George's Library of Cancelled Films (consolidated)

Preserving American Culture one hard copy at a time

There is no doubt that we are facing a new wave of censorship in America. What’s unique about the version we’re seeing here in the early part of the 21st Century, is that for the first time, that wave of Censorship is coming from The Left.

There’s no use in pretending that censorship was not, for decades, primarily the purview of the Right. It was. And Hollywood let us know about it too, constantly using our prudish censorius past against us. In FOOTLOOSE, what begins as a religious prohibition against dancing eventually leads to a literal book burning on the steps of the local High School. In FIELD OF DREAMS, Kevin Costner’s movie wife Amy Madigan leads a counter-revolution against a Conservative group using the excuse of a town meeting to ban certain authors from being read by local school kids. And just in case the movie’s “Conservatism as Fascism” moral equivalency isn’t clear enough, Madigan wraps up her argument with “at least he’s not a book burner… you Nazi cow.”

But these days, whenever there’s a conversation to be had about banning books or controversial ideas, it’s more likely to be a movement begun and supported by the political Left… Progressive parents looking to get TOM SAWYER pulled from a school library, or a Social Justice Organization looking to deplatform JK Rowling, or get Abigail Shrier banned from lecturing at some University or another. The Rolling Stones, the original 60’s counter-culture radicals, headliners at Altamont, decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble of explaining to our crazed scalp-hunting Social Justice Warriors that BROWN SUGAR is a song that opposes racism and takes digs at slavery. Instead they decided to preemptively remove it from their act. Sure, you’d love to see The Stones stand up for their art and tell the Woke Scolds to cram it with walnuts, but then you read a story like this one where a local Karen complains to the manager of a Trader Joes that someone in the store might be triggered by the lyrics to UNDER MY THUMB, and you realize that they probably made the smart choice.

This new wave of Left-wing Censorship is so alarming precisely because the Left controls all the levels of power in Hollywood, Academia, and The Media and unlike the Conservatives of FOOTLOOSE and FIELD OF DREAMS, they have the power to make content disappear in a way that has never been true before. A handful of Conservative religious nuts can get a book banned in a small town in Alabama, sure, but only The Left has the power to make sure that books, movies or speakers go away entirely, and stay away… forever.

I first began to think about this new reality during the short-lived attempt to cancel GONE WITH THE WIND back in the Summer of 2020. Citing “racist depictions”, Warner Bros removed GONE WITH THE WIND from its streaming service HBO Max. After a very public and, perhaps unexpected, outcry the service eventually restored the film, this time adding a contextual disclaimer at the beginning instead of banning it outright.

At first this seemed like a win. The forces of censorship had been smacked on the nose with a rolled up newspaper and forced to retreat back into the dog house. But slowly it began to dawn on me, GONE WITH THE WIND is one of the most popular and financially sucessful films of all time… but what if the Censors come for a film that is less popular or doesn’t have the armor of GWTW’s historic pop culture prominence to protect it?

In a lot of ways, streaming has been a boon for lovers of film. We have almost everything and anything we could ever want to watch literally at our fingertips. But there is at least one critical problem with streaming… we have created a small number of critical choke points beyond which are the only places where most films exist in their digital form. As a result, when it comes to cancelling “problematic” films, as The Left seems increasingly intent on doing, Jeff Bezos has the world’s largest kill switch. If Bezos decides, on his own or as a result of activist pressure, that a film is too problematic for the Proles to be allowed to watch, then he can make that film go away with the literal flip of a switch.

And this is not some wild conspiracy theory, it’s already begun. GONE WITH THE WIND may have survived, for now, but SONG OF THE SOUTH is already gone. I must confess that, personally, I won’t miss it. From what I remember, there is some pretty ugly stuff in there. But I hate censorship more than I hate anything, and as Larry Flynt’s lawyer once pointed out, we must work hardest to defend the rights of those whose ideas we hate the most. Because if we don’t, the forces of darkness will quickly turn their “Eye of Sauron” away from the easy targets and focus it squarely on the rest of us. The toppling of a Thomas Jefferson statue in New York City last month, something we were told would never ever happen, should prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

And since I am a believer in the theory that you should hope for the best and plan for the worst, for the last year I have been building a library of “problematic” DVDs. This is a collection of films, hard copies only for obvious reasons, that I believe will one day be branded as too problematic to be allowed to exist.

Here’s the list of the films I’ve collected so far, categorized by “cancel genre.” Not all of these films are great… some are brilliant, of course… and some of them aren’t very good at all… but like I said I hate censorship more than I hate bad movies and so I have not discriminated based on quality.

PROBLEMATIC COMEDY

BLAZING SADDLES – Why it will be banned: Well… y’see… I mean… uh… the thing is… aw hell…

WHITE CHRISTMAS – Why it will be banned: Two words… “Minstrel Show.” Also, in a world where the Left loves to pretend that words or gestures (like the OK sign) mean something they don’t, we can never be sure that the Left won’t one day claim that “‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” is white people code for dreaming of a world without black people.

CADDYSHACK – Why it will be banned: Like BLAZING SADDLES, this is a target rich environment, but I think I’ll go with the scene that ends with Porterhouse grinding Judge Smails’ shoes into oblivion. Also… the man’s name is “Porterhouse.” Nevermind that this scene was specifically designed to point out the ugly casual racism of rich white country club members and the hypocrisy of religion in the 70’s… it’s still gotta go.

ANIMAL HOUSE – Why it will be banned: Dear God where the hell do I start? On the one hand, most of the villains are white racists, so that’s obviously a point in its favor. But there’s just too much on the other side of the scale. I kinda want to go with the scene in the Honky Tonk where Flounder asks a black patron where he goes to school and gets a knife pulled on him, right before another black patron asks “do you mind if we dance with yo dates?” and then rips the cocktail table right out of the floor.

But here in the #MeToo era, I think you have to go with Otter’s closing “argument” from the “Trial” of the DTX (Detox, get it?) fraternity. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our female party guests… we did.”

THE THREE AMIGOS – Why it will be banned: This is one where I can’t point to a specific reason, it’s just that, like Han Solo, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

SOUL MAN – Why it will be banned: I mean… come on.

M*A*S*H – Why it will be banned: Well, they pretty much sexually harrass Hot Lips Houlihan right out of the Army… so there’s that.

MAJOR LEAGUE – Why it will be banned: Because it will be too expensive to go back in and digitally remove all the Indians logos from the ball caps after the MLB bans them from Baseball. Also, Pedro Cerrano’s vaguely voodoo-ish religious practices are probably offensive to somebody somewhere.

OVERBOARD - I probably watched this movie 7,629 times when it was on cable during its initial run. It’s utterly charming and it’s always great when giant movie stars with off screen chemistry get together in a romantic comedy… however, the inciting incident of the film is a kidnapping by any reading of the law, and the only way the story could resolve itself without Kurt Russell going to jail is for Goldie Hawn to fall in love with him. That said, it’s hard to imagine the #MeToo Left being OK with the fact that Goldie does eventually go to bed with Kurt under what could be charitably described as “false pretenses.” Sadly, OVERBOARD will have to go for the crime of “normalizing rape”, or something.

DAVE CHAPPELLE - Just a few weeks ago, in a scene eerily reminiscent of the book burning scene from FOOTLOOSE, an army of Trans activists and their allies assembled outside the Netflix offices to demand that Chappelle’s comedy specials be removed from the service. Thankfully, the Netflix brass told them to pound sand, but those specials are exclusive to Netflix… if they had acquiesed, then the specials could have been lost forever.

AIRPLANE! – Why it will be banned: In a world where “speech is violence”, AIRPLANE! is the feature film equivalent of the firebombing of Dresden. AIRPLANE! is a minefield of potentially cancellable offenses, from Barbara Billingsley’s “Jive” translations (which is one of the greatest movie gags ever written) to the “Pamphlet” of Jewish Sports Heroes to the line of passengers waiting to hit the hysterical female passenger with an escalating series of hardcore weaponry… which takes the concept of #MeToo to a whole ‘nother level, amirite?

Literally no ethnic, religious, or gender group is safe from this movie, not one… which is exactly what makes it so great (and so dangerous… Progressives hate the idea of Right and Left happily laughing together more than they hate anything). Go buy a hard copy while you still can… this is the kind of “no sacred cows” comedy that must be preserved and protected at all costs if we want to rebuild a free nation after the collapse of this bizarre Orwellian Oligarchy we’re living in.

PROBLEMATIC POLITICS

Because while comedy may be where this will begin, it’s not where it will end…

DOCUMENTARIES - Back in February of 2021, during Black History Month no less, Amazon removed the Clarence Thomas documentary IN HIS OWN WORDS from its service. In general, Conservative documentarians like Elder, Prager and Carolla have been smart enough to make their documentaries independently, and to own and distrubute them on their own platforms, but as IN HIS OWN WORDS proves, documentaries that feature Conservative subject matter will never be safe from Cancel Culture.

P.C.U. – PCU is the least-well known of a trio of films, IDIOCRACY and NETWORK are the other two, that perfectly predicted the evolution of, in this order, the University climate, the Culture, and Network/Cable News.

Progressives love NETWORK (RIP Ned Beatty, PBUH) because they think that the predictions it made presaged the rise Fox News, Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh AND NOTHING ELSE!!! But they conveniently forget about guys like Chris Cuomo, Keith Olberman, Don Lemon and the entire MSNBC lineup. There is a vast ocean of difference between what CNN is now and what it was 30 years ago.

The relationship between the network chiefs in NETWORK and their star on-air talent Howard Beale is a perfect distilation of the relationship between NBC and Trump. When he was great for ratings, they loved him and made him the focal point of their coverage. But when he stopped being good for ratings they suddenly hated him and set out to destroy him (in NETWORK, the execs even have a conversation about killing Howard Beale). And in fact, here in the real world, we have actual audio tape of NBC chief Jeff Zucker saying some of the exact same batshit crazy things that the insane Network chief (Ned Beatty, again) says in NETWORK.

It’s worth taking a moment to note here that Chayevsky got at least one thing wrong. Beatty mentions that 60 million people watch Howard Beale’s show, and Chayevsky probably assumed those ratings numbers would endure. But the modern day Howard Beales on Cable News don’t get anything like those ratings. The most popular cable news show (Tucker, I believe) pulls in something like 3 million viewers a night. Tater Stelter is somehow still surviving on air with less than 200 thousand viewers in the key demographic. Cable news may be insane and destructive, but thankfully it’s still a fringe product.

Other than that, Beatty pretty much nails the essential nature of the Media branch of the Oligarchy that is, even now, trying to consolidate its power and control over all of us.

The one way in which I fear for the future of NETWORK as an available film also comes from Beatty’s insane monologue. He says there are no countries, there is no Democracy, there are only coporations and currencies. I do worry that as we see the rise of a new partnership between Woke Corporations and Big Blue Government (the literal definition of Fascism by the way, though probably not the definition you were taught in school) the Progressive Left might start to wonder if NETWORK is getting a little too close to exposing “Their Truth.” But then I remember that most Progressives are too disdainful of anything that happened more than a year ago to ever go back and watch a movie made in the 70’s… and I relax a little.

In the same way that the Left feels like NETWORK is their kind of movie, Liberals also tend to believe that IDIOCRACY primarily pokes fun at the kind of Red State Rubes who love NASCAR and Reality TV, as opposed to Blue State Eliltes who love… Reality TV and, uh… what else do Blue State Elites do for fun, anyway?

So both of those films feel safe to me because they massage all the proper Progressive erogenous zones. Although I still may buy copies anyway since many of the things that can get you cancelled today were fine literally 48 hours ago. “I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure”, as the woman said.

But then there’s P.C.U.

When it came out, P.C.U, in addition to hacking away at young Reaganite Conservatives (embodied by David Spade and his blue jacketed cronies) P.C.U. seemed to take aim at a villain most of the country had already come to despise naturally… the Woke Scold. Back in those days, while the Woke Scolds had fully captured college administration offices, they had not yet captured the hearts and minds of students, so taking aim at them was still safe fun for children of all ages.

In the big climax, where the lead character (played by Jeremy Piven who was really too old for the part) leads the crowd in a chant of “WE’RE NOT GONNA PROTEST!” What he was really saying was “everyone is entitled to their own opinion and we should all mind our own business.”

“It used to be us against them. Now it’s us against us”, he says. So good!

But in the years since, campus Woke Scolds have successfully replaced “mind your own business” with the twin, though contradictory, mottos “silence is violence” and “speech is violence.” In order to survive on Campus you cannot avoid controversial subjects alogether and when you do speak, you are required to use only Politically Correct Woke-approved language. In our modern world, to stand up in front of a crowd and boldy declare “I’m going to keep my mouth shut and mind my own business” becomes a truly revolutionary act.

And that cannot be allowed.

DEAD POETS SOCIETY…

Wait, wut!?

Yes you heard me right. Dead Freakin’ Poets Society.

Now normally you wouldn’t see George running around with his hair on fire worrying about the cancellation by the Left of a movie that encourages critical thinking and the beauty of poetry, which features a beloved American actor who committed suicide, and which celebrates the idea of thoughtful #Resistance against the scourge of rich white professors and their rigid ideas about private school education as a launching pad for lucrative careers raping the environment and bending the law to their will. But I saw something in the news this year that forced me to rethink my position.

Walt Whitman… WALT FREAKIN’ WHITMAN… Uncle Walt… the silent hero of the film, is being cancelled. No more “I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world” for you, peasant… you must find some poet of color to celebrate instead.

We’ll also have to lose one of the greatest movie moments of all time… when Professor Keating (Robin Williams) pulls his stage-shy student (Ethan Hawke) in front of the class, directs him to stare at a photo of Walt, and compose an original poem based on what he sees (the sweaty-toothed madman!). I won’t spoil the ending in case you haven’t seen it (and if you haven’t… what’s wrong with you!?), but what follows is one of the most inspirational and emotional depictions of the power of creative expression to destroy rigid orthodoxy that has ever appeared on film.

Much of the story revolves around the ideas and the words of Walt Whitman, whom Keating obviously adores… can the movie even exist without “O Captain! My Captain!“? Probably not. Somehow Ethan Hawke shouting “O Kendi! My Kendi!” as he climbs up on his desk just doesn’t pack the same oomph.

When you combine the film’s exultation of Whitman, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Frost and other imperfect Western White writers along with its reverence for critical thinking and general mistrust of top-down authority, you can eaily imagine a world where Jeff Bezos, either on his own or on orders from whomever is running the pudding-brained Censor In Chief, decides that it’s time to hit the nuke button on his desk and remove DEAD POETS SOCIETY from circulation.

Dead Poet’s Society? More like Dead Old White Men’s Society… amirite?

I implore you to buy these great films on DVD (hard copies can’t be deleted) while you still can. Someday I fear we’ll be passing them around in dark alleyways like the Dissidents of Prague.

#Resist… and Carpe Diem!