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Complex Numbers #1064055 added February 12, 2024 at 9:07am
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Today, courtesy of Cracked, a brief discussion of one of the greatest movies ever made.
Mel Brooks’ landmark 1974 comedy Blazing Saddles turns 50 today...
The date on the article is February 7, so as of today, it's fifty years and five days.
In 2024, it’s tough to uncouple the movie from the heated discourse around its place in modern pop culture, namely thanks to the dead horse of an argument that Blazing Saddles “couldn’t be made today” due to its pervasive racist language.
Well, no, it's not that tough. Just enjoy the damn movie and ignore the "heated discourse." Or don't watch it if you don't like that sort of movie.
Not to mention, the conspiracy theory that the radical left is somehow trying to censor Brooks’ film.
Which is amusing since the film is about as radical left as they let you do in the early 70s. For context, when the movie came out, Nixon was still President; he wouldn't resign for another 6 months.
Now, on its golden jubilee anniversary, a lot of people are revisiting Blazing Saddles on streaming, and some folks are outraged to find that it is currently preceded by a “trigger warning” on Max.
Most of the article goes into exactly what that "warning" is: apparently, a three-minute context video.
Which is approximately two minutes and forty-five seconds longer than the "trigger warning" on pretty much every single other piece of professionally-produced entertainment: the MPAA rating or its TV equivalent.
Of course, we have a similar system here on WDC, and I can't count the number of times someone has cried "censorship" over getting their content rating changed. Because your story had the word "fuck" in it and its content rating was raised to 18+ (passive voice there used on purpose), we're obviously offended by that and they've been censored and we're worse than Hitler.
I bring this up only to point out that this sort of thing exists so that audiences have some idea what they're getting into, and to help parents decide what stuff they want their kids watching or reading. If a grown-ass adult decides they don't want anything to do with R rated movies or 18+ rated items here, that's their choice. Wouldn't you rather know you have a choice than, say, be shocked and surprised by a fun cartoon about bunny rabbits suddenly dropping the F-bomb, showing bunnies doing what bunnies do best (making more bunnies), and maybe exploding into fuzzy blobs of goo with long ears?
In short, content ratings and context pieces aren't censorship. Also, pulling your own content because you suddenly had an epiphany that you maybe shouldn't have done that (e.g. the Dr. Seuss books his estate decided were too racist, or Disney pretending Song of the South never existed) isn't censorship.
Back to the movie in question, though, as the article points out, the movie has the bad guys being racist, while the good guys aren't. It's not a celebration of palefaces being able to say the N word. It's a condemnation of it.
And that's not even getting into the other good reason for context explainers: now, 50 years later, there's entire new generations who didn't grow up with Nixon and casual racism, and helping these newer viewers understand history can only be a good thing, since no one pays attention to that shit in school. If it's even taught these days. |
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