How to deal with 'problematic' older media that hasn't aged so well?

[Skalpadda]

I’m hardly an expert on child rearing or child psychology, but I spent a couple of years working as a preschool teacher (mostly ages 4-6) and among over a hundred kids I met and spent 8 hours per day with I only ever saw one instance of racism and it was a boy clearly aping stuff his parents had said.

I don’t think you need to worry overly much. Parents, friends and other real life people around them will be what informs most of their world view. Give them positive examples as well and try to be a good role model. Seeing an instance of prejudice won’t immediately ruin their understanding of the world and turn them prejudiced.

You can highlight it and try to use it as an opportunity to explain how things have changed, but then you run the risk of introducing kids to negative ideas that they might otherwise not have even considered. But then if you don’t highlight it maybe that will cause them to absorb the negative ideas through osmosis.

I don’t know how old your kids are, but there will be plenty of opportunities to talk about this stuff naturally along the way. Also I don’t think you should be scared to do so because of the risk of introducing the ideas to them. It’s perfectly understandable to want to shield children from bad things, but complete ignorance isn’t a shield to prejudice, quite the opposite.

Not saying you should sit down with 4-year olds and hold detailed lectures about the horrors of the Holocaust or slavery, but you can definitely talk about prejudices in terms of fairness and how people should have equal opportunities in life.

[Similar]

I’m hardly an expert on child rearing or child psychology, but I spent a couple of years working as a preschool teacher (mostly ages 4-6) and among over a hundred kids I met and spent 8 hours per day with I only ever saw one instance of racism and it was a boy clearly aping stuff his parents had said.

I don’t think you need to worry overly much. Parents, friends and other real life people around them will be what informs most of their world view. Give them positive examples as well and try to be a good role model. Seeing an instance of prejudice won’t immediately ruin their understanding of the world and turn them prejudiced.

I’ve been thinking about this too. I was a kid in the seventies and things were … less complicated, at least as a generic white Danish kid. We had one TV channel, so choice was limited, and I watched Westerns and Tarzan and whatever else my parents felt was appropriate. I don’t remember my parents ever discussed what we saw, i.e. there was no direct counterweight to the portrayals of American Indians as murderous savages and Black Africans as primitives (although, as I remember it, usually the Really Evil people in the old Tarzan movies were typically white), and yet I’ve never for a second, at any age, believed there was any truth to the way things were presented in those movies.
I assume the counterweight was just my general upbringing; I am fortunate enough to have lovely parents. They’ve always just kind of lead by example, and I don’t think I could have had a better upbringing than that (I
think they also, in some way, gave me an urge to figure out how much of something I watched was actually true, so I’ve spent a lot of time looking up stuff in libraries. Which of course got a lot easier after the Internet became a thing).

And yeah, I heard my first racist comment around seventh grade (coincidentally from a kid who also uttered the first sexist comment I ever heard), from a dumb little shit who was definitely repeating what he’d heard his parents say.
I think we were generally very much unaffected by media, at least negatively, despite quite a lot of the kids in my class not having very bright parents.

Of course, there was a hell of a lot less media at the time too, so perhaps it’s a bit difficult to compare with now (I didn’t have phone until I was 27 and that was landline, just to give an example, and it didn’t have one of these newfangled screens, either), but I still think upbringing will win out.

[alms]

21 posts were split to a new topic.

[Det.Bullock]

Re: Transformers specifically, I suspect that even if a kid has never really heard of them or whatever, seeing the actual cartoon movie from the 1980s might actually be fun, just as a standalone, because it’s so weird and intense. Whereas the godawful TV series cartoons are worse than what small children watch today in terms of writing, and badly animated, so probably not worth suggesting.

Cyberverse (or “Transformerse Cyberverse Bumblebee Adventures” after the rebrand even though there are entire stretches without Bumblebee but Hasbro gotta Hasbro) I think is actually a better way to introduce modern kids to Transformers as:
1- it’s better than the original G1 cartoon in every possible way (low bar I know);
2- has more female Transformers having actually speaking roles in both factions;
3- is actually aimed at kids so the nerdy stuff usually doesn’t confuse newcomers and knows it has to be a bit goofy and fun;
4- despite that it’s not overly sanitized and knows when to be violent or scary.

[Zephro]

But does it have 5 small robots making 1 big robot? Which is more important than anything else.

It’s also acceptable to have 5 normal sized robot make 1 giant robot.

[Vheissu]

I’m a huge fan of the animated movie. It was Orson Welles’ last performance! and it had Eric Idle and Leonard Nimoy! It was also a pretty dark story with a lot of death.

I don’t know what Hasbro was thinking. It’s certainly not something I would show a child. Although it does have 5 robots combining into one.

Also, LexW you infinitely more patience than I do. Good reading though! It’s kinda fascinating how our modern conception of slavery has been warped by what became the US (and plantations offshore in the same period). Not that slavery ever was a good thing, but it’s a particularly despicable form that emerged in that time.

[Zephro]

I dunno I watched it when I was 5 years old, I felt I learnt a lot about tragedy from watching Optimus Prime die. I would definitely recommend it for children. It’ll set them up for Shakespeare later on.

[DeekyFun]

It’s also useful for learning the Universal Greeting, which has helped me navigate many a potentially perilous encounter on the mean streets of the Chiltern Hills. Never leave home without it, kids!

[Det.Bullock]

But does it have 5 small robots making 1 big robot? Which is more important than anything else.

It’s also acceptable to have 5 normal sized robot make 1 giant robot.

Strangely enough there have been no combiners in cartoons lately except for the awful Prime Wars Trilogy (which is NOT Transformers Prime because Hasbro loves to make things confusing) which started with Combiner Wars but since it’s aimed at nostalgic adults you never see them combine because it’s assumed you know what a Devastator or a Menasor is.

I’m a huge fan of the animated movie. It was Orson Welles’ last performance! and it had Eric Idle and Leonard Nimoy! It was also a pretty dark story with a lot of death.

I don’t know what Hasbro was thinking. It’s certainly not something I would show a child. Although it does have 5 robots combining into one.

Also, LexW you infinitely more patience than I do. Good reading though! It’s kinda fascinating how our modern conception of slavery has been warped by what became the US (and plantations offshore in the same period). Not that slavery ever was a good thing, but it’s a particularly despicable form that emerged in that time.

Personally after the few G1 episodes I have rewatched as an adult I never had the courage to sit through the entire thing (which I was spared when I was a child because it was the tail end of the G1 era and reruns were completely random so I didn’t even see the version split in episodes), I love the soundtrack though. I had heard the songs quoted multiple times in various nerd stuff for years without knowing they were for the TF movie (which means that the Boss and Zenyak quoting Optimus Prime and Megatron almost word for word in the finale of Saints Row 4 was completely lost on me the first time I played it).

Hasbro really underestimated how much children latched on to the cartoon compared to the toys, to them it was just getting rid of the old toys to sell new ones

[BillButNotBen]

Woah. This thread has taken off I wrote a whole long post but didn’t have time to finish it, but now it seems out of date, so I’ll start again.

I think we can all agree that racism is bad, and the past was racist, and racism is still a thing now. My conundrum is how to approach that past racism (and sexism, and other isms) which is prevalent in a wide range of older media that I’d otherwise consider valuable.

I’m coming at it from 2 viewpoints: As a parent considering the impact of said media on children, and as an adult considering the appropriateness of media that I’d otherwise find enjoyable or culturally important.

I think I consider media for my kids more closely than some, because they’re growing up in Japan and yet I want them to input western media. But western media isn’t widely available here, so I have to go out of my way to look for it, get access to it and put it in front of them.
Possibly if we were in the UK then I wouldn’t need to give this so much thought… they’d just consume whatever was on TV or whatever their mates were consuming.

Actually, while current events have made racism a more visible issue, the main one I’ve been having problems with more regularly has been sexism… or if not always sexism then the general (I would say) dated portrayal of females in lots of media, or their just general absence.
(But I think the same issues apply to racism and similar topics. )

(Eg: I just looked up some lists of top 20 80s kids movies. In 5 lists, the only ones I spotted with main female characters were The Little Mermaid (she gives up her voice to get a man) and Labyrinth (ok!) )

It’s the same with a lot of older kids TV shows, and with classic books. Books tend to separate more clearly into ‘for boys’ or ‘for girls’, though I’m not sure that’s a good thing. But even then, the girls often tend to fall into stereotypical roles (eg cooking, cleaning) and even the ‘girl power’ books / shows tend to be surprisingly often all about how to get the cute boy.

I think the current generation of parents realise it’s an issue, because there’s a large number of books along the lines of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls which actively highlight that women can be great, or can do things like science or politics.
(There’s also the dadification of games, as more and more game developers are dads, who want some games they can play with their daughters which involve something other than being rescued by mario).

But, similar to the Peter Pan Indians conundrum, I wonder if it’s good or bad to introduce the issue. For example, the aforementioned Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls is full of stories about how “Despite being told that women couldn’t be xxx, she didn’t give up…”. And I read this to my daughter and I wonder if she’s thinking “Yeah! She didn’t let the men tell her what to do!” or “Oh! Apparently there are lots of things women aren’t allowed to do”.

Given that my daughter is unlikely to ever encounter a Native American, did highlighting the outdated tropes in the movie have any real benefit? Or did it just introduce something negative that she didn’t need to be aware of?
(Maybe she’s a bit too young, but after using it as an opportunity to try and explain the history, she’s now declared that 'Indians sounds much cooler than Native Americans! I’m going to call them that!" and is being awkward about it.)

Also, even considering that a lot of the portrayals of Native American or African or other cultures in older movies are a little iffy, I can’t help but wonder if there’s value in at least encountering other cultures. Before watching Peter Pan, she wasn’t even aware that cultures other than English and Japanese really existed.

Reading some previous comments, I think I do agree that on balance it’s probably better to address the issues than to ignore them, but also maybe that it’s necessary to pick your battles as you can’t address every issue.

Anyway, this has gotten too long and rambling.(and I didn’t even get to part 2!)

[alms]

Woah. This thread has taken off

Yup, and this has happened because a few posters specifically disregarded my invitation to drop the matter and kept adding fuel to the fire.

So now the thread has been cleaned up, everything has been excised, including some OK posts that wouldn’t have had to go, otherwise.

There won’t be other consequences, as long as I’m not given a reason. Let’s not make incidents like this happen again, please.

[Risingson]

I am going to jump over the rest of the posts as I see that there was some fight.

How do you deal with problematic older media? Own it. Make it part of it. But my discourse is that we lack critical analysis for much of these media. A book from 1939 has a prologue giving it context and it has a lot of essays explaining where many stuff of it comes from, but somehow Gone With The Wind lacked that until now.

I LOVE noir. It is one of my favourite subgenres ever, and I love how it takes care of the underdog and how it talks about the institutional violence and the economic violence, but misogyny is part of a lot of its books, because they take the femme fatale role as part of the institution. You just have to be aware. No masterpiece is free of issues, all my favourite writers (Pohl, Fredrick Brown) have problematic themes in their pieces, even my favourite musical (Singin in the rain) gets creepy, and that is part of it. Part of its context. Part of the analysis we should give it to it. And if we are talking about problematic directors, Polanski’s films from Tess to Le Locataire are so tied to his experience as Victor Salva’s horror films are tied to his.

[LexW]

A book from 1939 has a prologue giving it context and it has a lot of essays explaining where many stuff of it comes from, but somehow Gone With The Wind lacked that until now.

Yeah, It’s not like the material isn’t out there. The critical analysis has been done. Anyone who has read books about film or even read the more intellectual kind of reviewers will have come across this kind of contexualizing work and analysis, and indeed, when I used to watch films on Channel 4 in the UK, they often had Mark Kermode or someone giving older films a context (whether they were problematic or not), letting people understand the ideas behind them and so on. But I feel like there’s an distinct anti-intellectual culture around films which actively seeks to avoid analysis, where people just want to watch flims and feel stuff and not think or read or consider, and where film critics are denigrated constantly, and film analysis is sneered at, which has prevented this. With books, the prologue is indeed often there as you say, and sometimes quite lengthy and academic, but we still haven’t done that with film, not routinely. It’s not like people couldn’t press the “skip” button on the analysis if they didn’t want to.

[Risingson]

you know @LexW , you made me remember why I cancelled my subscription to MUBI: because their blurbs were absolutely anti critical, anti intellectual, and pretty much on the train that describes a film like “the masterpiece that” instead of describing it. Examples…

Nymphomaniac: Von Trier shocked the world once more with his monumental two-part study of sexual obsession. With a stellar ensemble cast including regular collaborator Charlotte Gainsbourg, Uma Thurman and Shia LaBeouf, Lars leaves few taboos unturned, prowling the line between comedy, psychodrama…and porno?

Mullholand Drive: Initially conceived as a TV pilot, only to be transformed into a feature film, Mulholland Drive is lightning in a bottle of Hollywood fantasies, baroque emotions, and noir dreamscapes. Lynch’s surrealist masterpiece is a nightmarish puzzle box of doubles and desires, where nothing is what it seems.

La Dolce Vita: Alongside Fellini’s 100th birthday celebration, 2020 also marks the 60th anniversary of his immortal work of art. Including one of cinema’s most unforgettable scenes—Marcello!—this pinnacle of elegance and virtuosity changed the course of film history forever. Never has decadence been so entrancing.

And they are the intellectual film channel.

To this, btw, I also must ask: what’s the deal with the UK and how every channel, web and cinema avoids giving details about cast and crew? It’s amazing how the director of a film is never credited on the tv guide.

Sorry, got derailed as usual. So many things in my head.

[alms]

Sadly, TV is often used as a substitute to parental supervision, so that amplifies, instead of reducing, the potential problems wrt kids.

I suspect that introducing films or other media is both costly (paying people for their work is a sin in this machine-loving day and age, unless they are your cronies) and seen as a throwback to an ‘educative’ so to speak style of TV making, that nowadays feels stale to many viewers.

Also, as some guy on this site used to argue, everybody has had their patience gland removed in 2000.

Nevertheless, that approach is infinitely superior to putting clothes on nude figures.

[BillButNotBen]

when I used to watch films on Channel 4 in the UK, they often had Mark Kermode or someone giving older films a context

Yeah, I used to like that.

The nude figures analogy is kinda interesting, as you basically have 3 choices. Remove them entirely, but then people miss out on a lot. Clothe them, which makes them no longer what they once were. Or keep them, but explain them.

It’s interesting how much crossover there is between this thread and the one that’s now debating Cancel Culture.

[LexW]

Cancelling is only even relevant as a concept because people are still around and alive, and about 95% of people who are “cancelled” (as much as that’s a thing, which isn’t much), are not only alive and around, but keen to insist that they are right, and will never apologise, or deny that they ever touched those girls, or whatever. They’re also still profiting from their works whilst continuing to be twerps (or much worse than twerps).

When something is problematic and the creator is no longer around, they can’t really be cancelled. They’re no longer collecting money from the thing, they’re no longer appearing at shows or universities and so on. And most importantly, they’re not here to insist that in fact that rather obviously misogynist film they made is not misogynist, because they love women, so how could it be misogynist (literally the oldest excuse in the book on the subject of misogyny)? And thus you can typically much more reasonably deconstruct something and look at the context and so on. You can do that when they’re alive, sure, and people do, but you always have pushback from the idiots you’re doing it about, and people are understandably uncomfortable about potentially benefiting the person who is a twerp.

Cancel culture generally doesn’t, contrary to what people say, suggest censorship or the like (individuals may, but that’s on them, and censorship is much more commonly suggested by the very same people who “oppose” cancellation), but rather it’s along the lines of not doing anything that benefits that person, and not engaging with them.

Equally, a lot of the people opposed to “Cancel culture” are the same exact people who get very, very, very angry about some criticism and analysis of their work, I note. I forget who but several names on that list were people who have rage-flipped tables over relatively mild criticism of their work before (Atwood and Rushdie both certainly have - it was particularly funny in the case of Rushdie - who, full disclosure, was a friend of my parents - who deals with this ridiculous fatwa reasonably well, but absolutely threw his rattle out of the pram over some almost-boring criticism of I think it was Midnight’s Children).

There are limits to what prologues and the like can achieve. Birth of a Nation by DW Griffith is probably so far outside what is remotely reasonable that it should be treated the same was actual Nazi propaganda films and so on. It’s unfortunate that Griffith was important in early film-making, and did a number of techniques first (though I’m sure others would have within a year or three), so some film professors and the like are keen to make people sit through Birth, but I think all that does is put people off, and make people maybe think film is a medium founded in racism or something. In that case I think one is better off using heavily contextualized clips of demonstrating the techniques he used, and keep watching the whole film strictly optional. If you wouldn’t put something by Leni Rifenstahl on TV you probably shouldn’t put Griffith on TV (if anything, he’s worse, because we’re dealing with racist nutjobs much more than we are actual Nazis).

[Det.Bullock]

Cancelling is only even relevant as a concept because people are still around and alive, and about 95% of people who are “cancelled” (as much as that’s a thing, which isn’t much), are not only alive and around, but keen to insist that they are right, and will never apologise, or deny that they ever touched those girls, or whatever. They’re also still profiting from their works whilst continuing to be twerps (or much worse than twerps).

When something is problematic and the creator is no longer around, they can’t really be cancelled. They’re no longer collecting money from the thing, they’re no longer appearing at shows or universities and so on. And most importantly, they’re not here to insist that in fact that rather obviously misogynist film they made is not misogynist, because they love women, so how could it be misogynist (literally the oldest excuse in the book on the subject of misogyny)? And thus you can typically much more reasonably deconstruct something and look at the context and so on. You can do that when they’re alive, sure, and people do, but you always have pushback from the idiots you’re doing it about, and people are understandably uncomfortable about potentially benefiting the person who is a twerp.

Cancel culture generally doesn’t, contrary to what people say, suggest censorship or the like (individuals may, but that’s on them, and censorship is much more commonly suggested by the very same people who “oppose” cancellation), but rather it’s along the lines of not doing anything that benefits that person, and not engaging with them.

Equally, a lot of the people opposed to “Cancel culture” are the same exact people who get very, very, very angry about some criticism and analysis of their work, I note. I forget who but several names on that list were people who have rage-flipped tables over relatively mild criticism of their work before (Atwood and Rushdie both certainly have - it was particularly funny in the case of Rushdie - who, full disclosure, was a friend of my parents - who deals with this ridiculous fatwa reasonably well, but absolutely threw his rattle out of the pram over some almost-boring criticism of I think it was Midnight’s Children).

There are limits to what prologues and the like can achieve. Birth of a Nation by DW Griffith is probably so far outside what is remotely reasonable that it should be treated the same was actual Nazi propaganda films and so on. It’s unfortunate that Griffith was important in early film-making, and did a number of techniques first (though I’m sure others would have within a year or three), so some film professors and the like are keen to make people sit through Birth, but I think all that does is put people off, and make people maybe think film is a medium founded in racism or something. In that case I think one is better off using heavily contextualized clips of demonstrating the techniques he used, and keep watching the whole film strictly optional. If you wouldn’t put something by Leni Rifenstahl on TV you probably shouldn’t put Griffith on TV (if anything, he’s worse, because we’re dealing with racist nutjobs much more than we are actual Nazis).

Once I read a tweet (perhaps was by Lindsay Ellis? IDK) in which a film student said their professor did teach them about Griffith’s techniques by using his works that weren’t Birth of a Nation because the guy did use them in works that weren’t that pile of racist propaganda apparently.
The problem is probably that the movie itself has been pushed to prominence by people that wanted racism and the myth of the Lost Cause to be respectable, there was this Dan Olson video essay about how Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of The Will was basically pushed to prominence in criticism and film schools by nazi simpatizers even if the same innovative techniques were used in movies that didn’t lick nazi boots which bears similarities to the status of Griffith’s movie in film history as it’s often taught.

[Risingson]

Yeah I was going to say that: remember that the canon is something kind of artificial, and though Griffith and Riefenstahl were really good with their cameras there were more talented people around doing similar things. It also does not hurt to pick up any Griffith film that is not the Birth of a Nation.

[LexW]

The problem is probably that the movie itself has been pushed to prominence by people that wanted racism and the myth of the Lost Cause to be respectable, there was this Dan Olson video essay about how Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of The Will was basically pushed to prominence in criticism and film schools by nazi simpatizers even if the same innovative techniques were used in movies that didn’t lick nazi boots which bears similarities to the status of Griffith’s movie in film history as it’s often taught.

That’s very interesting re: Riefenstahl, I could certainly believe it. And yes that’s true re; Griffith. I remember I was confused for years when I first heard of Birth of a Nation and was only very vaguely aware of it’s subject matter, because I couldn’t even process that it was pro-KKK, I assumed it was just racist because blackface, and that the black people were sympathetic and so on. When in fact as you say it’s just out-and-out pro-racism (in a really extreme way). So yes using similar techniques in his less-openly-bigoted films seems sensible.