Ever since I was young I wanted to enter the film industry. I didn’t know it at the time but the creative fervor of the 90s independent film boom spawned such classics as Pulp Fiction, Dazed and Confused, and Clerks had breathing room to live alongside studio masterpieces such as Jurassic Park, Titanic, and the Matrix. This isn’t even to mention the Disney Animation resurgence with films such as the Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Beauty and the beast, and Aladdin. These were all films that you could be proud were part of your childhood each one was a work of art that had such creative power! These were Films that anyone of any age could go back and watch again and again, the creative spark behind each frame bringing a smile or tear to anyone of any age, in a manner of speaking they transcended generations. But more importantly, and central to our cultural consciousness of how art evolves, you were confident that these totems to a time and place would remain the same (george lucas notwithstanding), being eternal time capsules to the myriad creative voices of a time and place; which have become foreign today.
In recent years I have lost that foundational faith.
Authorial internet is not just under attack, it is being erased and retconned. Whether it is children’s books by Roald Dahl being rewritten to not offend the youth of today or Huckleberry Finn removing it’s most offensive language to be suitable to today’s standards, we are not just reinterpreting authors words, which is and always has been fair game. We are changing the author’s words. That is something I find not only deplorable but terrifying for the future of art. Censorship is one thing. It has always existed. But to go back and change a dead author’s actual verbiage, the actual words and ideas communicated through them in essence their vision. degrades and mutates a healthy product. It’s giving chemo to a patient without cancer or insulin to a person who isn’t diabetic. The job of education, or Art, is to challenge, to push boundaries, and more prosaically to show how the world existed in the time and place of when it was written. We read Mark Twain not only for his prose and wit, but for the world he creates, a world we never got to experience. We get to experience the horrors of racism through Twain’s wit. We experience the controversial and twisted mind of Roald Dahl through his words and stories. And it is the job of teachers and readers and elders and precocious readers to discern all this for themselves. Not for political idealists who want to push their ideology on us.
Therefore, in our current era where cultural forces from across the extremes of political and ideological spectrums want to change and alter past creations, we must be vigilant in our watch. When a story comes from a time and place, it should reflect the author’s vision of that specific vision. To change it at will might seem harmless. Some say does it matter that Ariel from the Little Mermaid is black? Does it matter that Cleopatra or Anne Boelyn are being played by black actors? It is easy to say this doesn’t matter, I believe the reasoning they use is that these were fictional characters. But in an age where identity matters, and the mindset that says “to understand a culture you must be part of the culture” reigns supreme, I detect a sinister double standard. The Little Mermaid comes from a Danish folk tale. I happen to be partly Danish. My culture is Scandinavian. In an era where I can’t even wear my own culture’s insignias on a t shirt without being called racist, simply because some idiots have appropriated Scandinavian culture for white supremecist imagery, it is more important than ever that culture be respected and not changed to fit current political trends. The Little Mermaid is a Danish Folktale. It should reflect the world in which it was written. Cleopatra was a descendent of the Greek nobility which ruled over egypt. Her being white is central to her existence as coming to grips with being part of the ruling family that ruled over their colonial possession. That’s not even addressing the fact that “white” as a concept did not exist back then. Making Anne Boelyn black completely erases her English ancestry which was central to her identity. A movie about Montezuma would not cast a white man to play the last of the Aztec leaders, nor would a movie about MLK Jr cast a white actor to play a black historical figure. And for good reason. Their identities were l central to their being.
The political headwinds that are forcing creators to change past works, change the identities of the characters from past works, and the inevitable self censorship that comes with creating new pieces of art has made me despondent over the future of creativity. I’m not saying you can’t change expectations. Hermoine was recently cast as black in the Broadway Harry Potter musical. But since J.K. Rowling never specified her race and was writing in the 1990s, a time when London was a multicultural melting pot, there is freedom to interpret her character. That’s fine. But to change the past won’t fix the present. Our current issues won’t be fixed by making cleopatra or Anne boleyn or peter pan black or asian or mestizo. They only can be fixed if we can read past works and adapt them the way they were made and have a conversation about them as they are. As they were meant to be.
SimonB writes 