Buy physical media

In this case, that is a direct quote from The Simpsons producer James L. Brooks, who was explaining why the team behind the series requested the removal of an episode from Disney+’s formerly complete lineup of the show. The Simpsons has been on the air continuously since 1989, so it’s only natural that its run has occasionally overlapped with significant shifts in artistic sensibilities. However, there’s only one episode so far that has been removed from syndication and streaming, and the removal has nothing to do with its subject matter.

The episode in question is season three’s “Stark Raving Dad.” Michael Jackson guest-stars as a character who believes he’s the King of Pop but, in reality, is simply a mental patient. Due to the allegations levied against Jackson in the Leaving Neverland documentary, the producers requested that the episode be pulled. Brooks said: “I’m against book burning of any kind. But this is our book, and we’re allowed to take out a chapter.”

Like Tina Fey’s request that certain 30 Rock episodes be removed, the expungement of “Stark Raving Dad” occurred with the full endorsement of one or more of the work’s creators. This is an alarming precedent because if the creators of a work don’t believe their own creation is worthy of defense, preservation of art in the face of pressure to remove it from public view becomes much more challenging.

This burgeoning trend is part of a new, fast-moving wave of censorship adding urgency to the call to buy physical media. Books, movies, television shows — your hard-copy version can’t be memory-holed.

I renewed my personal commitment to purchasing physical media a few months ago. In the wake of the horrific police killing of George Floyd, columnists and commentators in the Washington Post and elsewhere called for an immediate halt to all police-themed movies and television shows, arguing that they lionize cops.

Soon, executives pulled the long-running show Cops and the A&E reality series PD Live. Time’s Eliana Dockterman went further still, arguing that the most popular genre of contemporary entertainment, the superhero franchise, is massively flawed, in part because it normally includes a positive representation of authority, as well as depicts justice achieved through force.

This new moral panic reminded me that owning a piece of tangible art has unique benefits that grow more relevant by the hour.

On the most basic level, there’s something about holding a book in your hands, catching a whiff of the smell of an old binding, and feeling the corner of each page with your fingertip as you leaf through a novel you bought in a bookstore years earlier. You might even remember the actual purchase itself. Research has shown the added layer of sensory input even increases reading retention.

Still, we’ve sacrificed that particular perk of physical ownership for the far more seductive quality of convenience.

Of all the cultural shifts of the past two decades, few affect our everyday lives as profoundly as our increased engagement with digital distribution of content. Streaming services have dramatically changed the film and television industries. Download options have all but remade the music and publishing industries. We can access our entire library of songs, shows, books, and movies using a device that’s about the size of a deck of cards, which would have seemed like something out of science fiction as recently as the early 2000s.

That convenience can’t be understated. You might even remember the bad old days — checking and double-checking in vain like an idiot for a book on a series of shelves, having to engage in an inane conversation with an uninterested clerk about your fruitless pursuit, placing an order for the book, then having to follow up repeatedly by phone or in person until the book finally arrived, sometimes weeks later. Weeks!

All of which you can now bypass with the elegant simplicity of a one-click buy.

That convenience has a price, though, even if it isn’t in dollars.

Ownership of digital media can be complicated. In reality, you’re normally only purchasing a limited license to access your content. A glance at the terms of service of your favorite digital content provider, such as Amazon, will reveal that what you actually receive when you “purchase” content to “own” is something like “a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, limited license, during the applicable Viewing Period,” with the Viewing Period helpfully defined as the “time period during which you are authorized to view different types of Digital Content.”

The long and short of that is, whether you’re “buying” or renting, say, a movie, the provider can revoke your authorization to view the content, and there isn’t much you can do about it — although some customers are fighting back in court to try to expand consumers’ digital rights. For now, providers have all the power when it comes to controlling your content.

That means, essentially, that you can buy it, but you can’t own it.

The most common loss-of-content circumstance is an expiring rights deal, such as a Netflix show that “leaves” the service on a certain date. The same concept applies to purchases. Those or other considerations can mean the loss of that access overnight, such as when the cloud-based digital rights “locker” UltraViolet went out of business last year. Users who failed to transfer their prior purchases by a certain deadline saw access to their UltraViolet movies and TV shows vanish.

Up until recently, the limitations of our streaming paradise consisted mostly of intellectual property disputes or bandwidth constraints, but the potential for more nefarious control over content has been apparent for years.

In 2009, Amazon accessed users’ Kindle devices and deleted already purchased books. The titles included works by Ayn Rand and J.K. Rowling, and, in an alarming bit of irony, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.

Confusion around self-published bootleg copies of the books prompted those deletions, but the incident illustrated just how easy it is for providers to remove content that consumers believe they “own.” A few years later, Amazon wiped a Norwegian customer’s entire Kindle for an unspecified violation of its terms of service, further highlighting the tenuous hold we have on digital works we may believe we own outright.

Yet, the unusual circumstances of these incidents made the potential danger of general censorship seem remote.

Until the Great Awokening, that is.

The “campus culture” that many of us foolishly assumed would vaporize upon contact with the real world has instead pierced its ivy-covered bubble to infect nearly every aspect of our lives. As such, the advantages of physical media resonate more strongly than ever.

Our most recent flurry of revisions to the artistic record began with the decision to remove 1939 best picture winner Gone With the Wind from the HBO Max streaming service. The film has since been restored, albeit with a new, four-plus-minute introduction.

In the wake of the Gone With the Wind decision, we’ve seen numerous episodes of television shows edited or deleted across series spanning decades. Shows whose episodes have been altered or removed from streaming or syndication include 30 Rock, The Office, Community, Scrubs, Little Britain, South Park, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and, somehow, The Golden Girls.

With the exception of South Park, whose pulled episodes include potentially offensive religious imagery, the commonality within this wave of television censorship was blackface, or, at least, what contemporary elite sensibilities have come to understand as “blackface.”

The AMC prestige drama Mad Men narrowly escaped the same fate as its streaming TV brethren by placing its own warning and explanation at the beginning of an episode in which the character Roger Sterling appears in blackface.

The offending scenes themselves vary widely. For example, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia features several episodes in which the characters Mac and Dennis create self-made Lethal Weapon sequels, during which Mac portrays Danny Glover’s Detective Murtaugh with full dark makeup. Scrubs has Sarah Chalke playing a hypothetical composite of her character and Donald Faison’s character in J.D.’s (Zach Braff) fantasy sequence in which J.D. laments that he can’t combine the best qualities of both friends. The Office had a minor character, Nate, played by Mark Proksch, who was a friend of Dwight (Rainn Wilson) arriving to the company Christmas party dressed and made up as the controversial Dutch Christmas figure Zwarte Piet (“Black Pete”).

The oddest example is the Golden Girls scene, in which Rose (Betty White) and Blanche (Rue McClanahan) are wearing mud masks. The premise of the joke is that it’s obviously not blackface. However, the scene clearly and deliberately invokes the idea of blackface, and, thus, out it goes.

Those removals have predictably had the opposite of the intended effect, as interest in the forbidden media has surged. Likewise, it was the temporary removal of Gone With the Wind that sparked renewed interest in the film, pushing it up the bestseller charts on Amazon as consumers scrambled to purchase a copy before it was perhaps too late. For my part, I bought 30 Rock: The Complete Series on Blu-ray as soon as Hulu and Amazon began pulling episodes. The set was out of stock just a day after I placed my order.

The ever-shifting mores of a vocal sliver of the American public increasingly dictate what art is permissible for public consumption. Washington Post book columnist Ron Charles demonstrated the expanding boundaries of the cultural danger we face with a July 3 piece that discusses how the sentiment behind the rash of TV episode deletions could play out in a literary context. “I don’t mean to suggest that we’re under any super-sophisticated obligation to tolerate plainly racist books,” Charles writes. “But if cancel culture has a weakness, it’s that it risks short-circuiting the process of critical engagement that leads to our enlightenment.”

Charles prefers to engage with, rather than ban, potentially problematic works. But what of his comment on not having an obligation to tolerate “plainly racist” books? That’s quite an exception to the rule, considering the subjectivity of that label and modern society’s ravenous hunger for censorship and expulsion.

Charles’s piece references the works of numerous literary giants, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Jane Austen to Mark Twain to William Shakespeare. Those figures, and the potential controversies Charles cites, provide another important reminder about the value of physical media.

Today, your digital copy of Huckleberry Finn is fully intact. However, when you check your Kindle a few months from now, perhaps you’ll find a new, “improved” version auto-downloaded in its place, with offensive language and themes excised in the name of progress. After all, the “Clean Reader” app controversy of 2015 showed us how simple it is to edit a digital work to remove sexual or otherwise profane words. Clean Reader was a digital e-reader that offered settings to replace words throughout any book with designated cleaner terms. Authors revolted and the app was withdrawn.

Perhaps edits don’t go far enough, though. When you try to read Huck Finn a year from now, maybe your preferred device will greet you with a “content not available” error in its place. But that yellowing, dog-eared copy of Twain’s masterpiece resting on your nightstand will remain unredacted.

On a conceptual level, art’s value is intertwined with its freedom to be provocative. A piece of art can also possess merit independent of elements that are objectionable.

Examples aren’t difficult to come by. There are Twain’s essential works, which often include the rough racial language of the era. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird possesses the same “defect.” More recently, the classic comedy film Blazing Saddles uses such language with laser-sharp, satirical purpose.

This problem is larger than reflexive deletion of anything that includes a finite list of words or ideas, though. In the case of “Stark Raving Dad,” it was the episode’s association with a controversial figure that caused it to be struck from the record.

This greatly expands the potential for censorship, as a “problematic” person’s mere involvement with a project makes the work problematic, even if the substance is innocuous.

We can easily see how this idea may be extended to political beliefs in short order, eliminating art created by or involving not just people accused of actual crimes, but folks who have expressed views that are outside the approved orthodoxy.

It’s equally easy to see how a series with one or two problematic episodes today will have five or 10 or 40 problematic episodes tomorrow as the definition of what is “unacceptable” expands exponentially.

This seems like an elementary point, but a work is necessarily a product of its own time. So are people. The same frailties or prejudices or behaviors that exist in society at the time of a work’s creation will likely show up in that work. Embracing the artistic merit of the work does not equate to an endorsement of every aspect of it — or so we once believed.

Increasingly, the implication seems to be that deriving enjoyment from or seeing merit in a work that is “tainted” in this way means that we are tainted ourselves.

Even beyond context, though, there is the question of intent. A book such as To Kill a Mockingbird presents an unambiguous thematic condemnation of racism, but, to help achieve that goal, author Harper Lee uses realistic language. Does her intent matter, or do we lack the judgment necessary to make those sorts of distinctions?

Charles correctly notes that works such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn have long been the subject of school-district curriculum controversies because of the language they employ. What’s new is that we have now thoughtlessly unleashed these sorts of controversies into the world at large through continued infantilization of the American adult, as campus culture’s portability terrifyingly outstrips what many of us previously believed possible.

We lose more than just entertainment when we fall on the side of artistic erasure. To Kill a Mockingbird’s message is one that spotlights racist injustices in the legal system. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is perhaps the most historically significant novel in American history, detailing the horrors of slavery. Even the now-banned Golden Girls episode featuring “blackface” is about an interracial, May-December romance that creates conflict between two families but ends with tolerance and acceptance by both families for the sake of love.

One would think that a nuanced understanding of the intent behind these works would extricate them from being marked for deletion. But we’re a little short on nuance these days.

In his 1992 book Free Speech in an Open Society, First Amendment scholar and free-speech advocate Rodney A. Smolla concluded a chapter on hate speech by noting that: “In a just society, reason and tolerance must triumph over prejudice and hate. But that triumph is best achieved through education, not coercion. Tolerance should be a dominant voice in the marketplace of ideas, but it should not preempt the marketplace.”

It isn’t that those of us who want to preserve a cultural value of free expression support prejudice or injustice. It is that we believe that just ends are best served by an open marketplace of ideas, rather than a ham-fisted purge of whatever ideas are deemed “unacceptable” (or even adjacent to unacceptable) at a given moment, irrespective of context, intent, or artistic merit.

I’m an optimist in one regard: I believe the public’s adherence to cancel culture’s increasingly censorious demands will crest and recede. I hope that moment comes soon.

Until then, buy physical media.

Tom Garrett is a writer, attorney, and communications director from Virginia.