Roald Dahl’s books — James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — were recently rewritten to excise terms like “fat” and “ugly” (“enormous” and “brute” are apparently more palatable). Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels got the same treatment for racism, as did Agatha Christie’s works. Disney has edited everything from Aladdin to Toy Story 2 to remove offensive content, with as much care as it devotes to wiping out LGBTQ stories from films in production and finished films streamed in the Middle East. Movies and shows for adults — The Office, The French Connection — have been altered. And while no one is picking up the paintbrush just yet, the names of old art pieces in museums are being revised as well.
These practices are not fully new, of course. Movies shown on television have long been edited for language, sexual content, length, and so on. The radio has traditionally muted vulgar lyrics. It wasn’t exactly the Left pushing for such things. (In general, conservatives and the religious have a long history, and present, of cancellations and censorship, from book bans to moral panics over films and music, but this piece aims to focus specifically on changes to previously published works.) But people of all stripes and times have participated. In 1988, The Story of Dr. Dolittle (1920) was scrubbed of racist elements long after the author’s death. Residents of past centuries did pick up tools and modify paintings and sculptures featuring nudity — even a Michelangelo or two. And so on. Yet the modern age has brought a new, perhaps unprecedented intensity to the alteration of past works of art. Driven by the Left, it is the responsibility of the leftist to consider its ramifications.
Publishers, studios, and streaming services want to offer people classic, beloved works, but recognize their racist, homophobic, sexist, nonconsensual elements are wrong. There is no doubt that the decision to act can stem from a sincere desire to address harm, but some institutions lack any real principle or spine, modifying art and then reversing course immediately after the inevitable backlash, racing in this direction to avoid one mob and then in the opposite direction to avoid another, whatever can be done to protect image and profits. Capitalism at work.
As for individuals, while the independent thinker will always find institutional overreactions, things that really weren’t that bad, she will likewise be unable to deny the horrific nature of some scenes and terminology in older media. That something should be done to curtail the impact of bigoted ideas and portrayals is right and reasonable.
Alteration is not the only option available, of course. New introductions, content warnings, serious discussions before or after a film, and so on have been and can be utilized, offering context and critique rather than cuts. Then there’s the nuclear option, which is a removal but one that preserves the work: no longer publishing texts (auf Wiedersehen, Dr. Seuss), removing a creation from your streaming platform, etc.
These may be comparatively beneficial — even the last one — because they avoid certain problems. Despite the noble motives behind changing past art, there is something a bit bothersome about it: doesn’t this make past artists out to be better people than they were? If Roald Dahl or Hugh Lofting employed harmful language or stereotypes, why would they deserve a more polished, progressive image for today’s readers and those of the long future? The awful caricatures of Native Americans, unabashedly called “injuns,” in Peter Pan (1953) should quite frankly be a mark upon Disney forever. What interest have I in making Walt Disney of all people, or his studio, or the film’s many directors and writers look better? This isn’t precisely the same as whitewashing. In history, or the present, whitewashing is intended to glorify individuals or events by ignoring crimes and horrors. The Founding Fathers need to be heroes, so their enslavement of human beings and vile racism can be downplayed and swept under the rug. Here the motive is entirely different: awfulness will be surgically removed so that bigoted ideas and behavior are better contained, an attempt to avoid infection of children and adults alike while still letting them enjoy beloved works. Nevertheless, the effect is rather similar. Sanitization may have a clear benefit, but it inherently creates ahistorical representations of past artists. They are positioned as fundamentally different, more moral people. This does not seemed deserved, and it is troubling to voluntarily create any false view of history, whether of its cultural creations, its artists, or anything else. This may not be a big deal for those of us who know edits have been made — but children and future generations may not have such a firm understanding, resulting, to some degree, in a rosier view of authors, filmmakers, and studios of the 1950s and other decades.
One must further wrestle with the larger question. Is it right to change someone’s art without his consent? What if she wouldn’t want her piece altered? This provokes a couple answers. If it’s a work judged to be benign, everyone would be outraged at the suggestion of tinkering — don’t change Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, leave alone the works of Beverly Cleary, A.A. Milne, and Beatrix Potter! They may not approve and are not around to object; let their creations exist as they intended. (Studios and publishers have the legal right to tamper, of course, but that does not mean they should.) It’s easy to say that problematic art and artists have forfeited that right to preservation and respect of intention. “It’s racist, he’s racist, who gives a shit?” But as a writer, I’m horrified at the thought of someone changing my books or articles when I’m gone, even to make them better, less offensive, more moral. Beyond constructing a false view of who I was, it would be without my consent and against my strong-felt wishes and beliefs (verbalized here, with any luck forever). I imagine that most artists, whenever they lived, did not want other people meddling with their creations. There is too much obsession, care, and satisfaction involved in the creative process. So, if this is a treatment and right I want for myself — respect for my consent and control over my own material offspring — I have to extend it to others. No matter how innocent or flawed their pieces. Only those who would sincerely have no issue with a song, book, article, painting, film, sketch, photograph, or other work they made being changed a century from now in an attempt to purify it can support editing Dahl or Disney (one cannot say “that would never happen” or “there’d be nothing offensive to cut” because it is likely that few of the impacted creators of today could have imagined any of this happening to their work either). The rest of us must begrudgingly respect the consent of artists (though not the content of their art) or else fall into hypocrisy.
It seems worth adding that not only do our views on preservation and the artist’s consent change when speaking of benign art versus offensive art, a change that is questionable, it also appears that the form of art matters. The idea of brushing over an offensive painting in a museum is far less comfortable, and still nearly unthinkable, compared to tinkering with entertainment and books. How about altering old photographs? Or imagine Spotify offering new versions of old, beloved songs and simply wiping out the originals. Surely one is a bit slower to defend such things. But why? Why would the form matter? Similar feelings have lurked in the back of my mind as this writing has progressed. Perhaps understandably, I find the alterations of books more troubling than films and shows. I also find tampering with films and shows for impressionable children less irksome than doing the same to entertainment for adults. Yet those distinctions and biases don’t seem to matter much. Art is art, no?
The other strategies noted above avoid all of these challenges completely. Artists may not deserve (in more than one sense) to have their work modified by others, but people have the right to discuss, condemn, or ignore art. All that’s expected. Content labels, new introductions, serious discussions, and cancellations are fair game. Of course, people will disagree over which works should be pulled from platforms or publication and which should be offered with commentary and criticism. I have little hope of solving that. It is the intention here to simply highlight these possibilities as more acceptable choices, and encourage some skepticism of changing past art of any form.
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