What Do We Do with Older Books and Movies That Offend Modern Sensibilities?

Should they be edited? Given warning labels? Censored?

In 2007, I published a young adult novel, Double Feature, where one of the supporting characters, Gunnar, is an eccentric guy, seemingly clueless about everything. At various points, the other characters all say or think, “I wonder if Gunnar has Asperger’s Disease.”

This is actually all the set-up to a joke, and the punchline comes at the end of the book when Gunnar turns out to be the only character who has known all along what’s really going on in the story. Ironically, he’s way more in touch with reality than everyone else.

And the other characters end up agreeing: “Wow, I guess Gunnar doesn’t have Asperger’s Disease after all!”

Reading these parts of the novel now makes me cringe a little. What's so bad about having Asperger’s Disease? I also now know a lot more about the condition — and I know it isn’t called a “disease” anymore: it's considered part of the autism spectrum.

But I have no plans to rewrite the book to reflect what I now think, and I truly hate this recent trend where older books are being rewritten — and movies and TV shows are being re-edited and censored — to conform to modern sensibilities.

And, yes, this is an increasingly popular thing to do. The James Bond books by Ian Fleming have been rewritten, and certain Dr. Seuss titles have been re-illustrated, or taken out of print entirely. The estate of Roald Dahl made big headlines by releasing “revised” editions of that author’s works, eliminating certain “offensive” phrases and content.

Movies and TV shows are less likely to be edited or revised, with channels and streaming services currently more likely to add increasingly dire “warning labels” to content. Still, with anything “blackface”-related, even when it was clearly done ironically, the trend has been to censor the content completely.

Much of this is flat-out cynicism dressed up as virtue. The fact is, James Bond and Dr. Seuss are lucrative media franchises, and the rights-holders obviously wanted to maximize their earning potential. It’s surely not a coincidence that the estate of Roald Dahl “updated” his old written works at the same time Netflix was rolling out a series of new adaptations.

It’s also not the case that this kind of thing has never been done before. The son of Hugh Lofting issued “revised” versions of the Doctor Dolittle books way back in 1986. And movies like 1942’s Holiday Inn and 1953’s Torch Song have routinely had their infamous “blackface” scenes edited out.

Authors have also long edited their own works, post-publication, revising subsequent editions for all kinds of reasons, including “sensibility” concerns.

Indeed, in the 1970s, Roald Dahl himself revised his 1964 book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, turning the Oompa-Loompas, which were originally African “pygmies,” into blond beatnik-types. (The 1971 movie version, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, made a similar choice, featuring the Oompa-Loompas as entirely mythical creatures with orange skin, green hair, and…white eyebrows?)

But authors revising their own books seems like a completely different animal than what’s going on lately. I think the bar should be very high for revising and censoring older works. Unfortunately, the bar seems to be getting lower.

I wish it was a joke that in 2023, a school library in Canada literally removed all books published before 2009 from their shelves out of the concerns that those previous books weren’t “diverse” enough.

I hate to think what folks like that would say about movies like, say, 1959’s Pillow Talk. By contemporary standards, the gender norms in this classic romcom are horrible. The men are predatory, the women are prey, and this mostly seems to be treated as a big joke.

Then again, the movie is more self-aware than casual viewers might realize, often satirizing the values of the era. One of the stars, Rock Hudson, was a closeted gay man in real life, pretending to be a straight Hollywood actor, and in one scene, he plays a straight character who pretends to be gay. And the filmmakers knew all this!

Is he or isn’t he gay?

The movie is also a perfect window into that era and its values.

Even less accomplished, less self-aware works can provide that very same window into the past. Frankly, my novel, Double Feature, gives a pretty great idea of how people were thinking about autism twenty years ago.

In 2005, when I was writing the book, “Asperger’s Disease” was new to the mainstream scene. Everyone was talking about it and, yeah, making jokes, and no one was being very sensitive. We also knew a lot less about autism. I actually worked with autistic kids back in high school in the 1980s, and it blows my mind how much our cultural and scientific knowledge has grown since then.

And in 2006, dozens of people read Double Feature before it was published, and no one ever said a word about the insensitive Asperger’s jokes. Then after it was published, thousands more people read it, and still no one said anything about the jokes…except two people who wrote to say they had Asperger’s and thought the jokes were funny. The book even won a damn Lambda Award.

Which isn’t to say art should be immune from criticism. Obviously, part of the reason why culture has changed is because books, movies, and TV shows are criticized.

It’s fine to criticize authors for not recognizing or acknowledging an important cultural change after it’s happened — or for being unnecessarily insensitive or cruel.

Then again, irony and satire are also valid artistic choices.

Anyway, that’s with contemporary works. When it comes to judging works of the past, the equation is — or should be — pretty different.

Every work of art is a moment in time. That’s part of the function it plays as art.

I confess I think Roald Dahl is an interesting case study. His stuff doesn’t always land with me. I’m shocked by the casual cruelty inflicted upon the Oompa-Loompas by Willy Wonka — and the cruelty of the Oompa Loompas to the four non-saintly kids. Fat-phobic much?

But man, the creativity in Dahl’s books is also amazing. The Golden Ticket? Flying around inside a giant peach held aloft by seagulls?

Likewise, Gone with the Wind includes some incredibly racist stuff — and also happens to be some of the surest, most entertaining storytelling ever put on film.

At the same time, Scarlett’s relationship with — and the movie’s portrayal of — slaves is far more interesting and complex than a lot of critics of the movie acknowledge. The slaves, especially Mammy, are the only characters smart enough to see Scarlett for exactly the scheming conniver she is. Scarlett — and Rhett Butler — are also the only white people who treat the slaves with any dignity at all.

There are still plenty of racist tropes in the movie — and, yes, Scarlett, our so-called heroine, is keeping slaves and defending slavery. But I absolutely love how, post-war, when Ashley sanctimoniously admonishes Scarlett for pushing her white workers too hard, she immediately points out his hypocrisy, saying, “You weren't particular about owning slaves.”

Anyway, this movie is another perfect window into the past, in this case what white people — and white American audiences — were thinking about slavery in 1936 and 1939, respectively, when the novel and its movie adaptation were released.

When I was younger, I always bristled at the negative or stereotypical portrayals of LGBTQ folks in film. But I confess, now I love how I can tell a fascinating gay history of the last seventy years in America simply by showing someone the movies Rope, Cruising, Basic Instinct, Brokeback Mountain, and Red White and Royal Blue.

But what about the children? Should they really be exposed to stuff like this?

This has always been the cry of would-be censors, and so often it seems to me to be such an incredibly weak argument.

Society is constantly in flux — even faster now than it was two decades ago, thanks to social media. What was winning awards twenty years ago, like my book Double Feature, doesn’t always play so well today. Some people act they already have all the answers about everything, but the truth is, it’s actually impossible to predict exactly where culture will go next.

Our culture is our culture, and we’re all exploring and changing it together. This isn’t that difficult a concept to understand, and if teachers aren’t teaching it to kids, they should be.

Plus, when you start censoring ideas that you find objectionable, you sound absolutely ridiculous when you accuse your political opponents of censoring ideas that they find objectionable.

So what do we do with older books, movies, and TV shows that offend modern sensibilities?

Well, one part is easy: we should completely stop rewriting books by dead authors — multimedia franchises be damned. And in a very few cases, sure, maybe we should censor at least parts of some movies. I don’t necessarily object to cautionary labels either, assuming they take a broad-minded perspective.

But in the vast majority of cases, I think we’re much better off trusting people to understand that life is complicated, and that we all gain far more — including more social progress! — from an atmosphere of openness and dialogue than we do from a climate of control and fear.

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.