Maya Hawke and the Cruel Cowardice of the 'Nepo Baby' Shame Factory

Jealous activists believe that to help the unfortunate, we must first hate and punish the fortunate. That's not just cruel — it's stupid and harmful.

Perhaps you’re a big fan of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, or possibly La Traviata, adapted from an original play by Alexandre Dumas fils. Or maybe you prefer Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, or The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss II. If you’re a chamber music fan, Bach’s Water Music may be more your speed. Whatever the case — you’re guilty. You’re supporting nepo babies.

Big fan of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and The Origin of the Species? The philosophy of Marcus Aurelius? Nepo babies. Maybe fiction is more your thing — like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Oscar Wilde’s beloved stage play The Importance of Being Earnest. Sorry. Still guilty. Nepo babies all.

Love movies? The magic of silent cinema geniuses like Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton? Or maybe the MGM musicals of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney? Or perhaps the great French director Jean Renoir? Yep. You’re enabling nepo babies.

Did you vote in the 2000 election? Unless you threw down for Ralph Nader, you voted for a nepo baby — both Al Gore and George W. Bush were (and are) scions of legendary American political families. The worst kind of nepo baby — nepo-politico babies. Yuck!

Like most toxic colloquialisms, there’s no firm account of how this idiotic denigration originated, but we have a pretty good paper trail of how it entered the recent pop culture bloodstream. As with all stupid things in the world today, we can blame the bottomless cesspool of rotting grey matter known as social media.

It starts back in 2022, when Twitter was still Twitter and fans of the TV show Euphoria began shaming actress Maude Apatow for the unpardonable transgression of being the daughter of writer/director Judd Apatow and actress Leslie Mann. Soon after, “nepo baby” memes went viral on that other spigot of sewage, TikTok, and it was suddenly open season on anyone who wasn’t flagellating themselves for their hereditary sins.

Gen-Z attention spans being what they are, the term more or less wore out its welcome within a few months, though a lingering class of embittered ninnies continues to deploy it contemptuously any time they feel the need to excuse their own poor luck, laziness or lack of talent. As in, “If it weren’t for that stupid nepo baby Chris Pine, I could have been cast as the new Captain Kirk!”

This week, however, it resurfaced with a vengeance, once again exposing not just the most detestable underbelly of present-day “journalism” but a deeply damaging retrograde mindset which must be snuffed out as expeditiously and with as much prejudice as possible, lest it eviscerate the arts, destroy our best artists and crush our ability to appreciate and be moved by art. In an interview with The Times, actress Maya Hawke diplomatically attempted to brush the topic aside by both acknowledging the advantages furnished by being the child of famous actors (Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman) while at the same time refusing to feel guilty about it. Incredibly, this otherwise unremarkable bit of celebrity equivocation was seized on by outlet after outlet as an example of a celebrity “nepo baby” who, finally, was willing to admit what everyone just wanted them all to admit years ago — that they’re a bunch of privileged, undeserving brats who’ve wrongfully stolen the opportunities which otherwise might have gone to the less privileged (and less talented).

The vast majority of such “coverage” (insofar as we can extend that term to the parasitic practice of news story “aggregation”) was standard-issue clickbait with a shelf life of about two hours. But leave it to the Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi to take it to an even uglier place:

Ever since “nepo baby” became a buzzword a couple of years ago, celebrity children have gone deep into defence mode. They either refuse to talk about their head start in life or they insist that having an extremely rich and well-connected parent has somehow been a huge disadvantage.

…

Might Hawke now start a trend? Might nepo babies finally realise honesty is the best policy and start admitting that they got a massive leg-up in life? 

There’s something deeply malign in Mahdawi’s desire to see the children of celebrities engage in ritual self-abasement and the vilification of their own parents, and it should not be glossed over. It’s more than a little reminiscent of the authoritarian tactics employed by Mao’s Red Guard (deliberately recruited from a similarly thoughtless and envious youth movement) in “struggle sessions” where family members were browbeaten into condemning their own children, parents, loved ones and friends. The opening episode of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem furnishes a highly-sanitized recreation of such an event. As it happens, we also have a real life example of where this invariably leads.

In 1993, when Chinese Fifth Generation director Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine surprised the Cannes Film Festival by scoring a tie (ex aequo) for the Palme d’Or alongside early favorite Jane Campion’s The Piano, much of the attention focused on the film’s depiction of China’s brutal Cultural Revolution and the dehumanizing tactics employed to turn people against one another. When asked whether the film was in any way autobiographical, Chen was surprisingly forthright in admitting that it was. I heard him recount his story several times at two different press events during the festival, and always with the same deep sense of shame and regret. You see, Chen Kaige was a nepo baby. The son of an already famous filmmaker, Chen Huai’ai, director of the popular 1959 Communist propaganda film Song of Youth. Ironically, like all loyal artists whose success unnerved Chinese leaders, Chen Huai’ai ran afoul of the authorities — and when young Chen Kaige was only fourteen years of age, his teachers pressured him to denounce his father as a maker of “subversive art” — which he did. Chen Huai’ai was sentenced to hard labor while Chen Kaige was sent to a countryside rubber plantation after which he later joined the Red Guard.

In 2003, while promoting his extraordinary film Together, Chen recounted to Matthew Sweet of The Independent the moment he realized his father had forgiven him:

"Before the Cultural Revolution was over, I asked my father's forgiveness for the horrible things I did to him. I was being shipped off to the countryside to do labour for the army. My father took me to the train station to see me off. It was very awkward. We shook hands and he said something like, 'take care of yourself'. I was very casual, but I had arrogance in my eyes. I got on the train, feeling very depressed. I lit a cigarette as the train moved off. Then I looked out the window, and there was my father, running after the train. And at that moment I realised how much he was in love with me."

Those who have seen the stunning Farewell My Concubine (which will be released on 4k UHD from the Criterion Collection this coming July) may not have realized to what extent the film constitutes the healing of the father/son relationship, for the elder Chen served as his son’s art director on the film. Scarcely eighteen months after seeing his son receive international cinema’s highest honor — Chen Huai’ai died at the age of seventy-four.

It’s hard to imagine what kind of blighted, calloused conscience it takes to tick off the list of the Seven Deadly Sins and skip over “Envy.” Those presently acting out their Red Guard fantasies, like the Guardian’s Mahdawi, seem to believe themselves morally immune to envy’s corrosive effects, or perhaps they deem themselves so unimpeachably righteous that their resentment isn’t actually a form of envy. Except that it is. It traffics in the same vicious lies as all other historical resentments, from medieval pogroms to modern-day genocides — namely the belief that success is a zero sum game, that one individual’s privilege necessitates another individual’s misfortune, and that justice cannot be served but by compelling the privileged to declare their birth a crime and their parents criminals.

Chen Kaige’s own experience tells us precisely how that ignoble experiment ends: with the wholesale, unapologetic slaughter of tens of millions of people.

Smug pinheads like Mahdawi would likely chortle at the suggestion that calling out the “privileged” progeny of Hollywood stars is some kind of slippery slope to mass murder — and they would be wrong. Since 2020, we have all seen the rapidity with which the toxic cocktail of media and social media, if not properly calibrated, can accelerate discontent into dissent into deadly violence. It has happened and continues to happen with alarming regularity. Let us therefore set the record straight:

Neither Maya Hawke, nor any like her, owes anyone any apologies, explanations or justifications. Her success does not preclude anyone else’s. That goes for Jane Fonda, Liza Minnelli, Michael Douglas, Sofia Coppola, Nic Cage, Jason Reitman and every other second, third and fourth generation Hollywood artist without whom our cultural treasury would be infinitely poorer.

Every human being in history is born into a constellation of advantages and disadvantages. Some are hereditary. Most are not. Virtually all are beyond anyone’s control. The randomness of life and nature is immutable, unpredictable and necessarily unfair. The mettle of an artist is not measured in their ability to compete with all other artists at perfect parity, but in their capacity to maximize their talents in the face of adversity.

“Comparisons are odious,” my German-born mother would often remind me, quoting the 15th Century aphorism. And she would know — as a polio-crippled war refugee, she could have found ample opportunity to grouse about life’s unfairness and the advantages of those more fortunate than she. But she didn’t. In fact, among my closest friends, the most consistently grateful and least envious and resentful are the refugees — from Vietnam, Iran and Lebanon. The most grateful faces with which I have ever been greeted were Syrian refugees, teenagers who had already spent years in a Jordanian refugee camp with no end in sight.

We would do well to ask why it is that those with every conceivable reason to be envious and resentful rarely are, and those — like Mahdawi — with every conceivable privilege, instead dedicate their time to shaming and denigrating the rightful achievements of others. Nihilism? Narcissism? Only they can say. One thing, however, is certain: they care nothing for you, for the arts or for humanity. Ignore them and relegate them and their “nepo baby” fixation to the dustbin of history where they belong.