Welcome to the era of ‘close your eyes and don’t pay attention to the stereotypes’ or better yet ‘cancel everything that’s found to be offensive’, boy would that be a long list for some people with severe trigger warnings. Stranger than this is the fact that as it’s mentioned in the National Review, John Ridley, the writer of 12 Years a Slave, called for the cancellation of Gone with the Wind, one of the most classic movies to ever come out of Hollywood. It definitely shows stereotypes and glorifies the antebellum south, but there’s one very unique way to avoid having to see it: don’t watch it. In this era when it’s so easy to simply turn off or block certain movies from your streaming feed a lot of people have still made the choice to try and censor certain content that they don’t like and possibly find offensive, which is problematic to say the least since it invites a very realistic idea that they’re attempting to control what people can see and what they deem as ‘okay’ for the mainstream public. The better way to deal with this is for those that are truly offended to exercise their right to not watch and not pay attention to those movies and other media that they don’t care for, but of course this isn’t the way that such things are dealt with when there are such methods as canceling a movie, a show, or anything and anyone that doesn’t conform to the ideas and beliefs that others want to push.
As the Chicago Tribune mentions, this could have been a great way to teach about racial inequality, racial injustice, and to use the movie to do some good rather than complaining about all the ills it brings to the table. The Tribune actually stated that it was the cowards way out, and in a way that’s easy to agree with. Too many in this country have been seriously divided for years concerning racial issues when it comes to society and justice, but taking this fight to the movies is akin to stepping over a line drawn at the edge of a cliff, it’s bound to be a long and rocky fall if some sort of balance can’t be struck and quickly. After banning a movie one has to wonder just how far those that are all for it are willing to go. Are they going to stop after a while, or are they going to keep picking out details in movies, TV shows, music, and possibly lifestyles, that will be deemed as too problematic to continue? In reality that’s a fight that no one should want since as I’ve said in a few blog, we’re not our ancestors, and their squabbles and fights are not ours. Too many believe that the 400 years of slavery and oppression still belong to them when in truth people see too much negative in a world that isn’t perfect by any means, but is as far removed from the days of slavery as it can be in many ways. Taking this argument out on the movie industry is perhaps one of the most childish and churlish acts of defiance possible, and tends to indicate that those responsible are either running out of things to complain about or are simply reaching a little too far at this point and aren’t taking a closer look at the results that such actions might bring about in the long-term.
The issue with censorship is that it can eventually turn on itself as the idea of what needs to be censored and what is acceptable and what isn’t tend to change and shift with society as peoples’ opinions change along with society and what is deemed as ‘okay’. In other words the cancellation of Gone with the Wind is a start towards the type of censorship that might grow to include other classics that some of those doing the censoring might want to say are okay simply because they have redeeming qualities or because they’re not as severe. It’s almost a guarantee that someone else would call such an individual a sellout for daring to say that one movie is okay for its content while another is not. In this manner censorship is quite self-defeating since at one point or another it will turn on itself and will seek to eradicate just about anything and everything that has to do with free thought and opinion simply because it does not conform to a rigid set of rules that are unbending and will not yield to the shifting and constantly changing face of society. It’s a given that American society is not perfect and as such it’s a given that some movies are less than perfect. But simply banning them because of their content is a dangerous proposition since removing anything that a group of people doesn’t like runs the risk of removing everything at a later date as one tries to maintain the rigidity of such a ridiculous idea.
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