Article: Paramount won't remove content from different eras

[GloomCookie]

Link to the article: https://happymag.tv/paramount-wont-be-cancelled/

I find this interesting because as a proponent of the 1st amendment, I applaud Paramount for this. I also applaud Warner Brothers for something similar with Looney Toons and their older catalog. They understand the content is offensive and was made in a different era, but erasing it could be more harmful than leaving it be. I'm curious what other people feel about this issue.

[Oniya]

I've found that making content hard to get only tends to make people work harder to get it.  For example - and somewhat apropos of Paramount's decision:  When I was in school, there was a big kerfuffle about banning Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn'.  Despite being an avid reader, I hadn't had the slightest inclination to read it until that moment.  Knowing the context of the time would have made Twain's characterizations - and I believe his intent behind those characterizations more clear.

Side note:  You often hear the term 'Good Samaritan' in respect to someone who does good acts without expectation of a reward.  Back in the first century of the Common Era, the idea of a Samaritan being 'good' was counter to the prejudice of the day.  That was the lesson of the parable: that you should judge someone by their actions, not by their origins.  Without that context, it loses half of its meaning.

Adding a prologue to explain the context of the language (or a splash screen in the case of movies) should be sufficient to help people make informed decisions as to whether they want to consume a particular piece of media.  Learning the uncomfortable parts of history helps us to avoid making the same mistakes.

[Blythe]

I do agree with Oniya that a little prologue could help. And yeah, I remember the Warner Brothers stuff with Looney Tunes--and their prologue.

This was a prologue they used

But yeah, while I agree with Paramount here--I don't entirely like how Paramount worded their reasoning. It comes off more like "if you don't like it, don't watch it," which...while valid, isn't really the strongest reason they should do this. (I mean, it's a reason. I just think there's better reasons to keep the content up)

They should also do it because it's a way of keeping themselves accountable and not engaging in erasure. It's important to be able to look back and easily know who produced problematic things, the societal struggles at the time of minorities, and how they as a company have changed and (one would hope) moved away from that. Censorship in cases like this would (to me) look like a company is trying to hide shady stuff they did once upon a time, and I don't like that. So even if the content is bad, I don't want it to be censored/hidden. Much like Oniya, I also think it would create a demand to seek it out--and I don't want that either.

[TheGlyphstone]

In a general sense I'd agree with pretty much everything Blythe said, even if I'd also quibble about how the 1st amendment has nothing to do with any of this.

In the specific example, without knowing what exactly Paramount is choosing to present-uncensored I'm withholding judgement. Absent actual examples, I cynically see a company looking to tap controversy for free advertising rather than any actual artistic motivations.

[gaggedLouise]

These kinds of questions often come up over older content - films, novels, children's books, all kinds of artwork (record covers!). "Why are these people referred to in that way?", "how can they pull jokes about this stuff?" and so on. Both Disney and Tintin have been accused of racism, and it's not just the earliest trial runs (like the infamous Tintin in Congo) that have come under fire, but lots of later comics, cartoon films and movies. Early James Bond movies have a great deal of sexism and some racial stereotypes (the Caribbean people in Live and Let Die, for example) but I don't really mind about that, it was those days.

I do think it's much preferable to explain that "well, people in the old days didn't always have the same sensibilities and touchy spots that we have today" - and also, that laughing over something doesn't mean that a person must have accepted the presuppositions the joke is playing upon.

[Beorning]

We have similar discussions here. Like the controversies related to the apparent evergreen of children's adventure literature, Henryk Sienkiewicz's In Desert And Wilderness - which was written in 19th century and features views on Africans and Arabs that are... quite ignorant and very patronizing, to be honest.

Then, there's the thing with a popular poem for children, Bambo the Little Negro from about 100 years ago. A poem which, IMHO, is actually pretty fair for its time, as the underlying message is that a Black kid from Africa could be a fun person and a good friend. It's just that it was written these 100 years ago by a Polish-Jewish poet (Julian Tuwim, a poetic genius) - so its portrayal of African life is kind of... naive. And then, there's the issue of the word "murzyn" being used to describe Bambo - and that word is considered racist by some people nowadays (although Polish linguists do not have a consensus on that matter)...

[gaggedLouise]

The classic case of this debate, here in Sweden, is the mention across Pippi Longstocking that Pippi's father is a "king of the N***oes" on a distant island in the South Seas (presumably the Pacific). Dad is a captain and yes, he's white (though he doesn't appear in person until the thrid and final book whe Pippi makes the trip to meet him and his tribal people, who are shown kinda like the earthy, happy Polynesians in the paintings of Paul Gauguin (mixed in with a wash of Treasure Island). :)

That one has been endlessly wrangled and discussed over here. Astrid Lindgren (1907-2002) was definitely not a racist or a xenophobic person, she believed in universal humanity, and in the Pippi books (written in the 1940s) the main point of describing Pippi's dad in that way is to underline that his daughter is independent of everyday norms and parochial limitations in the little town where she lives. And the books were written at a time when "N***o" was the standard word for dark-coloured people all across Europe, it didn't carry much of a moral stigma. Even Martin Luther King, twenty years later, was referred to as "the great N* leader" in the news, by people who admired him.

Lindgren was aware of the issue when the views on the word changed, but she preferred the solution of adding notes to the texts, to explain that her use of the word was never meant to be harmful and that it was quite common at the time. In editions produced after her death the word has been edited out and replaced with something else, I'm not sure what word, maybe "sunburnt people", "indigenous" or something like that. Because Pippi is such a present figure through film and tv adaptations, quotations and artwork, the question keeps coming up now and then.

[Chulanowa]

These kinds of questions often come up over older content - films, novels, children's books, all kinds of artwork (record covers!). "Why are these people referred to in that way?", "how can they pull jokes about this stuff?" and so on. Both Disney and Tintin have been accused of racism, and it's not just the earliest trial runs (like the infamous Tintin in Congo) that have come under fire, but lots of later comics, cartoon films and movies. Early James Bond movies have a great deal of sexism and some racial stereotypes (the Caribbean people in Live and Let Die, for example) but I don't really mind about that, it was those days.

I do think it's much preferable to explain that "well, people in the old days didn't always have the same sensibilities and touchy spots that we have today" - and also, that laughing over something doesn't mean that a person must have accepted the presuppositions the joke is playing upon.

The argument of "Aw pish-posh, it was a different time and people had different sensibilities!" has one big stumbling block - it's not true.

The NAACP had been speaking out against racism in Hollywood productions (for example) since the foundation of the film industry. The Negro Actors' Guild of America led a boycott against Disney for the release of "Song of the South" in 1942. Black, Jewish, Latino, feminist, and LGBTQ pushback against the way majoritarian media portrays them has been there all along, with quite a bit of support from individual majoritarian allies.

If it's racist now then it was certainly racist then, too. The actual standard hasn't changed - just whether white audiences are comfortable with seeing it or not.

[stormwyrm]

And the books were written at a time when "N***o" was the standard word for dark-coloured people all across Europe, it didn't carry much of a moral stigma. Even Martin Luther King, twenty years later, was referred to as "the great N* leader" in the news, by people who admired him.

The word "ne**o" (which is also the word for the colour black in Spanish and Portuguese) was not considered offensive in the 1940s when the Pippi Longstocking books were written. It was in fact the preferred term for dark-skinned people and "black" was even thought of as the more offensive term back then. Not only was Martin Luther King described as such by the news and his admirers, he used the word frequently in his speeches, most notably in his "I Have A Dream" speech in 1963, where he used it fifteen times. Not only was it not offensive, it seems it was in fact the standard and preferred term at the time. Will we then also try to change Dr. King's speeches to use today's preferred terminology? That seems a bit excessive.

The word only began to acquire the somewhat offensive connotations it now has relatively recently, possibly brought about by its similarity to the more long-standing offensive term ni***r to which it is cognate. Language can and does shift very rapidly, within much less than a generation at times.

[GloomCookie]

If I recall correctly, there's similar connotations with the term Oriental, though I'm not entirely sure why. I've heard of terms like "From the Orient" and things of that nature, but I'm not 100% if it's considered offensive or if they've just swapped it for a more modern term.

[gaggedLouise]

If I recall correctly, there's similar connotations with the term Oriental, though I'm not entirely sure why. I've heard of terms like "From the Orient" and things of that nature, but I'm not 100% if it's considered offensive or if they've just swapped it for a more modern term.

I think "Asian" is preferred by some people, also the term "Far East" is considered eurocentric these days...

The trouble with easily changing out words like this is that the new terms can become euphemisms for the derogatory ideas they were meant to wipe out, and after a while the new word is seen as stigmatizing, so it's changed out for yet another new term. Crippled became Handicapped became Disabled, which then became Functionally Challenged.