What are you Writing?

[Harp]

Myrer also wrote a very Fedora Lounge book, "The Last Convertible."

A favorite of mine and the television series was also good. Myrer could take hold of a plot outline and throw
an extraordinary amount of fascination after it, always a good read.

 

[AmateisGal]

This is a wonderful discussion, and I'm so glad we're having it.

I, too, have noticed a trend in some novels where you have the feisty female heroine trying to rail against racism, sexism, homophobia, using a decidedly modern attitude. That's not great historical fiction as its, well, not historically accurate!

However, as Mike pointed out, there certainly were a lot of very feisty, brave, and wonderfully strong women throughout history, and many of them were forward thinkers. And Mike, for the love of God, PLEASE WRITE A NOVEL ABOUT YOUR AUNT. She sounds absolutely amazing!

As I write historical novels, I want to make sure I'm staying period correct. Unfortunately, this has led to some pushback from people. I once asked a question on Twitter: "Is it okay to use the term 'Jap' in my novel since it was period correct?" I was flatly told NO by many people, saying it would be too triggering, to maybe allude to using the word, but don't come outright and say it. I don't like that. Yes, we are going through a very necessary and way overdue discussion of racism, bigotry, etc., ,and we really need to confront these issues, BUT, I don't want to "whitewash" the past, if you'll forgive me the term, because to me, that takes away our ability to see history as it really was, warts and all.

Unfortunately, as a writer, I also have to be careful not to make some missteps because the social media mob will come after you in a frenzy. The YA and romance writers community on Twitter can be absolutely vicious. I recognize a lot of this mob mentality comes from decades of repressed generational trauma and pain, but yowza, as a white woman, I hesitate to even think about writing from a perspective of anyone but a white woman.

Whew. I may have gone off the rails a bit on the discussion, but these are the types of issues I enjoy talking about with others.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I once got criticized for pointing out that Japan was guilty of waging a genocidal war against China and Korea -- in a discussion of Dr. Seuss. So I can symphathize. And while I don't write fiction professionally, other than radio sketches, I find that these are not good times to be writing about 1930s-40s popular culture, either, and I think that's because enough time has passed between than and now that the generational-frame-of-reference link has been broken. We who are immersed in the period can't really expect people who never knew anyone who actually lived in it to have any feel feel for the nuances of that era. It's as remote to them, intellectually, emotionally, and theoretically, as the Civil War.

I used to get annoyed by this but then I realized a difficult truth. It happens to every generation. It happened in the past -- there were furious debates over "Gone With The Wind" in the 1930s and the question of how it whitewashed slavery, and when the came time came to make the movie, Mr. Selznick was told that a certain word was not to be used, no matter how "historically accurate" the term was. The movie wasn't being made for people of 1861, it was made for the people of 1939 -- and enough of them were disturbed by That Word that avoiding that controversy made solid moral and commercial sense. It's really no different today. We may be writing about The Era, but we're not writing *for* The Era -- we're writing for 2021, and if we want to get paid for it, there are compromises that have to be made.

Of course, there's always the Milton Caniff approach -- call the Japanese "The Invader."

 

[Fading Fast]

There is a balance that has to be struck. To be sure, even historical novels have to be aware of modern norms - I get that. And the more you want to sell, the more aware you need to be aware, and I say that with no snark as we all need to put food on the table.

I see the problem as being not one of the honest historical novel writer, but of how insanely unforgiving our modern culture is to the past. I have no interest in hiding the ugliness of the past - show it all, tell it all, examine it all and denounce all the bad - but if a modern writer of historical novels is scared of every modern tripwire because of, as @AmateisGal notes, the "mob," then isn't the mob actually creating a de facto "whitewashing" of the past?

If all you read are modern historical novels, then you'd think everyone who uttered a racist comment was the worst person on earth as those characters are almost always evil villains to their core in these book, yet, many of our true heroes who fought racism, sexism, etc., in those times are also on the record of saying some nasty prejudice stuff (FDR, Truman for example).

It's not pretty, but many sincerely good people still swam in the water of their day and said and thought things that are unacceptable to us today. Heck, based on these novels, you'd think the "good" people in the past were perfectly or almost perfectly aligned to 2021 progressive thinking, which is nonsense as well. What value is that to understanding the past?

Unforgiving modern politics has created an environment that has made the modern historical novel an odd "whitewashing" of the past. I see those books - and have all but stopped reading them - as fairytales. They are lovely simple stories that make us feel good about ourselves as we, of course, identify with the "perfect" heroine or hero, but that is not history at all, just weird virtue signaling.

So yes, I get and understand that some bending to modern norms is unavoidable and maybe not a bad thing, but the balance between that and historical accuracy has swung way too far to the former as we have let one narrow view dominate our current culture. A more confident culture would allow for a more honest representation of its past in its historical novels.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Great discussion. Certainly a topic that is in the back of every writers mind as they/she/he stares at the blank screen. As has been discussed in another thread, it must be difficult to come up with a new Indiana Jones screenplay that can both be true to the original concept/feel/era AND avoid the minefields of cancel culture. The reasons why a writer “can’t” write something are many and the list keeps getting longer. Even if you have a clear conscience about writing something today, you might still find yourself in hot water twenty years from now. Nothing new in that, I suppose. Some of my favorite writers of the era are now sternly frowned upon and no longer read by right thinking people.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The irony, of course, is that eighty years ago writing "too" favorably about racial matters was enough in the eyes of many crusaders to get you "cancelled" as a Red. A certain Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling of Chicago tried to single-handedly cancel hundreds of people who didn't fit her particular model of cultural purity, and she had plenty of followers. And some pretty high-profile personalities of the time had already experienced "cancelling" first hand -- comedian Eddie Cantor, for one prominent example, was loudly and forcefully "deplatformed" for a year for giving a speech in which he publicly expressed anti-Fascist views.

This is one reason the current "cancel culture" catchphrase bothers me -- it's treated like it's something new, that it's something unique to the our own time, that it's Those Snowflake Kids Today with their phones and their social media and all. It certainly is not, it's simply a manifestation of a trait that's inherent in Americans, going all the way back to the Puritans. Every few decades it finds its way back to the surface, flares up for a while and then burns itself out until the next time. Sometimes it comes from one perspective, sometimes it comes from the opposite, but it's always built on the same principle -- the innate American tendency to self-righteousness. It comes out in different ways at different times, but it's always there, and the only reason people act surprised about it today is that they've lost sight, if you'll pardon the expression, of history.

Some pretty good works of historical fiction have managed to critique the culture of their own time by taking advantage of the recurrance of that trait -- Mr. Miller, for example, and "The Crucible." Seems like a novel about the modern era is begging to be written in the guise of historical fiction. What if someone came up with a YA novel based in, oh, a high school in 1941, where teachers and students are getting canceled for their political beliefs in the wake of sensationalistic media coverage of a state political inquisition focusing on their institution? Seems like a good way to have a "historical heroine" with contemporary-feeling views and motivations, and yet she'd be facing realistic consequences for expressing those views in her time. (Maybe she even has an older sister who dresses and lives as a man and works in a gas station...) Would anyone today publish it?

 

[Fading Fast]

What I find interesting about cancel culture - and I'll admit, I enjoy the term as it is nicely shinning a light on the trait Lizzie points out - is that many of the same people who remind us about McCarthyism in arrogant and condescending tones (some people have dinner out on that one every day) applaud cancel culture.

Yes, they hate that phrase, but defend their actions as standing up to some "ism" without noticing the irony that they are just trying to stomp out opposing views by attacking the morality of their opponents under the guise of self righteousness as was done in McCarthyism. "You're a racists!" has replaced "You're a Red!"

I would mildly disagree that everyone sees cancel culture as new, as the above view - that it is a version of McCarthyism reborn but on the left this time - is one I read regularly.

 

[LizzieMaine]

But then, to turn it around, you have to admit that some of the same people who have made *that* argument have at other times made statements to the effect that "McCarthy Did Nothing Wrong..." (I'm looking at YOU, Certain Cable News Pundits,) which kinda slip the moral skids out from under their point of view. Which leads into another important point...

Much of what we call "cancel culture" today can be reduced to a matter of using a particular situation to "pwn the (other guys)," and that certainly comes from both sides of the argument. I personally saw a social-media discussion of the recent issue revolving around Mr. Geisel and his legacy reduced, within the space of two hours, to uncontrolled sniping, name-calling, and stupid, shallow memes. Nobody was actually interested in discussing the nuances of how one particular cartoonist born in 1904 might have used the common visual tropes of his time in ways that are understandably offensive when viewed by persons born in 1994. The "He was a product of his time" crowd and the "It was wrong then and it is wrong now" crowd each had plenty to say, but both sides were utterly unwilling to *talk.* The "product of time" would not concede the offensiveness, and the "it was wrong" crowd would not concede the historical context. From both perspectives, All-American Self Righteousness triumphs once again. "Pwning the opposition" is more important than understanding the full breadth of the issue. To coin a phrase, nertz.

To get back to Melissa's situation with the use of "Jap," well, my own hands in that area are not entirely clean. About thirty years ago, I did a radio bit revolving around a parody of the old Godzilla movies, in which I performed in an exaggerated stereotypical Japanese dialect -- "Gojira! Gojira!" -- and at the time nothing was said about it. It was intended, and understood as a parody of a stereotype, not as an actual expression of it. The listeners who heard it, presumably, understood it as such because they knew the actual movies. People today, however, would not have that context and would make assumptions about intent that would call that bit extremely racist and offensive. And, in the context of 2021, they'd be right. It didn't bother me at all in 1991, but I like to think I'm not the same person in a lot of ways that I was then, and it does bother me, a lot, to think of it in 2021.

In the same way, it doesn't bother me, particularly, to see the word "Jap" in a historical novel -- not just because I understand the historical context, but because I've never *had to be* bothered by the word "Jap." But a Japanese-American person my age whose parents experienced internment might view any appearance of that word, in any context, as offensive and disturbing -- and they'd have every right to view it that way, perhaps more right than I have "not to be offended." And that's something any author or publisher has to weigh in making those kinds of editorial decisions.

One more incidental thought on "cancel culture." The very fact that such culture is being widely discussed and debated over every platform there is suggests that the problem may not be as intense as we've been told by the media to think it is. When someone like, oh, J. K. Rowling, still has hundreds of millions of both pounds and fans, still has all of her books in print, still creates new and profitable derivative works based on the property she created, and still has millions of social-media followers, it's hard to feel especially sympathetic for her just because she's been told off on Twitter. I think the best remedy for "cancel culture" is for "cancelers" to realize that it's actually a really good career move for those who will thus be enabled to wave the bloody shirt of "cancellation" all the way to the bank.

 

[Fading Fast]

Other than passing in an airport or bar or something, I haven't watched cable news in many years, so I am not evading when I say I'm not familiar with some of what Lizzie points out above, but have no doubt of her honest reporting of it.

I have read arguments about McCarthyism that point out there were communists spies in the government who did damage to US security, but even those (from distant memory) didn't dismiss McCarthyism as necessary or harmless, but noted that it didn't spring from nothing. I'm in the camp that it was flat our wrong, but as with everything, it has more nuance and angles than the popular thumbnail understanding of it seventy years later. And yes, just as there are hypocrites on the left, they exist on the right too.

Of course, all analogies have differences and many "cancelled" on the right have leveraged it into a career as a victim. But what I notice is that college campuses seem to almost always "cancel" one viewpoint and that is troubling as those are "young minds" that should be exposed to all sides. It also isn't great that some of the major social media platforms censor all in one direction too.

After living my entire life being told how horrible anything that even smacks of McCarthyism is, I find it interesting (and yes, because I'm that small, enjoyable) to see a modern version of it (different but with a strong echo) being pushed by some who have screamed the loudest about McCarthyism. We all love exposing some good old-fashioned hypocrisy.

I also am not a complete buyer of the "you don't know how that triggers someone because you aren't X or didn't experience Y." argument. True enough, but we all have triggers and bad memories from our past that we have to live with and see echoes of in movies, books, TV all the time. Even if mine isn't as bad as yours, that doesn't take my opinion off the playing field.

And my opinion is the entire "avoid triggering" attitude is a problem. The view that we somehow need to only produce things that won't "trigger" somebody is wrong. To be sure, everything has a balance and it's obnoxious to be intentionally provocative depending on the facts and circumstances, but using the word "Jap" in a WWII novel in the context of how it was used then shouldn't be controversial. Being an adult isn't about being in a world free of hurt, but being able to absorb and process those hurts in a mature way especially if those hurts spring from an honest view of the subject matter.

 

[Tiki Tom]

I seem to recall that, in the 1930s, literary “influencers” were having a big debate about whether or not writers should be pursuing the grander goal of changing the world by promulgating enlightened viewpoints through their stories, thus educating the masses. It seems like this is still the hope of a lot of writers today. Must be a lot of egoism involved if, every time a novelist sits at the keyboard, his or her goal is to change the world. Or, as someone noted above, maybe it is just a case of virtue signaling in the hope of cashing in.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've always argued that "all art is propaganda, whether conscious or not," and I've yet to see anything in the world to dissuade me from that. Everything from a comic strip to an opera conveys some message about the world in which it was created and the personal perspective of the person who created it. And isn't that the whole point of "art?"

I think Fading's point about being an adult able to function without being triggered all the time by words is a valid one -- after all, I'm the one who got called the "c-word" to my face right here on the Lounge once, and let's just say it wasn't the first time in my life -- but I think when an author is writing for publication, in a work which will be sold to the public for money, it's understandable that editors are going to want to be very careful about anything that might compromise the salability of the work. That's not particularly pleasant from a creative/artistic point of view, but it's the commercial reality of the way in which art is brought before the public. I don't think Norman Mailer particularly enjoyed using the word "fug," "to fug," "motherfugger," etc. but when he signed his publication contract, that choice was no longer his. And if you want to reach a mass market with your work that's the game you have to play.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Okay, “japs” is a no go. But can we still call Germans “krauts”?

 

[AmateisGal]

I definitely think "cancel culture" goes way too far. We have become a very black and white society, and there is no room for mistakes. Now granted, some of the mistakes people make should be judged, and judged harshly. But the social media mob can be absolutely vicious. People have lost their jobs for making mistakes, but then again, those mistakes are truly terrible, and they're facing the consequences. Still, it all rather smacks of "big brother."

I don't ever want to intentionally offend anyone or make them feel triggered, but, as FF said, I think that's rather inevitable. We all have trauma, or other issues that have brought us pain in the past, and I think avoiding that pain can be problematic.

All I can do as a writer is write the best story I can, and make it as historically accurate as I can. I don't want to throw the word "Jap" in my story simply for shock value, but if I have a marine who served on Peleliu or Iwo Jima, having his character not use that term would be rather ridiculous, right?

 

[MikeKardec]

I, too, have noticed a trend in some novels where you have the feisty female heroine trying to rail against racism, sexism, homophobia, using a decidedly modern attitude. That's not great historical fiction as its, well, not historically accurate!

What I've tried to do is splitting the difference. A feisty 1950s female in The Diamond of Jeru (Audio not Film) bursts with a tirade about the nature of men but it is (hopefully) established that she's just thinking these things for the first time, spurred on by the (not all negative but typical) behavior of the men she is with. It can be fun to work it in in a manner that's accurate. BTW it worked because I was in the midst of the scene when I realized what what was happening emotionally and thus felt free to allow her to say what was obviously true.

"Is it okay to use the term 'Jap' in my novel since it was period correct?"

I REALLY have a lot of questions and thoughts about this one. First off, and this will come into play further on, I'm a mutt but part Jewish, Gypsy, and I have Japanese extended family members, I'm not related to them but they married into the family in the late 1940s . So, lots of groups that got locked up during WWII. That said, none of them personally suffered during that time and I grew up totally insulated from any negative experience any of them might have suffered. Lucky me! Moving on to an Honest Question: Are Nippon and Japan two different westernized versions of the name of what we now call Japan? Does simply shortening the name of a country make it derogatory? We in the US call British people Brits without negativity, yet our existence is a negation of their political culture. Germans used to call us "Amis" and I'm sure in the days when that was common their thoughts about Americans were ambivalent at best. I've had Australians passive aggressively call me "Yank" then apologize so they could have the best of both worlds ... I don't have any problem with being called Yank ... except I'm not from the north east US. Just because someone uses a term in anger should not color it forever, that should only work for terms that have always had completely negative connotations. Personally, I'd use "Jap" in period dialog but I wouldn't have a Third Person narrator use it.

I have a good friend who's exact job with remain nameless but he's probably brought as much infrastructure (clean water, roads, etc) to people of the Third World as anyone alive. He's lived and sweated and been injured and shot at doing this for 50 years, right alongside people of many races. He refers to everyone by their race in a manner that makes people's hair stand on end today but ... damn, he's done more for those people and he's lived closer to them than any of his detractors. He has a way of identifying people (possibly because he's worked with so many different types of people) that people might call "racist." But I really don't think that's accurate.

An aside: I spend quite a bit of time in the 1980s in the west indies. On many islands is is very common for people to identify one another by their skin TONE. Even back then this freaked me out but they did it BECAUSE they lived in a place where there had been a lot of racial intermixing ... oddly they did it because it mattered less to them than it did to me.

The YA and romance writers community on Twitter can be absolutely vicious. I recognize a lot of this mob mentality comes from decades of repressed generational trauma and pain, but yowza, as a white woman, I hesitate to even think about writing from a perspective of anyone but a white woman.

At at guess many of the mob members are White Women.

I find that these are not good times to be writing about 1930s-40s popular culture, either, and I think that's because enough time has passed between than and now that the generational-frame-of-reference link has been broken.

I think this is a very astute comment. I also think it is why we must keep trying to do it. We must insist that context outlive a single generation.

if a modern writer of historical novels is scared of every modern tripwire because of, as @AmateisGal notes, the "mob," then isn't the mob actually creating a de facto "whitewashing" of the past?

True and we shouldn't allow it to happen. The sort of subject matter we are discussing needs to be handled with respect, not neglect. That doesn't mean shying away from dealing with it humorously as well as critically but we need to take what we do seriously. A question: How do people feel about the racial language used by Quentin Tarantino and James Ellroy? I have a love hate relationship with both writers. When they are good they are very good and when they are bad they are exploitative and obnoxious ... but neither has any fear and neither seems to have come in for much criticism recently. Unless I've missed something.

many of our true heroes who fought racism, sexism, etc., in those times are also on the record of saying some nasty prejudice stuff

I've found that a lot of true to life "heroes", those who do amazingly brave things, are not very "good" people. The sort of guy who walks into a wall of live steam to pull another man to safety in an industrial accident is often the sort of guy who's got a serious 'tude. There was a beautiful portrayal of this in a novel about the US involvement in Mogadishu called Sharkman Six. A young Lieutenant is frightened by his bullying, braggadocios, loudmouthed Sargent. The Sgt is the "villain" of the piece in many ways. But, if I remember correctly, the man lives for his reputation as a "big man" and is a fantastically brave, amazingly ferocious warrior when it comes to protecting his people. He the absolute ba***rd that you want to have your back because he will bring is absolute ba***rd-ness to bear on your enemies.

A more confident culture would allow for a more honest representation of its past in its historical novels.

Amen. Let's outgrow this insanity ASAP.

Even if you have a clear conscience about writing something today, you might still find yourself in hot water twenty years from now. Nothing new in that, I suppose.

All you can do is be honest.

many of the same people who remind us about McCarthyism in arrogant and condescending tones (some people have dinner out on that one every day) applaud cancel culture.

In essence you are right but what we all "McCarthyism" was SO complicated and McCarty was just the tip of the iceberg. It is interesting that now the blacklisters seem to be "on the other side" but it's not that simple. I think there are two sides and I don't care what you call them. The one that tries to control free speech with "shut up" and force as opposed to those who say, "here's why you are wrong, let's debate," the ones who want to ban books and the like as opposed to putting them in context and discussing them ... I think those people are always wrong. I grew up in the 1960s and if someone says "shut up" they are The Man, and you have to Stick it to The Man.

both sides were utterly unwilling to *talk.*

As Charles Schultz used to write: "Sigh."

I think the best remedy for "cancel culture" is for "cancelers" to realize that it's actually a really good career move for those who will thus be enabled to wave the bloody shirt of "cancellation" all the way to the bank.

I wish this was always true but it only works if you have some cultural momentum. There are plenty of voices that are being stifled just because they have not yet gained the strength or the political clout to resist. Typically, it's not the 'masses' that shout you down directly. They go after your platform or publisher or support system punishing the weak links in the chain them until you are put down.

That said, JK Rowling fights on and has the wherewithal to do it. I doubt, however, that doing so is particularly profitable or artistically stimulating. I suspect that the Theodore Geisel estate just cut their losses and offered to amputate the limb before anyone else could get to it. I'm guessing they will be back with new versions of those books when this blows over. Both are multi million dollar powerhouses. It's the small and mid level people I worry about the most. They have the most to lose and the least ability to weather the storm.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think this is a very astute comment. I also think it is why we must keep trying to do it. We must insist that context outlive a single generation.

I think this leads to a situation where you have to be very careful in choosing your audience. Some things that would appropriate in writing for an academic audience will not be appropriate, or even salable, in writing for a general, commercial audience -- and trying to force the issue in the latter case will not only not get your point across, it'll actually damage the case you might be trying to make. If you're going to discuss, say, the foundational role of "blackface" in the development of American popular music and American comedy -- and if you're going to discuss those subjects at all, you are going to have to understand that role -- you aren't going to be able to do it in a book or an article targeting a mass audience. Anything that you do publish will be thru a niche house or a journal of some kind, not thru any kind of a mass outlet. And, frankly, I don't have a problem with that -- it keeps the contextual information available to those who will want access to it in their own research, whch is the really important thing.

And I think you can translate this into historical fiction as well -- if you look back on the really successful hist-fic books of the 1930s, for example, you'll find that something like "Anthony Adverse" doesn't tell a meticulous, historically accurate story about Europe c. 1800, but a 1930s-reader's idea of what that world was like. Same with "Gone With The Wind," which is a picture of what a 1930s romance buff imagined the Old South to have been like. In both cases, the audiences sold the story they wanted to tell by tailoring it to the world they lived in, not the world they were writing about. Scarlett O'Hara is in spirit and in personality far more a woman of the 1930s than she ever was a woman of the 1860s.

I've noticed on other forums recently quite a few people screaming PEEE CEE PEEE CEE PEEE CEE because Turner Classic Movies has begun airing certain films with contextual disclaimers delivered by the on-camera hosts. I don't see anything inappropriate about this at all, because the primary audience they're trying to reach in an effort to keep these films alive is people who weren't alive when these films were being regularly shown on local TV, let alone alive when they were actually current product. As I said before, the period is a completely alien culture to them -- and if they turn TCM on at random to see, say, Al Jolson singing in blackface alongside Cab Calloway in his own face, the images they see will be utterly incomprehensible to them. The host disclaimers/analyses are absolutely essential if there's to be any chance at all of the viewer not immediately rejecting the whole thing out of hand.

People of our generation have absolutely got to come to grips with a simple fact: the world has changed, and it's not going back to the way it was, ever, period. That's not some unusual thing, it happens to every generation, and now it's our turn. Eventually we're going to be gone and all the things we think, or ever thought were important are going to be as forgotten as Mesopotamia. If we want to see the things we know and the things we want to preserve for the future even remotely understood or preserved, we are going to have to make peace with the fact that we don't get to make the rules on how we're going to do that anymore. It's possible to adapt and preserve that context, but it's going to have to be done in a way that won't cause the people we're trying to reach to turn away in disgust.

 

[Fading Fast]

...I've noticed on other forums recently quite a few people screaming PEEE CEE PEEE CEE PEEE CEE because Turner Classic Movies has begun airing certain films with contextual disclaimers delivered by the on-camera hosts. I don't see anything inappropriate about this at all, because the primary audience they're trying to reach in an effort to keep these films alive is people who weren't alive when these films were being regularly shown on local TV, let alone alive when they were actually current product. As I said before, the period is a completely alien culture to them -- and if they turn TCM on at random to see, say, Al Jolson singing in blackface alongside Cab Calloway in his own face, the images they see will be utterly incomprehensible to them. The host disclaimers/analyses are absolutely essential if there's to be any chance at all of the viewer not immediately rejecting the whole thing out of hand.....

I agree completely. From what I've seen so far, TCM has done an excellent job of explaining the historical context of these films. Growing up in the '70s, even then, some of this stuff was ugly and uncomfortable to see. As I got older, I began to understand it as I did the homework to understand it or I learned indirectly about it from history courses, etc. And even "understanding it" doesn't make it easy to see, but life isn't always about easy.

As Lizzie notes, it is important to keep explaining it and putting it in context so that the films don't just get dismissed - or worse - for a generation, now, nearly a hundred years removed from when some of these movies were made. And let's not kid ourselves, TCM has to do this as it has one product, old movies, and if they get "cancelled," TCM is out of business.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Exactly. Sometimes I see these intros and they come across to me as pedantic and simplistic -- but then I have to remind myself *they aren't talking to ME. They're talking to people born twenty or thirty or forty years AFTER me.* You've got to give kids milk before they're ready for meat.

 

[MikeKardec]

Exactly. Sometimes I see these intros and they come across to me as pedantic and simplistic -- but then I have to remind myself *they aren't talking to ME. They're talking to people born twenty or thirty or forty years AFTER me.* You've got to give kids milk before they're ready for meat.

More likely they have been given the mandate to "explain" the work by their corporate superiors and they are not quite up to the job ... but it's the job they have nonetheless.

I do this sort of thing all the time now, adding "the story behind the story" to older novels. However, I never apologize for them, and I try to never critique them. These aren't "disclaimers" but my great fear is that is what this process is going to become. Adding a value judgement, at least for certain things, is a step toward removal of the title from the catalog. It becomes a registry of ban-able books and could cover far to wide a swath of material. When your company gives a team the job of seeking out and adding disclaimers (which is what's likely these days because no one wants to get caught unawares with questionable product), they will do it everywhere they can. It's their job. Doing it is job security.

 

[MikeKardec]

A note on "cancel culture." My take is that this grew out of the academic world, specifically the science community. Starting in the 1980s and possibly in reaction to a lot of wacky far out science that was done in the 1970s (and a lot of dangerous far out science that was done in the 1960s), the trend of "calling out" what were supposed to have been "bad ideas" seems to have arisen. If you were working on the fringe you were going to get isolated and cut off. University scientists with accepted theories tasked their students with discrediting anyone who might upset those theories, building a wall of argument around consensus and marginalizing anything experimental that was still being worked out. There was a joke that Physics advanced one death at a time as the old guard died off and once they, and their reputations and their departments full of defensive researchers, were gone the next idea could finally thrive.

Clearly, some of the more radical ideas needed to die but having others killed in the crib was a great disservice to us all. And some of the accepted dogma was also stuff like String Theory which has become the black hole that physics has disappeared into, a giant fiercely defended energy suck of great elegance but little real use. Just outside the territory of legitimate testing and argumentation the tactic of "discredit" grew up. Find one flaw, often not on the exact subject, but on something tangential and they could be discredited and no one needed to think about them any longer. A lot of jealousy and other personal issues got worked out this way.

Then it spread into the softer sciences, anthropology, sociology and the like, and then into science-like disciplines like Women's Studies ... that's where I first encountered it, a close friend of mine from Junior High was a bit of a pioneer in that area. Getting published, and then being cited, is the economy of all these fields. Peer reviewed journals had to approve of your thought, yet there was no hard science to appeal to if you were rejected. Discredit seemed to become the ultimate weapon in the tempest in a teapot that was academic life. It simmered there for 20-30 years. It was used on EVERYTHING and sometimes in great ignorance. I can remember a discussion where someone mentioned the American constitution. A colleague piped up stating, "Thomas Jefferson held slaves." This meant that no one was required to think about the Constitution ... not realizing that Jefferson was actually somewhat opposed to the Constitution over the looser Articles of Confederation and thus the comment, while initially being sort of off the subject, was REALLY off the subject. Anyway, subject matter discredited, minds cleared, ready to move on to other things. At other times the same group would comment, "provocative" in sort of a weird way that suggested an idea was at the limits of acceptable discourse.

What I was seeing was a glimpse into the future. I wish I'd known it, I would have loved to have asked everyone who was there about where they thought this was all going to lead.

Moderators: If anyone objects to this post as too political please delete it. I don't want to cause trouble and I'm comfortable with the irony of deleting a post about cancel culture! I'm merely trying to suggest that I was seeing what we call cancel culture in the 1980s and '90s, and this was how I experienced it. The import of that experience can certainly be argued but I had the creepy feeling at the time that it was all too convenient and I have recognized what I thought was this same pattern in the years since, especially right now.

 

[AmateisGal]

More likely they have been given the mandate to "explain" the work by their corporate superiors and they are not quite up to the job ... but it's the job they have nonetheless.

Actually, I don't think that's the case at all. Alicia Malone, one of the hosts of TCM, is a film historian in her own right, and she knows her stuff. I don't think the 'corporate overlords' are forcing them to do any of this. You can tell by the conversation (I watched the one they did for The Searchers) that they're quite knowledgeable about this, and feel it is an absolutely critical discussion to have. I really appreciate these "reframing" features that they're doing, and I've argued with people on Twitter who are growling about it. No one is censoring these films; TCM is simply explaining *why* they are problematic today.

For example, I'm watching Jezebel right now on TCM and oh my, if you wanted to learn about slavery with this film, you'd think the slaves were living in a utopia of singing songs and wearing wonderful, fancy clothes and being able to talk equally with their masters. (I think Bette Davis did Jezebel as a response to not getting the role of Scarlett O'Hara, but I could be wrong.)

Lizzie is right. The world isn't going back to the way it was, and that is a good thing. We as a country are pretty far behind in reconciling with our past. Other countries, like Canada and Australia, are doing truth and reconciliation commissions about their indigenous populations and how the white man came in and took everything. Meanwhile, in the U.S., we can't even agree that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. We've got a long ways to go.