Don’t even think about cancelling Blazing Saddles. By Brendan O’Neill.
HBO Max … has soiled its streaming version of Blazing Saddles with a worthy three-minute intro — three minutes! — designed to put the film in its ‘proper social context’. Just as it did with Gone with the Wind a few weeks ago …
The ‘proper social context’ is graciously provided by Jacqueline Stewart, a professor of media studies at the University of Chicago, and thus cleverer than you and me. She informs us that ‘racist language and attitudes pervade the film’. But that’s okay, everyone, because ‘those attitudes are espoused by characters who are portrayed here as explicitly small-minded, ignorant bigots’. ‘The real, and much more enlightened, perspective is provided by the main characters played by Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder’, says Stewart.
This is the dumbest thing I have seen in a very long time. Aside from being a spoiler, this ‘contextualising’ lecture is artless, patronising and ridiculous. Blazing Saddles is one of the great satires on racism. Everyone knows this. Set in the American frontier in the late 1800s, it tells the blackly comedic story of a town, Rock Ridge, getting a black sheriff (Cleavon Little). The townsfolk hate him, to begin with at least. ‘Up yours, nigger!’, as the old lady says to him when he wishes her a good morning. The sheriff looks to an alcoholic gunslinger called Jim (Gene Wilder) to help him out. …
The idea that we need a professor to tell us that the racists are the bad guys and the black sheriff and his hapless buddy are the good guys is deranged. Blazing Saddles was one of a handful of VHS films I had when I was a child. We watched it constantly. I must have seen it a hundred times. Even as a nine-year-old I knew what the film was about. …
Who do these people think they are? How dare they interject in an artistic work and declare that it is okay for us to watch it so long as we do so with the right mindset? That is insulting to Mel Brooks, who I’m pretty sure did not plan for a three-minute lecture to be automatically added to the start of his movie, and it is a massive slap in the face to HBO Max’s viewers. It’s tempting to say they are being treated like children, but it’s worse than that — as I say, even children know Blazing Saddles is comedy. Stream it or don’t stream it, HBO. Do you trust people to engage with art or not?
They think we are the stupid ones. More leftist projection.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
