I’ll just dive right in, because I don’t believe in swimming around the issues: Ellen DeGeneres sucks. What am I talking about and what does that have to do with Dory, the regal blue tang fish from Finding Nemo? Let’s dip into that a little more slowly.
I remember the first time I ever watched Finding Nemo. Actually, that’s not true. I don’t remember at all because, like Dory, the blue regal tang voiced by Ellen DeGeneres in the movie, I have memory issues tied to my trauma. Growing up with complex PTSD and anxiety caused by multiple forms of abuse means I’ve forgotten or repressed a lot of my childhood. But I remember watching Finding Nemo over and over again, much like other cathartic movies like Lilo and Stitch, and relating most to Nemo and Dory—both as a pair of unlikely friends, respectively lost in their own unique ways, and individually. And I related specifically to Dory, as much as a small child with C-PTSD can relate to a cartoon fish who was separated from loved ones and unintentionally continued to repress her own memories to cope with the trauma.
In 2003’s Finding Nemo, Dory proves she has a good heart when she helps Marlin the clownfish find his son Nemo, who’s been taken by humans. Along the way, she processes some of the memory issues surrounding her own familial trauma, recalling that she has a family and hoping to return to them. In its 2016 sequel, Finding Dory, the story is flipped, and Dory becomes the main character, desperately searching for her parents, with the help of her friends and newfound chosen family, Marlin and Nemo. The sequel finds the cute cartoon fish further proving her goodhearted nature, and, in spite of the forgetfulness that causes her to frequently repeat herself, that she is still quite skilled and smart—and that her quirks are actually her greatest assets.
Like Dory, I had been separated from love, albeit not physically. Growing up in an abusive household affected my memory, although I wouldn’t realize the acute ways that it had until the more recent years of my adulthood. Back then, I didn’t know why I loved Dory so much, or why it was so comforting to watch her receive love from Nemo and Marlin and the rest of the film’s school of sea creatures. I didn’t know why it was so helpful to see her memory issues and personal trauma frustrate those around her, and also to see those in her life accept her and try to guide her through her struggles anyway. I didn’t know why it was so important for me to see her strive toward joy, hope, and helping others despite her own confusion and loss.
As an adult, I now understand that all of this is because Dory and I share some important things in common. I understand that my own traumas and coping mechanisms have sometimes made me a frustrating person to deal with for the people in my life. I see that those in Dory’s life who patiently provide her with love and affection despite her more frustrating qualities helped me hope that this, too, was possible for me—that I could just keep swimming through the uncertainty and fear in order to help myself and others.
I understand these things now, but it seems that comedian and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, the actor who voiced Dory, does not. The Hollywood heavyweight, whose net worth is estimated at approximately $490 million, has a penchant for controversy. She’s defended a fellow comedian’s homophobic comments and cozied up to a war criminal. And last week, on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, she compared her experience self-isolating from Covid-19 in one of the mansions she and her wife lucratively flip to “being in jail”—a decidedly different experience, to put it lightly.
“One thing that I’ve learned from being in quarantine is that…this is like being in jail, is what it is,” she said, adding: “It’s mostly because I’ve been wearing the same clothes for 10 days and everyone in here is gay.” She ended her diatribe by saying, “I want to spread light where there’s shade,” but apparently only at the expense of real human beings in prison, who are currently suffering from the disease at alarming rates.
DeGeneres may have voiced Dory, but it’s clear she’s nothing like her. And she could stand to be. On top of her empathy, Dory is just an altogether joyful fish. She approaches situations with her “Just Keep Swimming” attitude, and even though it’s mostly because she experiences short-term memory loss, she never lets others’ negative opinions of her hold her back—instead, she learns what is useful from them and moves on. DeGeneres, meanwhile, has built a brand based on being nice that seemingly leaves out actual empathy—for the victims of Kevin Hart’s homophobic jokes, the Bush administration, and America’s carceral state. She doesn’t seem to have learned anything from Dory.
Dory’s attitude provides a good blueprint (pun intended) for how to approach life’s difficulties: face them head on, do what you know you need to do for yourself while listening to others around you, and don’t let anyone drag you down 20,000 leagues under the sea to the depths of the abyss. You just keep swimming, right? Seeing Dory navigate so many stormy seas and still emerge above water with her head held high taught me that I, too, am capable not just of surviving, but thriving, whether I feel I’m held back by trauma or not. I think that’s what Dory’s character communicates to many of us—she is, after all, the reason Marlin finds Nemo in the end.
That’s why it’s been incredibly disappointing to have been faced with the truth about DeGeneres in recent years. Growing up, she was a hero of mine, just like Dory. Twenty-three years ago this April, DeGeneres came out as gay on the cover of TIME Magazine and then, a few days later, addressed it in her own words on her then relatively new television show, Ellen. While an estimated 42 million viewers watched that hour-long special, DeGeneres struggled to retain an audience, and her show ultimately failed. But after Finding Nemo debuted in May of 2003, DeGeneres rapidly regained her prominence in pop culture. The Ellen DeGeneres Show debuted in September of the same year, and it would go on to rack up nearly ten Daytime Emmy Awards. In May 2008, shortly after the California Supreme Court overturned a ban on same-sex marriage, DeGeneres announced her engagement to her longtime girlfriend, actress Portia de Rossi. The couple would marry that August, cementing their status as lesbian couple royalty in the mid-aughts.
Since then, DeGeneres has shown a different face. Her fall from grace within the LGBTQIA+ community has been rapid, with many in the community having majorly out-progressed DeGeneres’s flimsy politics over the course of the past decade and change. In late 2018, a New York Times profile of DeGeneres, appropriately headlined “Ellen DeGeneres is Not As Nice As You Think,” detailed her struggle over whether to quit the daytime show business following the release of her first comedy special in 15 years. In the profile, DeGeneres is presented as a conflicted woman who has tired of being expected to sing and dance and smile and be kind to everyone just because she’s a happy-go-lucky, “relatable” public figure. Despite her qualms, DeGeneres stayed in daytime television—and her career, buried under the weight of recent gaffes, has begun to suffer for it.
Ellen DeGeneres just can’t seem to win in 2020. But this isn’t the 1990s or early 2000s, in which DeGeneres had every right to blame homophobia for any lack of rapport with audiences. Today, she only has her own bad attitude and politics to blame. And if championing Hart over outcry from her own community and palling around with George W. Bush weren’t enough to prove DeGeneres’s politics have degenerated beyond repair, her jests about how she feels like social distancing and isolating at home is comparable to being a person in prison certainly should be. The inhabitants of the U.S. prison system have few personal rights, no money, and some of the most bare-bones “support,” including medical care, provided in this country. They are one of the most vulnerable populations American at the best of times. During the Covid-19 pandemic, incarcerated people are bearing the brunt of the outbreak, with much less protection and fewer resources than literally anyone else.
And Ellen DeGeneres? She’s an influential celebrity whose fortune is halfway toward making her a billionaire, living in a mansion in Los Angeles with access to hand sanitizer and soap, clean water and fresh food, and pretty much any other material good in the world that she could want. Perhaps if DeGeneres thinks people hate her so much for no good reason, she should take a good look in the mirror and realize just how far from Dory’s example she has fallen. DeGeneres owes it to those she’s offended to learn to speak the language of empathy, like Dory does when she attempts to speak “whale.” It’s high time she learned to see things from someone else’s perspective.
I will always love the Finding Nemo movies, and I will always love Dory, who taught me that it’s okay to be myself, and that my trauma could never make me lesser, even if its manifestations frustrate people sometimes. I’ve just had to let go of the voice behind her voice of empathy and reason. It’s been singing a different tune these days, and it’s better left tuned out.
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