How to rethink classics in an enlightened age
Favourite songs and movies of old can make us feel uneasy today. But does that mean we should simply discard them, asks Ted Anthony.
They are fighting, yes, but the fight crackles with the enticing electricity that only Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn could deliver. He is storming out the door. She is throwing his golf clubs after him. The music is jaunty. He is charmingly irritated.
Then he strides up to her, throws a fake punch, opens his fist and shoves his palm into her face, slamming her onto the ground. She looks up at him with what appears to be mild exasperation. She rubs her injured neck. The rom-com musical score plays on.
So begins 1940’s The Philadelphia Story: with a case of domestic assault played for laughs. Eight decades later, the movie is clearly two things: uneasy fare for a post-MeToo culture – and an enduring classic.
They exist throughout the pop-culture canon, from movies to TV to music and beyond: pieces of work that have withstood time but that contain actions, words and depictions about race, gender and sexual orientation that we now find questionable at best.
Whether it’s blackface minstrel routines from Bing Crosby’s Holiday Inn, Apu’s accent in The Simpsons, the arguably rapey coercion of Baby, It’s Cold Outside and Sixteen Candles – what do we do with this stuff today? Do we simply discard it? Do we give it a free pass as the product of a lessenlightened age? Or is there some way to both acknowledge its value yet still view it with a more critical eye?
Entertainment is a byproduct of its era, of how we view ourselves, of who gets to call who what, and who wields the paintbrushes of representation in society. And if you’re never the one holding the paintbrush, how entertaining can it be?
If we’re showing our kids Hollywood classics, and we put Gone with the Wind in front of them, what do we say when Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) acts like a happy slave who adores her masters? Through what prism should we view such hormone-drenched 1980s fare as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Porky’s and, heaven help us, Zapped, an entire movie about a teenage boy who can pop open girls’ blouses with his mind?
‘‘There’s a history to everything,’’ says Yunte Huang, who has traced the history of the stereotype-Asian Charlie Chan character. ‘‘And we need to know history – including those ugly representations and everything. On the one hand, we need to be critical and continue to protest. On the other hand, it is important for us to get people to talk about this. Let [the movies] come out, but talk about them and analyse them so we know how far we have travelled.’’
Until the last couple of decades, older fare resurfaced only sporadically, when studios or networks put it back out there on air or VHS tape. But the digital era and the rapid rise of streaming means that now anything can be accessed by pretty much anyone on any screen. That in turn means a dizzying library of our cultural past, warts and all, is available at the press of a button.
Tim Cogshell, a film critic in California, thinks a lot about how yesterday’s attitudes should be considered in today’s environment. Part of his answer comes down to intent. ‘‘I gotta know the details. What’s going on here? What’s the intention? Sometimes you have to peel the onion. And then one decides how to think about it, how to feel about it, where to put it in the canon.’’
So while Birth of a Nation, the 1915 film widely regarded as one of the most corrosively racist ever made, is viewed more harshly as the years pass, a misogynist bigot like Archie Bunker from All in the Family presents a different story. Whether a successful portrayal or not, it was intended to highlight a problem and get it discussed.
The solutions suggest a general direction: don’t simply ban or eliminate or delete. Talk about stuff, whether formally, or informally at home. And don’t assume we’re smarter today; entertainment is being made now that will be just as problematic to our great-grandchildren.
Involving more voices in the production of today’s popular culture can make sense of this more than dismissing the issue as overreaction, or scrubbing the leavings of less-enlightened eras.
That doesn’t mean that newly offensive classics can’t be entertaining. Many are old favourites for a reason: they resonated with us over many years, and have things to say that remain relevant – and, at times, fun and escapist.
Let Molly Ringwald – the Sixteen Candles actress who grew increasingly uncomfortable with some of the material that made her a 1980s star – have the last word: ‘‘Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art – change is essential, but so, too, is remembering the past, in all of its transgression and barbarism, so that we may properly gauge how far we have come, and how far we still need to go.’’
Ted Anthony writes about American culture for the Associated Press news agency.