Selective Sanitizing

In one scene, Eastwood’s character, Detective “Dirty Harry” Callahan, and his partner, Early Smith, walk into police headquarters late at night after thwarting an armed robbery. They encounter a group of four rookie traffic cops who’ve already impressed Callahan with their lethal accuracy on the police firing range. After a quick exchange of hellos and see-ya-laters, Callahan asks his partner, “So, you know those guys?” Early responds, “Yeah, they came up after me in the academy.”

Now here’s where things started getting weird. In the original movie, which I’ve seen perhaps half a dozen times on television, Early–who happens to be black–follows this little tidbit of information about the rookie cops with an additional comment: “You know, those guys were real tight in the academy. They hung out by themselves so much, a lot of us thought they were queer for each other.” (I’m paraphrasing from memory here, but I remember the “queer for each other” line distinctly.)

But something was different this time on TBS. Early’s crack about the rookie cops possibly being “queer for each other” had vanished–it was totally cut, as the film shifted abruptly to the next scene. Later in the movie, we learn that the seemingly clean-cut rookie cops are part of a vigilante “death squad” assembled by a corrupt police lieutenant (played by the insufferable Hal Holbrook) to assassinate San Francisco’s worst criminals.

Of course, the bloody Dirty Harry films tend to be thoroughly sanitized for TV, but I’d never seen that line cut before. I began wondering why it had been removed. The film never offers any other evidence that the traffic cops are gay; Early’s throwaway comment simply adds to their characterization as an oddly close-knit circle that keeps to themselves. Could it be that a politically sensitive higher-up at TBS frowned at any suggestion–even in passing–of a relation between the possible homosexuality of the cops and the fact that they turn out to be brutal, lawless killers? Or that the virtuous black detective, Early, who plays the sensible Yin to Dirty Harry’s wild Yang, would make an apparently flip remark about some fellow cops possibly being “queer for each other”? Or was it simply too much to allow a non-gay character to use the term “queer”?

An interesting question, to be sure. It occurs to me because I noticed some similarly awkward omissions while watching old “Tom and Jerry” cartoons recently on cable. (Before you start giving me grief about being a grown man who occasionally watches “Tom and Jerry,” I will merely note that the new Scooby-Doo movie–Scooby-Doo, for heaven’s sake!!–made $56 million at the box office this past weekend.)

Anyway, two “Tom and Jerry” scenes struck me. The first was in the classic toon where Jerry decides to leave boring life with Tom in the suburbs and strike out for Manhattan. Upon Jerry’s arrival at Penn Station, a shoeshine man mistakenly grabs the mouse and uses him as a dauber to apply black polish on a shoe. In the original cartoon as I remember it from my childhood, the man stuffs Jerry in the top of the polish bottle when he’s finished, and we see Jerry in one of those unsettling, pathetic “blackface” looks that apparently passed for humor in the late 1940s or early ’50s. (Unfortunately, this was a fairly standard gag in cartoons of that era–for instance, a character would foolishly stick his head in some opening only to find a lit stick of dynamite; when it exploded, you’d see the bewildered blackface appear.) But in this new version, the blackface bit was completely cut–you see the man using Jerry to slap on the polish, but then the cartoon jumps awkwardly to the next scene.

I caught another example of selective sanitizing in a different “Tom and Jerry” episode. Several of the “Tom and Jerry” shorts featured a black housemaid, in full “Aunt Jemima” regalia, who made a habit of swatting poor Tom with a broom whenever he wrecked some part of the house during his ill-fated attempts to catch Jerry. In the original versions I saw as a kid, the maid would cackle at Tom in the stereotypical accent of the 1940s black housemaid, much like the Hattie McDaniel “Mammy” characters in old Hollywood movies: “You’s gonna get it, Thomas–you’s a BAAAAAD pussy cat!” etc. But in the new, re-dubbed versions, she speaks clear, distinct King’s English, as if she had picked up a literature degree from Oxford in her spare time.

There are several other examples of this phenomenon; unfortunately, I can’t recall them at the moment (send me an e-mail if you’ve noticed others). Right now I’m more interested in determining what to make of all this after-the-fact sanitizing. I find the “Magnum Force” omission slightly disturbing, since Early’s suggestive comment is not as obviously offensive as the blackface gags. Its removal strikes me as just another demonstration of a new, unspoken rule in multicultural America: Only members of the group in question may freely (even proudly) use derogatory terms about themselves–e.g., only gays may refer to themselves as “queers,” and only black rappers and comics may call blacks “niggers.” Meanwhile, I’m inclined to go along with the removal of the blackface stuff–good riddance to it, along with minstrel shows and every other ancient, degrading portrayal of blacks.

But one can also make a compelling argument against these somewhat presumptuous efforts to sanitize old movies and cartoons to suit today’s fine-tuned sensibilities. They seem eerily similar to the nit-wit attempts to prevent schools from assigning Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” merely because it uses the term “nigger.” Perhaps there’s something to be gained, in an educational sense, by keeping these old references intact, however unpleasant they may be. As Allan Bloom noted in “Closing of the American Mind,” new Bible translations that make God gender-neutral are unfortunate if for no other reason than that “future generations will not have to grapple with the fact that God was once a sexist.”

Of course, what exactly we would gain by retaining such things and forcing each new generation to grapple with them is open to bitter dispute. For race agitators and multiculturalist worry-warts, the blackface gags and Mammy characters merely prove how irredeemably racist America is (and always will be). For others (count me in this crowd), they are clear evidence of just how far we’ve come, because no one today sees anything quaint or humorous about them. They seem tasteless and silly, if not downright embarrassing.

Anyway, I’m still too buzzed from the U.S. soccer team’s glorious victory (and too sleep-deprived from watching it) to offer a definitive answer on this question right now. But I am curious to know what others think about this little trend.

Lee Bockhorn is associate editor at The Weekly Standard.