Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has a problem. Their business depends almost wholly on showing movies from the pre-woke world — movies that cannot possibly survive the strict moral scrutiny to which our major media institutions now must subject all artworks. So what to do? Well, show the movies but tag them as problematic; acknowledge the difficulties but try to defend the films anyway. We’ll see how that strategy works out.
As I have said on a number of occasions, I think LPC (Left Purity Culture) will burn itself out, as it always does. In the end, when there’s no one left to execute, Robespierre has to guillotine the executioner:
But who knows when that day will come? Meanwhile, I realized after I read the stories I link to above, I don’t have my own copy of John Ford’s The Searchers — I had better remedy that deficiency.
I’m also going to make a list of (a) great films that (b) I do not own and that (c) Amazon and other guardians of the virtue of late capitalism may decide to blackball. Then I’m going to buy one of them each month.
