One of the left’s greatest cultural triumphs was over the various forms of conservative control over the arts. It used to be: (1) you couldn’t make any sort of art with sexual content; (2) you couldn’t make any sort of art that mocked Christianity; (3) you couldn’t make any sort of art that criticized America; (4) you couldn’t make any sort of art that depicted graphic violence; and (5) art that contained “Communist” themes, or employed suspected Communists or their friends, couldn’t find a distributor.
Great art, of course, was still made under those strictures- “Citizen Kane” was a fully Hays Code-compliant film. And some artists courageously took on the censors, such as Henry Miller and his publishers. But a lot of great art did not get made, because it couldn’t find a publisher, distributor, or gallery, or because it couldn’t get funded. And a lot of otherwise great art had to be bastardized to be produced- imagine Nick and Nora Charles, who had one of the strongest and most vibrant marriages ever depicted in the movies, having to sleep in separate beds! But they did, in The Thin Man. Mick Jagger famously had to change Let’s Spend the Night Together and sing “let’s spend some time together”. Etc. We all have heard the litany.
The opening up of culture has been an enormous boon for American society. In the midst of the 1960’s counterculture, playhouses could stage Hair, a great of-the-moment musical, which could have never been staged under the old rules because it contained nudity (and probably because it was too sympathetic to hippies who were thought to be drug users as well). The 1970’s was a golden age for gritty cinema- films like The Godfather Part II and Last Tango in Paris were the beneficiaries of the loosened standards, as were their audiences. The Joy of Sex was published to a mainstream audience, performance artists appeared on stage in the nude, and nude photography appeared in coffee table books as well as soft-core pornography.
And in 1974, Mel Brooks made Blazing Saddles. A movie that everyone agrees could never be made now.
For those who have never seen it, Blazing Saddles is, on its top level, a satire of Westerns, which was still a vibrant genre into the 1970’s. (True Grit, starring John Wayne, came out just five years before Blazing Saddles, and was a huge hit, for instance.) Maybe for that reason alone you could say that nobody could remake it, because Westerns have lost most of their popularity and people wouldn’t get jokes such as Harvey Korman pointing out how stupid and cliched it is to order horse cavalry to “head them off at the pass”. (That was a classic, overused trope in Westerns.)
But that’s not the real reason why people would say you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles now. That real reason is because Blazing Saddles is also a biting- and quite explicit- satire of America’s mistreatment of Blacks. The movie’s politics are crystal clear- you are supposed to laugh at the racists. The racists in the movie are constantly doing harm to themselves due to their irrational prejudices, and the people who ultimately prevail are the characters who either come in without any racial prejudices (the Black Sheriff Bart, and his white sidekick the Waco Kid) or who learn from their experiences and discard them (the white townsfolk of Rock Ridge).
But to make you laugh at the racists, Brooks had to throw a lot of racism up on the screen, in explicit detail. And he had to do it comically. To watch Blazing Saddles is to literally find yourself laughing at white characters using the n-word maliciously. And man do they use it- 17 times, according to one count. Plus the f-word anti-gay slur. And KKK robes. And a Black character saying, in a stereotypical dialect, “where the white women at?”. And a reference to the size of a Black character’s penis. Yep. It’s all in there. And no, there’s no way you could do that now.
Now, obviously, there’s only one Blazing Saddles, and if it was just a matter of “you can’t make a certain sort of movie that features white characters throwing around the n-word all the time”, I wouldn’t complain. Defending white people’s right to say the n-word is not a hill anyone should die on.
But it isn’t just that. There’s all sorts of movies that couldn’t be made now. Heck, take the other two great examples of 1970’s cinema I mentioned. The Godfather series probably still could be made, but there might be protests, given that they depict Italian-Americans in a very negative light and that community as full of crime and mafia violence and corruption. And certain characters, such as Hyman Roth, the Jewish crime lord in the second Godfather movie, might have to be written out entirely.
As for Last Tango in Paris, there is a brutal rape scene in the movie, and we are supposed to generally sympathize with the rapist. Indeed, the entire relationship that is portrayed in the movie is highly exploitative, and the man does most of the talking and treats his girlfriend as an object (as does the film). I would imagine that film wouldn’t be greenlit either.
There’s all sorts of indicators here. Hollywood is already censoring films to appease China. A great film could be made about China’s treatment of the Uyghurs, or the success of Taiwan in becoming a democracy, or the Hong Kong protest movement. Don’t expect those films to ever be made in Hollywood.
After years of bending too far in the other direction, with Muslims being go-to villains in Hollywood movies, now Hollywood is afraid to depict Muslims as villains. There obviously should be a middle ground here- gratuitous depictions of Muslims and Arabs as bad guys should be avoided, but there are definitely many stories (especially about international terrorism in the past 40 years) where it might make sense for a Muslim terrorist to be the villain. The real problem in Hollywood wasn’t that Muslims were often villains, but that they were rarely heroes or just ordinary characters- cinema has done nothing to provide the American public with any sort of nuanced understanding of Islam, and showing that Muslim Americans are just like any other Americans.
There’s one other trend that is almost as dangerous as the China issue and more dangerous than not having any Muslim villains. And this has to do with “representation”. We are getting to the point where a significant number of activists are pressuring publishers and producers not to put anything out where a person of one race or sexual orientation or identity depicts someone of another race/orientation/identity. For instance, Boys Don’t Cry, a landmark film that depicts a trans boy named Brandon Teena and his life story (including the time he spent growing up and identifying as her assigned sex at birth, a young girl named Tina Brandon), and which won Oscars and was acclaimed, is now the subject of protests at colleges. Why? Because Hilary Swank, one of the greatest actresses of our time, played Teena (and won an Oscar for the portrayal). Only a trans man could play that role, according to activists.
Similarly, there was the American Dirt controversy, where an acclaimed novel (which made Oprah’s Book Club) that told the story of an immigrant woman who suffered immensely as she tried to make it to America, was denounced because it was written by a white author.
As far as I can tell, the historical precedent for these things is the condemnation of blackface, a minstrel show tradition where white people dressed up and made up as Black people in highly stereotypical depictions, and then mocked them. Blackface was a disgusting form of art and a reminder that problematic societies can produce highly problematic art.
But the key point about Blackface wasn’t that white people were portraying Blacks- it was that white people were mocking Blacks. Every Shakespeare company for centuries has produced Othello, and many of those portrayals featured white actors. Most great white Shakespearian actors played the role at some point, and many great white opera singers performed Verdi’s musical version of it, Otello. Olivier, Pavarotti, they all did it. And on the other hand, there is also a long tradition of great Black actors playing Othello as well, from Paul Robeson to Laurence Fishburne.
We don’t think of Othello the way we do of Blackface, and that’s for a perfectly obvious reason- the same reason an actor like Robeson, who wasn’t going to do anything that actually mocked Black people, was willing to play the role. Othello is actually the rare piece in the canon that portrays a Black person in a position of power and as a fully rounded human character. Most classical entertainment either had no Black people at all (e.g., most Shakespeare plays), Black people only in some servant roles (e.g., Gone With the Wind), or Black people being mocked (Blackface, Stepin Fetchit).
The point is, no Black people were harmed in the production of Othello with Laurence Olivier. Not literally, not even figuratively. It wasn’t Blackface. Blackface (and a few other cousins, such as stereotype-filled portrayals of Hispanics and Asians) constitutes a discreet category of white people mocking members of other races. It’s terrible, and I’m glad we don’t do it anymore. I shed no tears over its demise.
But— turning the prohibition against Blackface into a prohibition against anyone portraying someone different than they are, to the point where cisgender actors are forced to give up roles playing trans people, even though the underlying art is sympathetic to trans people, is taking the principle to places it was never intended to go.
Activists have an answer, of course. They point out that members of minority groups can’t get jobs— they can’t get roles in Hollywood, can’t get book contracts, etc.— and that these white able-bodied cisgender people are “taking away roles” from them. But that analysis doesn’t work. First of all, it ignores that sometimes the person who succeeds doing a certain thing has extraordinary talent: Swank’s performance in Boys Don’t Cry, for instance, is one of the greatest performances in the history of American cinema. It seems to me that you can’t simply say “they should have hired a trans man”; you would need to identify what trans man was working as an actor in the 1990’s who could have played the role as well as Swank did. Heck, I can’t even think of a cis woman actor who would have played the role as well as Swank did. This is no condemnation of actors with any gender identity— it’s simply a tribute to what a singular, amazing performance Swank gave.
Second, it quickly turns into depriving someone of a right to do their art. You can see that most clearly with American Dirt: when activists say “you need to publish stories by [Hispanic] authors instead”, this also means that even if Jeanine Cummins had a particularly compelling story she dreamt up about an immigrant’s experience, a story that has not occurred in any other person’s imagination, she can’t tell it. If she does, she, her publishers, anyone who promotes her book, etc., will all be declared racists. If someone said “white people are only allowed to think up stories about other white people”, we’d find that ridiculous. But that’s exactly the endpoint of this sort of reasoning.
Third, I think it actually harms members of historically oppressed groups when these demands are made. It throws them in the ghetto, in a sense. It relegates them to telling stories about their group. There was a time when there were plenty of Blacks working as actors in Hollywood, but they were all playing servants. You can see them, most famously in Gone With the Wind, but also in a number of other movies. E.g., the housekeeper in It’s a Wonderful Life, the piano player in Casablanca, etc. Mae West always put Blacks in her movies, because she was a strong believer in civil rights and wanted to get Black actors work, just like the activists now. But here’s the thing- even though Black actors did get work, nobody would call that era good for Blacks in Hollywood. The breakthrough came when Blacks started to get roles that were not coded “Black”. The one that really struck me was when Denzel Washington starred in The Pelican Brief, which was based as a popular book by a white author that never identified the race of the protagonist. Here was a Black superstar playing a traditional hero in a traditional thriller, alongside a white female co-star. That was progress!
And that’s what we should want to see with other minority groups. Why can’t the strategist in a movie about a political campaign be an actor who is confined to a wheelchair? Why can’t we have a trans man be a superhero? Why can’t the protagonist in a baseball movie be Asian? Why can’t the lawyer who wins the big Supreme Court case be a butch lesbian? Why can’t a romantic comedy feature a relationship between a cis guy and a trans girl? To demand the role of Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry misses the whole point. It demands not to be treated equally with other actors, but simply to be typecast.
But my worry is, the entertainment industry appears to be buckling to all of this. They are deathly afraid of China, and they quickly change up whenever activists protest their work. Even worse is the chilling effect. The next time a white author comes to a publisher with a gripping story about a member of a minority group, that book will simply never get published. The next movie about China won’t be greenlit.
And so many movies can’t be made now. It isn’t that we need a remake of Blazing Saddles (we don’t), but we need art with the fearlessness that Mel Brooks and Blazing Saddles showed. We need transgressive art. A lot of Americans were sympathetic when Muslim terrorists attacked Charlie Hebdo, the French publication, for running cartoons making fun of the Prophet Muhammed. But could that sort of art be published in America? Do we really want to live in a world where public figures are afraid to criticize a powerful religion?
The left used to understand that. It is a proud part of the left’s history that it stood up to the censors and stood for the right of people to make art that challenged people. If you want a future of great, transgressive art and not a parade of superhero movies carefully engineered not to offend anyone powerful, the time to stand up is now.