Alternate titles:
Judging Art In The Context Of Which It Was Made
Cancel Culture Comes For Tulip City
"I'm not saying you're racist, just everyone who enjoys the same things as you is racist." This was told to me by a so-called "woke leftist" on a progressive Discord server a while back - I wound up leaving the server because it got incredibly toxic and inflammatory during the 6-9 months I was active on there. The topic at hand was the TV show The Dukes Of Hazzard, and how the series is seen (in a post-George Floyd world) as "Confederate Propaganda," for a myriad of reasons: There are no black main characters; it shows impoverished white folks having a good time and living a positive life in the South; it glorifies the image of simple/rural/farm living (and therefore is anti-progressivism). When asked to show me a good, wholesome, approved TV sitcom from the early 1980s, the other person could not. When I pointed out that the series depicted impoverished farmers (laborers/workers) fighting against a corrupt local police force and county council (you know, like the entire basis of the Black Lives Matter movement), this person countered with The Myth Of The Lost Cause Of The Confederacy; circling back around to the idea that it showed poverty and farming (a regressive lifestyle) as glamorous. When pointed out that, canonically, the Duke family were sharecroppers and, despite being white, were still subject to the same systematic hurdles that freed slaves faced in the Reconstruction south, I was told that this didn't matter and that I was whitewashing history with The Lost Cause Myth again.
I flipped the question back on this person "What were the show's creators trying to tell us?" because this question takes the entire context of the show out of our current, modern viewpoint, and was once again, lectured on the Lost Cause Myth, and it was here that the opening line was told to me: "I'm not saying you're racist, just everyone who enjoys the same things as you is racist." The insinuation was that the showrunners of Dukes were trying to tell us that the United States South would be better off still owning slaves, that the Duke Family (in the TV show) were taking advantage of their own white privilege, and that anyone continuing the watch the show in 2020 (at the time) was clearly living in the same fantasy world.
This actually trickles into a Small Beans podcast about the movie The Green Mile. The host, Michael Swaim, asks the question outright "Am I judging this movie through a 2020 lens and totally missing the point?" The answer is a solid, resounding yes. In the podcast, they were definitely looking at a movie through a 2020 lens and reaching the entirely wrong conclusions. Fact is, The Green Mile was made in 1999 and based on a novel from 1996, and tells a story from 1932. When he wrote the novel in 1996, Stephen King almost definitely wasn't thinking "What if there's a pandemic in 25 years that has us all inside reading The Internet and seeing an innocent black man get murdered by cops, which sparks a nationwide movement about black lives mattering, which will most definitely nullify the protagonist in the novel I'm writing?" In 1999 (and 1996) we still used words like "fag" and "retard" as jokes and low-grade insults...There's absolutely no comparison between where society was at in 1999 and then again in 2020.
Speaking of "what the creator is trying to tell us," satire is dead. There's a reason that All In The Family or Blazing Saddles couldn't be made again: Rob Reiner and Mel Brooks have already told us! Both AITF and BS are biting bits of satire, aimed at poking fun at a very specific audience...ironically, this audience is full of people who've missed the entire point of the satire. Archie Bunker is not the good guy, he's a caricature designed to poke fun at the exact same type of person to idolize him as a hero! The townsfolk in Blazing Saddles are the ones being poked fun at - and I don't think it's a coincidence that the type of person to idolize Blazing Saddles often pick the same scene to mimic or voice out loud. Not only, as mentioned above, has society moved past the point where the Blazing Saddles/All In The Family brand of comedy is no longer tenable, but their tales have already been told in groundbreaking ways! If any creator were to attempt the same sort of satire, they'd be skewered as being derivative and unoriginal! The tropes are tired and uncreative, even if you take the objectionable content out of it.
I'll leave my readers with a challenge: As I've advised when consuming news sources, I'd also challenge you to consider the source when reading (watching or listening to) works of fiction. Who wrote, directed, and produced it? When was it made? What was going on in society at that time? Did those goings-on influence the writer/producer/director in anyway? On a broader scale, how did society at the time influence the writer/producer/director? Why did the content creators choose to tell us in the manner that they did?
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