Erasing of history makes fools of us all
WHEN I was approximately eight years old I saw something which was to have a deep and profound impact on me for the rest of my childhood. It was a ‘video nasty’, The Evil Dead, a film so horrific, so unspeakably terrifying, it was deemed unfit for public consumption.
Banned outright in the UK and Ireland it was declared ‘the number one video nasty’ by conservative activist Mary Whitehouse; copies of it were burnt by police during raids of video stores here and across the water.
But that didn’t stop my older cousins from procuring a copy. Nor did it stop me from sitting down to watch it with them.
And, as you do, I toughed it out till the end, laughing when they laughed, gasping when they did, aping their reactions until the bitter end.
‘Did you like it, Simon?’ they asked. ‘Oh, it was brilliant,’ I replied as my tender young soul screamed for redemption.
Needless to say I was completely and utterly traumatised; nightmares, night terrors, months of sleeping with the hall light on, of checking under the bed for monsters, of lying there waiting for my inevitable death.
Even viewed today, as an adult, The Evil Dead is an unsettling film. But that was the 80s for you, kids were left to their own devices, discovered the world through fair means or foul.
Thankfully today’s children are monitored a little more closely, and the likelihood of being exposed to Sam Raimi’s notorious flick before their time is remote.
There was 72 films on the officially banned list back then, their relatively small number making them even more notorious. Today that number is inestimable, the latest editions the formidable Gone with the Wind, the nerve-shredding Fawlty Towers and the spine-chillingly, gruesome The Mighty Boosh.
Each have fallen foul of broadcasters keen to place themselves on the right side of history, their depiction of race deemed as unsavoury as Raimi’s portrayal of death, murder and gore.
Announcing its decision to remove the 1939 Oscar winner from its platform, HBO said, ‘Gone With The Wind is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society.’
In a normal society, one not governed by self-righteous, hysterical populists, that statement would have ended after the first ten words, it would have read ‘Gone With The Wind is a product of its time,’ and the matter would have ended there.
Because that’s what it is. It’s a piece of historical fiction, a snapshot of a bygone era, a time when black people, women, homosexuals, essentially anyone who wasn’t a white male, were deemed inferior.
That was how things were then. And if that makes you uncomfortable well then wait until you hear about this guy called Adolf Hitler.
What started as a moral and just protest against police brutality in the United States has morphed into another attempt to erase the past, to ‘cleanse’ humanity of its sins. Statues have come down, history has been rewritten, and everywhere you look celebrities are apologising profusely. There’s even been talk of our own sacred cow, our beloved Father Ted, being removed from the screens. Yeah, good luck with that.
Some of the now cancelled shows portrayed characters in ‘blackface’, which, given the connotations, makes sense - even if the writers weren’t setting out to exploit people of colour.
But are we really going to trawl through the archives and put all films, books and songs containing the N word into Room 101? Are we really so dim-witted that we can’t separate reality from fiction and understand the person speaking those words is an actor, a character, a resident of a fictional universe?
The overriding theme of the Black Lives Matter movement has been the need for education, to acquire knowledge so that we may look at society anew. The same goes for these pieces of art. Rather than watch Fawlty Towers and be instantly triggered, why not take a step back, take a curious view, ask how and why this was allowed to happen in 1970s Britain. You never know, you might actually learn something.