Yahoo Finance William Watson: The only trigger warning anyone should need is caveat lector: reader beware
“We’ll always have Paris” seemed a fitting coda to a recent trip to Europe that had included three days in that city, so for the flight home I chose “Casablanca” from Air Canada’s surprisingly extensive movie offerings. Filmed in 1942, its a story of wartime love, gallantry, courage and danger — a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die — and its best-of-all-time screenplay, crackling with memorable lines, never fails to move and maybe even inspire.
But there’s a jarring moment I’d forgotten about. On her first visit to Rick’s Cafe, owned by her former lover, played by Humphrey Bogart, the luminously beautiful Ingrid Bergman asks Captain Renault, played by Claude Rains, “Captain — the boy who is playing the piano — somewhere I have seen him.” The piano player she’s referring to is Arthur “Dooley” Wilson, the Black American actor, singer and musician who was then in his mid-fifties (and despite a long and varied career is now known mainly for singing “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca).
I don’t think Bergman was a racist. She was Swedish, for goodness sake. In 1946 she spoke out against segregation in a Washington, D.C., theatre where she was acting. Ilsa Lund, her character in Casablanca, is resolutely anti-fascist, sacrificing her love for Bogart to support her resistance-leader husband, Victor Laszlo. The movie itself is strongly anti-fascist — “splendid anti-Axis propaganda,” Variety’s review called it on Dec. 1, 1942. In the end — I don’t think I’m giving anything away about such a famous plot line — Bogart and Rains march off arm-in-arm, at the “beginning of a beautiful friendship,” to fight fascism together. In the 1950s, Casablanca screenwriters Howard Koch and Julius and Philip Epstein were investigated by the House Un-American Affairs Committee. Koch, who wrote the Soviet-friendly “Mission to Moscow,” was blacklisted for five years. Casablanca was not a reactionary project.
Yet in 1942 it was acceptable for a young white woman — Bergman was 27 — to refer to a middle-aged Black man as “boy.” I don’t regard myself as a snowflake but that startled me.
What to do about it? One possibility is to expurgate it. The line could be rewritten. Bergman’s voice could be dubbed with something less offensive. Or the scene could be removed — though it’s actually pivotal to the story: it’s where we find out that Wilson’s character, Sam, had been in Paris with Bogart’s character, Rick. Of course, many of us were raised on TV versions of cinema movies that were edited almost to incoherence to make room for commercials.
Expurgation and re-touching — “bowdlerization,” named after Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), famous for publishing a “family version” of Shakespeare — are becoming common in books containing language that wouldn’t be allowed in contemporary conversation. Among progressives bowdlerization used to be regarded as hopelessly bourgeois. In fact, a useful project would be to restore all the bad words prophylactically removed from works in the 1950s and before: Mordecai Richler’s The Acrobats, for instance, or Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. But bowdlerization is now all the rage among progressives — though of course they don’t call it that and reject any comparison to it.
A better approach is simply to provide a warning to readers and viewers — along the lines of my all-time favourite: “Contains explicit language.” I actually prefer language to be explicit, don’t you? Books where language is only implicit are so hard to read. All those empty pages.
Penguin Random House has decided a new edition of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises will carry the disclaimer: “This book was published in 1926 and reflects the attitudes of its time. The publisher’s decision to present it as it was originally published is not intended as an endorsement of cultural representations or language contained herein.” It would be an annoyance and received as such by most readers and viewers. But if it’s put on the copyright page or in the credits, which only obsessives read anyway, no real harm done. If it’s put on every page or run as a permanent chyron across the bottom of the screen, that would be something else.
And it’s a bit weaselly, isn’t it? — with of course no offence intended to weasels. It tries to play things both ways: We fully understand the language would be offensive if used today but in our view the harm done by giving offence to some readers or viewers is outweighed by the benefit from the work itself. If I were the kind of person likely to be offended by particular passages in a work, i.e., one of those “some readers or viewers,” I might be even more offended that my hurt feelings had actually been considered but had been found wanting in the balance.
It’s the kind of defence that might best be left implicit. We’re all adults here. Publishers and producers very likely understand which bits of their work, if any, are likely to give offence. If they go ahead, it’s clearly because they think their value outweighs any harm done.
As time goes by, to coin a phrase, what’s acceptable or offensive changes. That’s life. Seeing what flew in the past doesn’t imply approval of it for the present. That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?
Caveat lector. Let the reader beware.
