This isn’t a particularly elegant or impressive defense of artistic freedom from censorship, but the point Anderson is trying to make is valid; bowdlerized versions of anything….books or movies or paintings or speeches on soapboxes in the town square…are anathema to a free society.
Director Wes Anderson Blasts Woke Edits of Roald Dahl Books
Anderson, responding to a question, said he was strongly opposed to recent revisions of Dahl’s books to remove descriptions of characters like “fat” and “crazy”.
“If you ask me if Renoir should be allowed to touch up one of his pictures, I’d say no. I don’t want even the artist to modify their work,” he told reporters.
“I understand the motivation for it, but I’m in the school where, when the piece is finished… the audience participates in it, we know it, so when it’s done, it’s done,” Anderson added.
“And certainly no one who is not an author should be modifying someone’s book — he’s dead.”
His thoughts are incomplete…maybe he should examine exactly how evil those motivations are! And the conceit that only authors (artists) should be allowed to edit after the fact is simply pompous.
But the implicit recognition that if some works are altered, then no works are safe is an important revelation, and one that should be (but won’t be) embraced by Hollywood and the publishing industry.
Too bad they weren’t paying attention when this began. Remember a dozen years ago when some deeply authoritarian publishing company printed an edited version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?
I Disapprove of What You Say, But I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It
Nothing complicated about that, and it should be axiomatic in a free society. Yet we have devolved so far from its simple idea that our culture is unrecognizable.
Should the Skokie Nazis have been allowed to march? Should “The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion” be allowed in our nation’s libraries? How about “Mein Kampf?” Or Marx’s writing (as bad as it is)? Or Official KKK materials?
Of course. This isn’t complicated. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant!”
But I will go one step further. Government secrecy is perhaps the biggest threat to our freedoms, and dwarfs the current Woke censorship of our public discourse. The government jealously guards its secrets, and as we see time and time again, those secrets are almost always kept to protect the power and graft of government itself.
A truly free country would prohibit government secrecy, and anything kept secret must be affirmatively approved by the legislature and signed by the president on a case-by-case basis. No sweeping generalizations; no 75-year time frames for publication.
And I swear I’m not smoking anything!
