s league on Earth. You can put another definition on a shirt in case the dictionary has been feeling underrepresented.

You are free to do all of that.

And we are free to give you the response this performance deserves:

Shut the fuck up.

For more than twenty-five years, people have spoken about Wild Wild West as if it personally destroyed cinema.

Not just a bad movie. Not merely a disappointing summer blockbuster. According to popular memory, Wild Wild West was an act of violence against filmmaking itself. A loud, expensive, mechanical-spider-shaped stain on Will Smith’s otherwise untouchable late-’90s run.

Enough.

Shut the fuck up.

I am tired of pretending this movie is not great.

Now, before the Letterboxd defense attorneys arrive with screenshots of its Rotten Tomatoes score, let me explain what I mean by “great.”

I do not mean flawless. I do not mean respectable. I do not mean Wild Wild West should have beaten The Matrix for anything other than Most Audacious Use of a Giant Metal Insect.

I mean great in the way movies used to be fun before every blockbuster needed twelve years of lore, three post-credit scenes, and a YouTube video explaining what the ending means.

Wild Wild West is ridiculous, stylish, offensive, inventive, loud, committed, visually memorable, and completely unashamed of itself.

That is a great fucking movie.

There is no moment in Wild Wild West when the movie forgets that its job is to entertain.

It has gunfights. Gadgets. Trains. Explosions. Disguises. Beautiful women. Racist villains. Secret laboratories. Magnetic collars. A man with no legs operating a giant mechanical spider in the desert.

A man with no legs operating a giant mechanical spider in the desert while talking about how his “thing” still works.

What else did you need from a summer movie in 1999?

The film moves like somebody was standing behind the camera yelling, “Add something else.”

A normal Western was not enough, so they added science fiction. Science fiction was not enough, so they added spy gadgets. Spy gadgets were not enough, so they added buddy-comedy arguments between Will Smith and Kevin Kline. Then somebody apparently looked around the room and asked why the movie did not yet have a colossal steam-powered spider.

I’m stuck on the spider.

That person understood cinema.

There is a belief that movies become smarter when they become slower, darker, quieter, and more miserable. Everything has to end with some deep, moving moment as the screen fades to black.

Wild Wild West does none of that.

Outside of not drumming on white women’s breasts, there are no lessons to be learned.

It knows exactly what it is.

It is a live-action cartoon with a hundred-million-dollar budget and one of the biggest movie stars in the world dressed like the coolest cowboy America had seen in years.

Will Smith Owns the Western

Will Smith’s Jim West does not waste time proving he is worthy of the hat. He enters already dangerous and already aware that he is the shit.

The movie’s attempts to address race are often clumsy. Some of the jokes are ugly. Some feel like the screenwriters mistook acknowledging racism for saying something meaningful about it.

But Will Smith made everything look cool.

Aliens? Cool.

Government surveillance conspiracies? Cool.

Fighting Confederate terrorists aboard a weaponized train while dressed like the sharpest cowboy in America? Cool.

Will Smith was the  blockbuster. You can’t rewrite this. Your little movie had motion but he was the wave. 

And it’s the fact y’all keep playing with the theme song, though.

The Wild Wild West theme song alone deserves its own Smithsonian exhibit.

Did the movie need a rap song sampling Stevie Wonder and explaining the plot? Absolutely not.

Was the movie ever going to arrive without one? Absolutely not.

That was the deal.

Even people who claim they hate the movie know the song.

That counts for something.

Dr. Arliss Loveless Is a Perfectly Insane Villain

Loveless is a former Confederate scientist, an industrial genius, a flamboyant racist, and a man who refuses to enter a room when he can be dramatically revealed through machinery.

Every line arrives soaked in venom and Shakespearean grandeur. Kenneth Branagh plays him like a bitter Southern supervillain from a cartoon designed by someone who had recently discovered both Jules Verne and cocaine.

It is an enormous performance.

Thank God.

Too many modern villains speak softly, stare into the distance, and explain that they are not actually evil. They are simply trying to restore balance, protect the universe, avenge their family, or solve housing inequality through genocide.

Loveless does not need your sympathy.

He hates the United States. He hates Jim West. He hates losing. He has a collection of elaborate machines and women dressed according to themes. His primary goal is revenge, and his secondary goal is making sure everybody hears the speech he prepared about it.

That is villainy.

The Giant Mechanical Spider Is Not a Flaw

Whenever people discuss why Wild Wild West is supposedly terrible, they always mention the spider.

They speak about it like the machine crawled out of the screen and repossessed their home.

Yes, the movie ends with a giant mechanical spider walking through the desert.

That is why movies exist.

The spider is not evidence that the film went too far. Going too far was the entire creative philosophy.

Once you have created a steampunk Western starring Will Smith and Kevin Kline, the only responsible decision is to end it with a giant robot spider. Anything smaller would have been cowardice.

Imagine getting to the final act and Loveless reveals a regular cannon.

Imagine Jim West fighting a reasonably sized vehicle.

Imagine all that money, production design, and narrative foolishness leading to something tasteful.

No.

Give me the spider.

Give me the absurd scale of it. Give me Jim West climbing across its metal body while it stomps through the desert. Give me a villain who looked at the entire history of military technology and decided warfare needed more legs.

The spider is magnificent because it is unforgettable.

Cinema is an image-making art. People remember images.

They remember the shark in Jaws. They remember the T. rex in Jurassic Park. They remember the DeLorean. They remember the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

And whether they admit it proudly or through clenched teeth, they remember that fucking spider.

Wild Wild West is not secretly a restrained masterpiece waiting to be reclaimed by serious critics. It is too loud, too horny, too expensive, too offensive, and too obsessed with machinery to ever become respectable.

Good.

Respectability would ruin it.

The movie gave us Will Smith as a cowboy, Kenneth Branagh delivering Confederate supervillain Shakespeare, a plot-summary rap song, and the most unnecessarily magnificent mechanical spider in cinematic history.

More than twenty-five years later, people are still talking about it.

Sounds like a great fucking movie to me.