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      in Television

      I’ve Never Watched Anything as Transformative as ‘Sailor Moon’

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      The show is about friendship, yes, and also liberation that does not match the world’s expectations of femininity.The first lesbian relationship I saw portrayed on-screen was in “Sailor Moon.” Uranus and Neptune were two characters who seemed undeniably in love. The show is Japanese anime, though, and I could only watch the English-dubbed version that called them “cousins.” The titular Sailor Moon and the other Sailor Scouts are celestial superheroes sent across time to protect Earth from nefarious forces. In the human world, they take on the appearance of ordinary girls, but can transform into their fighting selves via personal totems. Sailor Moon often has a compact mirror and shouts, “Moon Prism Power, Makeup!” before transforming during battle and declaring, “In the name of the moon, I’ll punish you!” Swoon.“Sailor Moon” aired early on weekday mornings when I was in middle school, around 1995. I was a bookish tomboy in Compton, Calif., a working-class suburb full of Black and brown people, where superheroes looked more like gangsta rappers than anime characters. I went to Sunday school every week in stockings and Mary Janes and thought of femininity as a chore rather than a good time. I loved women but hated the imagined woman I was supposed to one day swell into, makeup and perfume and nail polish and gold jewelry signaling my arrival wherever I went like bells on a cat. In this vision, I worked and maintained a household and didn’t expect much acknowledgment for the effort — and certainly no fun.I grew up watching horror movies with my mother in the ’80s because she didn’t care about ratings systems and liked what she liked and wanted someone to watch with her, which explains a lot about me. I also watched cartoons freely, without being minded. Animation was a safe place. I controlled the VHS tapes, and my family would scatter whenever the opening of “The Little Mermaid” boomed into the house. In the world of cartoons, I was alone and unobserved. I think queer artists recognize this medium as a place of solace and fantasy — a secret world running parallel to the one in which L.G.B.T.Q. humans and people of color are targeted by book bans that want to annihilate both us and evidence of our existence.Comics have always been a place for dreaming, for silliness, for the disregard of rules that apply to anything from physics to the patriarchy. Yes, the medium can also be used to perpetuate dangerous and demeaning ideas, but the nature of the form makes room for fantasies both malicious and divine. The queer experience thus finds a home in animated worlds. Queer art can be a propagandist of possibility in a universe not always in favor of queer existence, and that is lifesaving. The queerness of “Sailor Moon” isn’t really about Sailor Moon, a.k.a. “champion kicker of ass in a Japanese schoolgirl skirt and tiara,” though. The world of “Sailor Moon” is interested in transformation, in upsetting expectations of presentation and value related to girlhood, masculinity, strength and gender roles. The show is about friendship, yes, and also liberation that does not match the world’s expectations of femininity. The series includes actual trans characters and a lesbian couple with superpowers, in case there is any doubt.Anime in the ’90s and 2000s had its hyperviolent giant-mechanical-suit boy culture down. Representation of my personal identity was not prioritized broadly speaking, but the iconic status of “Sailor Moon” within the queer community was no accident. Although the more direct Sapphic references were edited out of the English version, censorship couldn’t erase the show’s queer sensibility for me. I remember the scene with Uranus and Neptune. Neptune is stretched out on a chaise longue, asleep by their pool, and Uranus leans over and wakes her up, whining that she’s not paying attention to her: “It’s not fair, you know. You just go into your own world and leave me behind.” Cousins, my ass. The show does not let up on the attraction the girls have for Uranus, even though they aren’t supposed to be attracted now that it’s clear she’s a woman. Years later, in a Best Buy circa 2005, I found DVDs of the show’s uncut Japanese version with subtitles, which confirmed what I’d known all along: They were lovers! I also discovered the existence of the Sailor Star Lights — who possessed the earthly bodies of boys but fought as girls and underlined the show’s gender queerness in the fifth and final season. (That season didn’t air with the others in the ’90s.) I felt vindication followed immediately by the depression of a closeted queer holding onto fictional characters as a promise for something other than every predetermined choice of girlhood. But I also discovered I could be more than one thing in one body: I could be masculine and feminine, powerful and clumsy; I could have vices and gifts, and not one trait would have to be the defining quality. I could be liberated.The secret message of “Sailor Moon” might be that queerness is not just sexual (fight me); queerness is also existing under duress, where one’s instinct toward self-determination is a kind of spiritual expanse that grows from deep within the body and psyche then cascades out into an eventual shape unlike most others. Hulu has been streaming the show since 2014, broadening access to these inspirational figures. In “Sailor Moon,” the concept of transformation is about light, magic and power hidden in the ordinariness of living. There is nothing queerer than that (except maybe actual gay sex). Venita Blackburn is the author of “How to Wrestle a Girl,” “Black Jesus and Other Superheroes” and the forthcoming novel “Dead in Long Beach, California.” She is an associate professor of fiction at California State University, Fresno. More

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      in Music

      North Carolina Radio Station Won’t Ban Met Opera Broadcasts After All

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      The station, which had called the Met’s newer operas unsuitable because of their “difficult music” and “adult themes and harsh language,” reversed course.The music director of a nonprofit North Carolina classical radio station said on Thursday that the station would reverse course and air several contemporary operas being performed by the Metropolitan Opera this season that the station had originally said were unsuitable for broadcast, citing their “adult themes and harsh language.”“It was a very hard decision,” Emily Moss, the music director of WCPE, a nonprofit station based in Wake Forest, said in an interview. “It’s been a hard day and a hard week.”The reversal came after the station faced widespread criticism.The Met, the nation’s leading opera company, has been staging more contemporary work in recent seasons as part of a push to attract new and more diverse audiences; the company has found that these newer works draw more first-time ticket buyers than the classics do.But Deborah S. Proctor, the general manager of WCPE, took issue with new works planned for the current season in a survey she sent to listeners on Aug. 31.“This coming season, the Metropolitan Opera has chosen several operas which are written in a nonclassical music style, have adult themes and language, and are in English,” she wrote. “I feel they aren’t suitable for broadcast on our station.”In the survey, Proctor cited her problems with several of the Met’s offerings this season.She described the violence in Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” the death row opera that opened the season. She cited the “non-Biblical” sources of the libretto of John Adams’s “El Niño,” and the suicidal themes in Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which is based on the Michael Cunningham novel and the Oscar-winning film it inspired. She wrote that “Florencia en el Amazona,” by the Mexican composer Daniel Catán, was “simply outside of the bounds of our musical format guidelines.” And she said that both Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” contain “offensive language plainly audible to everyone.”“We want parents to know that they can leave our station playing for their children because our broadcasts are without mature themes or foul language,” she wrote in the letter. “We must maintain the trust of listeners.”The station decided last season not to broadcast Blanchard’s “Champion.”The Met, which has said it follows Federal Communications Commission guidelines regarding profanity and language, said it was happy with the change of course. “We’re pleased that opera fans in North Carolina will be able to hear all 27 of our scheduled broadcasts this season,” the Met said in a statement.The station’s letter, and the survey attached to it, received scant attention before reaching social media last week. Rhiannon Giddens, a North Carolina native who shared the Pulitzer Prize this year with Michael Abels for their opera “Omar,” wrote an open letter voicing her displeasure over the station’s stance and noted that challenging adult themes are staples of many of the most popular operas of the past.“The Met broadcasts are the only way many people get to hear the productions, which are situated in New York and priced way out of many people’s budgets,” Giddens wrote. “Radio is supposed to be egalitarian and an equalizer, not used as a weapon, as you are doing.”The station reversed course after receiving feedback from the public and holding internal conversations.“We really value being safe for a general audience, especially children,” Moss said in the interview. “But one of our core values is that we are a refuge from the political and troubles of the world and we are returning to that value.” More

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      in Theater

      A Tiananmen Square Musical Worries About China’s Glare

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      The original lead actor and director withdrew from the Phoenix production of a show about the 1989 pro-democracy protests, a topic that China aggressively censors.When it was announced that Zachary Noah Piser would be playing the lead role in “Tiananmen: A New Musical,” he happened to be on a concert tour of five Chinese cities with a group of Broadway actors.One day later, Piser, who played the title role in “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway last year, posted a short statement on Instagram, where most of his posts are bright and colorful.This one featured just seven words set against a blank white backdrop: “I have withdrawn from the musical Tiananmen.”“It was very odd to me because it was one statement, and it’s not usually how things like this happen in our business,” said Marc Oka, a cast member who found out about Piser’s departure through the Aug. 25 post, which had comments disabled.Those involved with the “Tiananmen” musical, which premieres at the Phoenix Theater Company next month, are well aware that China aggressively censors discussions of the Tiananmen protests, in which Chinese troops killed hundreds if not thousands of pro-democracy student activists.Jason Rose, the musical’s lead producer, said Piser’s manager told him — without providing details — that the actor felt pressure to leave the show and to post on Instagram. The manager, Dave Brenner, denied saying that.“It was a decision he had to make and it was not an easy one,” Brenner said of Piser, declining to comment on why the actor quit a day after the public casting announcement. Piser also declined to comment.Since the show, which follows the account of two Chinese students during the 50 days of protests at Tiananmen Square, was optioned by Rose’s Quixote Productions two years ago, some members of its cast have been worried about how the Chinese authorities might respond.It is unclear exactly why Piser, who is Chinese American, decided to leave the show he was set to star in. But the show’s original director and at least one other cast member dropped out, Rose said, because of fears about the safety of family members in China. The Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.Darren Lee became the musical’s director after the first one dropped out because of concerns about his family’s safety.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe departures illustrate how frightening it can be for people with connections to China to bring attention to the 1989 protests in Beijing. The Chinese government continues to evade responsibility for the massacre and tries to eradicate any remembrance of the event — the brutal conclusion to weeks of demonstrations that had pierced the Communist Party’s facade of invincibility.“Even doing a regional production in Phoenix, Ariz., there is so much concern over the control and reach of the Chinese government that American actors are afraid to be involved in the show,” said Kennedy Kanagawa, who replaced Piser in “Tiananmen.”The show’s new director and choreographer, Darren Lee, who is Chinese American, said he accepted the job only after determining that he did not have direct relatives who might face retaliation from the Chinese government.“It was the first time where I’ve ever been in the position where I asked my parents whether or not they thought it was OK to take the show,” he said.“Tiananmen: A New Musical,” with a book by Scott Elmegreen and music and lyrics by Drew Fornarola, follows two fictional students at Beijing Normal University who are named after real students killed by the military. Initially, the students, Peiwen and XiaoLi, have contrasting perspectives on the protests, but they fall in love and witness history as tanks roll into the square and soldiers draw their guns.Chinese troops killed hundreds if not thousands of pro-democracy student activists during protests in 1989.Jeff Widener/Associated PressThe musical wrestles with the tension between the revolutionary act of remembering and the authoritarian attempts to erase history. In one of the closing scenes, set in the present day, XiaoXia, the sister of XiaoLi, lights a candle as part of a vigil remembering the protests. A soldier arrests her and snuffs out the flame.Earlier in the show, in a fictional monologue as his soldiers gun down protesters, Deng Xiaoping, China’s top leader at the time, says, “People will forget what we did here.”He adds: “At the edge of memory, who defines the truth? Me.”To this day, the Chinese government is vigilant about eliminating discussion of Tiananmen. The word remains one of the most censored topics in the country, second only to President Xi Jinping, said Xiao Qiang, an expert on censorship and China at the University of California, Berkeley.It does not matter, Xiao said, that this show is being staged at a regional theater.“Even the word ‘Tiananmen’ would generate fear in the Chinese government and that fear would generate a very repressive action,” he said.Within China, people who publicly discuss what happened at Tiananmen can face jail time or see their children prohibited from attending universities. In May, the activist Chen Siming was arrested by the Chinese authorities over a social media post paying tribute to Tiananmen, according to Human Rights Watch.Often the mere specter of danger is enough to muzzle any dissent, Xiao said.The cast of “Tiananmen” is entirely Asian American and Pacific Islander, but those who are not ethnically Chinese have less concern about their involvement. Kanagawa and Oka, who are both Japanese American, said they felt comfortable speaking about the show because neither has family ties to China.Potential consequences have been front of mind for other contributors. After Piser dropped out of the show, Rose said, some cast members grew more fearful and asked not to be featured in news releases or photographed.The cast has had daily conversations, Kanagawa said, about repercussions for participating in the show. Some fret about being banned from visiting China or having business contracts canceled. Others fear for the safety of their relatives.“People in China disappear still, and the idea of that being a family member is legitimately terrifying,” Kanagawa said.“Every person in the room has decided, for whatever reason — could be artistic, could be political, could be whatever — to be there,” Lee said.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe Phoenix Theater Company and Quixote Productions have a history of staging politically relevant productions, presenting a musical in 2020 called “¡Americano!,” about a young man who discovers he is an undocumented immigrant. But “Tiananmen,” which was shaped by Wu’er Kaixi, one of the real student protesters in Beijing, has produced a special set of challenges.“Every person in the room has decided, for whatever reason — could be artistic, could be political, could be whatever — to be there,” said Lee, the musical’s new director. “Everyone also understands that their comfort and their safety is paramount.”Rose said Piser and the theater company had worked cooperatively until the actor arrived in China on his concert tour. At that point, “everything changed,” Rose said.“I was always aware of the sensitivities, but frankly that’s what drew me to the show,” Rose said. “If this were 1954 or 1951, would Russia be dictating our arts scene?”“This is a show that needs to be told,” he added, “particularly because of the efforts to erase the bravery and courage from history.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Barbie’ Debuts in Saudi Arabia, Sparking Delight, and Anger

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      Denounced in some Middle Eastern countries for undermining traditional gender norms, the hit movie is finding an audience in Saudi Arabia, illustrating the region’s shifting political landscape.On Friday night, Mohammed al-Sayed donned a pale pink shirt and denim overalls to join a friend at a movie theater in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, where the men settled in to watch a film about a doll on a mission to dismantle the patriarchy.Similar scenes played out across the conservative Islamic kingdom last weekend, as women painted their nails pink, tied pink bows in their hair and draped pink floor-length abayas over their shoulders for the regional debut of the movie, “Barbie.” While critics across the Middle East have called for the film to be banned for undermining traditional gender norms, many Saudis ignored them.They watched as the movie imagined a matriarchal society of Barbie dolls where men are eye candy. They laughed when a male character asked, “I’m a man with no power; does that make me a woman?” They snapped their fingers in delight as a mother delivered a monologue about the strictures of stereotypical femininity. Then, they emerged from the darkened theaters to contemplate what it all meant.“The message is that you are enough — whatever you are,” said Mr. al-Sayed, 21, echoing the Ken doll’s revelation.“We saw ourselves,” said Mr. al-Sayed’s friend, Nawaf al-Dossary, 20, wearing a matching pink shirt.Watching Barbie’s search for identity and meaning, Mr. al-Sayed said he was reminded of the fraught period when he started college and wasn’t sure of his place in the world. He said he believed that the movie had important lessons for men as well as women.“I felt like my mom should see the film,” he said.“All of our families — all families,” Mr. al-Dossary said, laughing.That this was happening in Saudi Arabia — one of the most male-dominated countries in the world — was mind-boggling to many in the Middle East. When “Barbie” opened on Thursday in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, it arrived suddenly and overwhelmingly. Moviegoers rushed to prepare Barbie-pink outfits. Some theaters scheduled more than 15 showings a day.Moviegoers wore pink during a screening of “Barbie” in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on Thursday.Ali Haider/EPA, via ShutterstockA snide headline in the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat declared that Saudi cinemas had become “havens for Gulf citizens escaping from harsh restrictions” — a twist in a country whose people once had to drive to Bahrain to watch movies.Eight years ago, there were no movie theaters in the Saudi kingdom, let alone any showing films about patriarchy. Women were barred from driving. The religious police roamed the streets, enforcing gender segregation and shouting at women to cover up from head to toe in black.Since he rose to power, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 37, has done away with many of those restrictions while simultaneously increasing political repression, imprisoning conservative religious clerics, leftist activists, critical businessmen and members of his own family.Even now, despite sweeping social changes, Saudi Arabia remains a state built around patriarchy. By law, the kingdom’s ruler must be a male member of the royal family, and while several women have ascended to high-ranking positions, all of Prince Mohammed’s cabinet members and closest advisers are men. Saudi women may be pouring into the work force and traveling to outer space, but they still need approval from a male guardian to marry. And gay and transgender Saudis face deep-seated discrimination, and sometimes arrest.So as word spread through the kingdom that “Barbie” would debut on a delayed schedule — a sign that government censors were most likely deliberating over it — many Saudis thought the movie would be banned, or at least heavily censored. Bolstering their expectations was the fact that neighboring Kuwait banned the film last week.Lebanon’s culture minister, Muhammad Al-Murtada, also called for the film to be banned, saying that it violated local values by “promoting homosexuality” and “raising doubts about the necessity of marriage and building a family.” It is unclear if the government will follow his recommendation.Even in Arab nations that have allowed the film to be shown, it has faced intense criticism. The Bahraini preacher Hassan al-Husseini shared a video with one million Instagram followers calling the movie a Trojan horse for “corrupt agendas.”Even while Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has done away with many social restrictions in Saudi Arabia, he has increased political repression.Pool photo by Ludovic MarinAnd in Saudi Arabia, not everyone is receptive to the film. To the entrepreneur Wafa Alrushaid, who suggested that the film be banned in her country, its messages are a “distortion of feminism.”“I’m a liberal person who has called for freedom for 30 years, so this isn’t about customs and traditions, but the values of humanity and reason,” she told The New York Times. The film, she argued, excessively victimizes women and vilifies men, and she objected to the fact that a transgender actress had played one of the Barbies.“This film is a conspiracy against families and the world’s children,” Ms. Alrushaid, 48, declared.Many Arab critics of the movie expressed views similar to those of some American politicians and right-wing figures who have castigated the film as anti-male. The tussle in the Middle East over the movie illustrates how battles that sometimes echo the so-called U.S. culture wars are playing out on a different landscape.The animated film “Lightyear,” which showed two female characters kissing, was banned in several countries in the region last year. And six Gulf Arab countries issued an unusual statement last year demanding that Netflix remove content that violates “Islamic and societal values and principles,” threatening to take legal action.In Kuwait, religious conservatives have become more vocal in recent years, Gulf analysts say, broadcasting views that many Saudis would be hesitant to express in public now, fearing repercussions from the government.“Banning the movie ‘Barbie’ fits into a larger tilt to the right that’s increasingly felt in Kuwait,” said Bader Al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University. “Islamist and conservative forces in Kuwait are relishing in these culture wars to prove their ascendancy.”Some Kuwaitis expressed astonishment that they would have to travel to the Saudi kingdom to watch the movie. Many pointed out the irony that Kuwait and Lebanon, despite objecting to the film, had long provided greater freedom of expression than many other Arab countries.Streaming out of movie theaters in Riyadh, people who watched “Barbie” seemed to leave with their own understanding.Lining up for “Barbie” in Dubai. Many Arab critics of the movie have expressed views similar to those of some American right-wing figures who have castigated the film as anti-male.Ali Haider/EPA, via ShutterstockYara Mohammed, 26, said that she had enjoyed the movie, dismissing the Kuwaiti ban as “drama.”“Even if kids saw it, it’s so normal,” she said.To Abrar Saad, 28, the message was simply that “the world doesn’t work without Ken or Barbie; they need to complete each other.”But to teenage girls like Aljohara and Ghada — who were accompanied by an adult and asked to be identified only by their first names because of their ages — the film felt deeper.“The idea was pretty realistic,” said Aljohara, 14, wearing a hot pink shirt underneath her black abaya. She said she liked that the film ended with a type of equality between men and women.“But it wasn’t nice that it ended with equality,” interjected Ghada, 16. “Because I feel like equality is a little bit wrong; I feel like it’s better for there to be equity because there are things a boy can’t do but you can do them.”Asked if they ever thought they would watch such a movie in Saudi Arabia, both exclaimed, with laughter: “No!”“I was expecting them to censor a lot of scenes,” Ghada said.In fact, it did not appear censors had cut anything major. A scene in which Barbie declares that she has no vagina and Ken no penis remained, as well as a scene with the transgender actress. The Arabic subtitles were rendered faithfully — including the word patriarchy.Hwaida Saad More

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      in Movies

      How ‘Barbie’ and Blackpink Entered South China Sea Map Spat

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      Vietnam banned the film over its apparent use of a Chinese map showing disputed territory. Blackpink concerts may be next. Here’s what the fuss is about.Of all the things that could inflame tensions in a region that could someday be a theater of war between superpowers, the movie “Barbie” was not an obvious catalyst. Yet here we are.The authorities in Vietnam this week banned the upcoming Greta Gerwig film over a map in “Barbie” that they said shows a Chinese map of territory in the South China Sea, where the two neighbors have competing claims.The Philippines, another Southeast Asian country that disputes China’s territorial claims in the sea, is now deciding whether to ban the star-studded film as well. And Vietnam said on Thursday that it was investigating a South China Sea map on the website of a company promoting Blackpink, a K-pop band scheduled to perform in Hanoi this month.Taking such stands against seemingly innocuous cultural exports may look to some like an overreaction. But Vietnam’s responses make more sense if they are viewed within historical and political contexts. Here’s a primer.What is Vietnam’s beef with ‘Barbie’?The head of the Vietnam Cinema Department, an agency in the one-party state, said on Monday that the Warner Bros. film would not be released domestically because of a scene that includes the so-called nine-dash line — a map that appears on official Chinese documents and encircles most of the South China Sea.The official, Vi Kien Thanh, did not say which scene Vietnam hadn’t liked. Several commentators wondered if he meant the one showing Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, standing in front of a crudely drawn world map. Some also noted that the nine-dash line in that scene appears to lie very far from Asia.A scene in “Barbie” with a map depicting contested territory in the South China Sea. The image may have prompted the Vietnamese government to ban the upcoming film.Warner Bros. PicturesIf that is, indeed, the offending map, “I really can’t see what the fuss is about,” said Bill Hayton, the author of books on Vietnam and the South China Sea.“The map in the film appears to bear no relation to a real map of the world,” Mr. Hayton added. “This looks like Vietnam’s censors trying to demonstrate their patriotism and usefulness to the regime.”Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did Warner Bros. The American movie studio told the Reuters news agency on Thursday that the “Barbie” map of the South China Sea was a “childlike” drawing with no intended significance.Why is the South China Sea important to Vietnam?Vietnam and China are neighbors with an extraordinarily complex relationship. On one hand, both are ruled by a Communist Party, making them ideological allies. They’re also busy trading partners that share an 800-mile border.Yet China occupied Vietnam for a millennium and invaded it as recently as 1979. And under Xi Jinping, China’s powerful leader, Beijing has built military outposts on contested islands in the South China Sea. It also rejected an international tribunal’s landmark 2016 ruling that sided with the Philippines by saying that China’s expansive claim to sovereignty over the sea had no legal basis. More

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      in Movies

      What’s Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films

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      A new edit of ‘The French Connection’ removes a racial slur. But nit-picking old artworks for breaking today’s rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture.The remarkable thing about the censored scene is how ordinary it feels if you’ve watched a police procedural made before, say, 2010. It’s in William Friedkin’s “The French Connection,” from 1971. Two narcotics cops — Jimmy (Popeye) Doyle, played by Gene Hackman, and Buddy (Cloudy) Russo, played by Roy Scheider — are at the precinct, following an undercover operation during which a drug dealer ended up slashing Russo with a knife. The injury has left Russo struggling to put on his coat. “Need a little help there?” Doyle chuckles, then adds an ethnic jab: “You dumb guinea.” Russo: “How the hell did I know he had a knife?” Here Doyle points a slur at the Black dealer: “Never trust a nigger.” Russo: “He could have been white.” Doyle: “Never trust anyone.” Then he invites Russo out for a drink, and they trade masturbation jokes as they head through the door.But perhaps you should forget I mentioned any of this, because you’re now a lot less likely to see it in the film. In June, viewers of the Criterion Channel’s streaming version noticed that much of the scene had been edited out, without announcement or comment; people viewing via Apple TV and Amazon found the same. It was reported that the version available on Disney+ in Britain and Canada remains unedited, suggesting that whoever authorized the cut imagined the moment to be unfit for American audiences in particular. (Disney owns the rights to the film, having acquired Fox, its original distributor, in 2019.) The domestic market now sees a slapdash sequence that has Russo entering the room, clutching his forearm, followed by a jerky jump to the door, where Doyle waits. The disparaging exchange is, of course, omitted. What remains is a glitch, a bit of hesitation, the suggestion of something amiss. “Never trust anyone,” indeed.Bad jump cuts create bumps in logic; they’re disorienting in a way that suggests external, self-interested forces at play.The conversation that has surrounded this edit — a belated alteration to the winner of an Academy Award for best picture — is just the latest of many such controversies. In 2011, one publisher prepared an edition of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” that replaced instances of that same racial slur with “slave.” In February, Roald Dahl’s British publisher, Puffin Books, and the Roald Dahl Story Company confirmed that new editions of the author’s works, published in 2022, had been tweaked to substitute language that might offend contemporary readers, including descriptors like “fat” and “ugly.” (After a backlash, Puffin said it would keep the original versions for sale, too.) Then, of course, there are the right-wing campaigns to excise passages from instructional texts or simply remove books from public schools and libraries.This particular change to “The French Connection” came unexplained and unannounced, so we can only guess at the precise reasoning behind it. But we can imagine why the language was there in the first place. “The French Connection” was adapted from a nonfiction book about two real detectives, both of whom appear in the film, and the scene clearly wants to situate the viewer within a certain gritty milieu: a space of casual violence, offhand bigotry, sophomoric humor. We see a bit of banter between two policemen working in what was then called the “inner city,” dialogue underlining their “good cop, bad cop” dynamic; in certain ways, it’s not so different from the set pieces you would find in Blaxploitation films of the era. Doyle’s eagerness to get to the bar hints at the long-running “alcoholic cop” trope, and his homoerotic jokes are offset by his womanizing — another ongoing genre cliché. His racist barbs give a sense of his misdirected frustration. Doyle is presented as flawed, reckless, obsessive, vulgar, “rough around the edges” — but, of course, we’re ultimately meant to find him charming and heroic. He is one in a long line of characters that would stretch forward into shows like “The Shield” and “The Wire”: figures built on the idea that “good cop, bad cop” can describe not just an interrogation style or a buddy-film formula but also a single officer.Attempting to edit out just one of a character’s flaws inevitably produces a sense of inconsistent standards. We get that true heroes shouldn’t be using racial epithets. But they’re probably supposed to avoid a lot of the other things Popeye Doyle does too — like racing (and crashing) a car through a residential neighborhood or shooting a suspect in the back. This selective editing feels like a project for risk-averse stakeholders, so anxious about a film’s legacy and lasting economic value that they end up diminishing the work itself. The point of the edit isn’t to turn Doyle into a noble guy, just one whose movie modern viewers can watch without any jolts of discomfort or offense. If Gene Hackman is American cinema’s great avatar of paranoia — a star in three of this country’s most prophetic and indelible surveillance thrillers, “The French Connection,” “The Conversation” and “Enemy of the State” — then his turn here might anticipate the intensity with which entities from police departments to megacorporations will try to mitigate risks like that. This is a space of casual violence, offhand bigotry, sophomoric humor.Artful jump cuts can illuminate all kinds of interesting associations between images. Bad ones just create bumps in logic; they’re disorienting in a way that suggests external, self-interested forces at play. The one newly smuggled into “The French Connection” reveals, to use a period term, the hand of the Man, even if it’s unclear from which direction it’s reaching. (Is it Disney, treating adult audiences like the children it’s used to serving? Did Friedkin, who once modified the color of the film, approve the change?) Censors, like overzealous cops, can be too aggressive, or too simplistic, in their attempts to neutralize perceived threats. Whoever made the cut in the precinct scene, sparing the hero from saying unpleasant things, did nothing to remove other ethnic insults, from references to Italian Americans to the cops’ code names for their French targets: “Frog One” and “Frog Two.” It also becomes hilarious, in this sanitized context, to watch the film’s frequent nonlinguistic violence: A guy is shot in the face; a train conductor is blasted in the chest; a sniper misses Doyle and clips a woman pushing a stroller.Surveillance, as the movie teaches us, is a game of dogged attention; focus too much on one thing and you miss a world of detail encircling it. Nit-picking old artworks for breaking today’s rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture, the full context; we become, instead, obsessed with obscure metrics, legalistic violations of current sensibilities. And actively changing those works — continually remolding them into a shape that suits today’s market — eventually compromises the entire archival record of our culture; we’re left only with evidence of the present, not a document of the past. This is, in a way, the same spirit that leads obdurate politicians to try and purge reams of uncomfortable American history from textbooks, leaving students learning — and living — in a state of confusion, with something always out of order, always unexplained. You can, of course, find the unedited precinct scene on YouTube. (Just as you can find altered scenes from other films, from “Fantasia” to “Star Wars.”) It’s just packaged inside an interview with Hackman about his approach to portraying Doyle, whom he disliked. “The character was a bigot and antisemitic and whatever else you want to call him,” the actor says. “That’s who he was. It was difficult for me to say the N-word; I protested somewhat, but there was a part of me that also said, ‘That’s who the guy is.’ I mean, you like him or not, that’s who he was. You couldn’t really whitewash him.” Turns out you can.Opening illustration: Source photographs from 20th Century Fox, via Getty ImagesNiela Orr is a story editor for the magazine. Her recent work includes a profile of the actress Keke Palmer, an essay about the end of “Atlanta” and a feature on the metamusical “A Strange Loop.” More

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      in Theater

      School Plays Are the Latest Cultural Battleground

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      At a time when lawmakers and parents are seeking to restrict what can and cannot be taught in classrooms, many teachers are seeing efforts to limit what can be staged in their auditoriums.Stevie Ray Dallimore, an actor and teacher, had been running the theater program for a private boys’ school in Chattanooga for a decade, but he never faced a school year like this one.A proposed production of “She Kills Monsters” at a neighboring girls’ school that would have included his students was rejected for gay content, he said. A “Shakespeare in Love” at the girls’ school that would have featured his boys was rejected because of cross-dressing. His school’s production of “Three Sisters,” the Chekhov classic, was rejected because it deals with adultery and there were concerns that some boys might play women, as they had in the past, he said.School plays — long an important element of arts education and a formative experience for creative adolescents — have become the latest battleground at a moment when America’s political and cultural divisions have led to a spike in book bans, conflicts over how race and sexuality are taught in schools, and efforts by some politicians to restrict drag performances and transgender health care for children and teenagers.For decades student productions have faced scrutiny over whether they are age-appropriate, and more recently left-leaning students and parents have pushed back against many shows over how they portray women and people of color. The latest wave of objections is coming largely from right-leaning parents and school officials.Stevie Ray Dallimore taught theater for a decade at a private boys’ school in Chattanooga, Tenn. After a year of tensions over the content of plays, the school eliminated his position.Greg Kahn for The New York TimesThe final act in Dallimore’s yearlong drama in Chattanooga? He learned that his position at McCallie School, along with that of his counterpart at the nearby Girls Preparatory School, was being eliminated. They were invited to apply for a single new position overseeing theater at both schools; both educators are now out of the jobs.“This is obviously a countrywide issue that we are a small part of,” Dallimore said. “It’s definitely part of a bigger movement — a strongly concerted effort of politics and religion going hand in hand, banning books and trying to erase history and villainizing otherness.”A McCallie spokeswoman, Jamie Baker, acknowledged that the two school theater positions had been eliminated so the programs could be combined but said that “implying or asserting in any way that the contract of McCallie’s theater director was not renewed because of content concerns would be inaccurate.” She noted that the school has a “Judeo-Christian heritage and commitment to Christian principles,” and added, “That we would and will continue to make decisions aligned with these commitments should be no surprise to anyone.”Drama teachers around the country say they are facing growing scrutiny of their show selections, and that titles that were acceptable just a few years ago can no longer be staged in some districts. The Educational Theater Association released a survey of teachers last month that found that 67 percent say censorship concerns are influencing their selections for the upcoming school year.“The Prom,” which opened on Broadway in 2018, has a school edition for use by students, but some schools are unwilling to produce it because the protagonist is a lesbian.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn emails and phone calls over the last several weeks, teachers and parents cited a litany of examples. From the right there have been objections to homosexuality in the musical “The Prom” and the play “Almost, Maine” and other oft-staged shows; from the left there have been concerns about depictions of race in “South Pacific” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and gender in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Grease.” And at individual schools there have been any number of unexpected complaints, about the presence of bullying in “Mean Girls” and the absence of white characters in “Fences,” about the words “damn” (in “Oklahoma”) and “bastards” (in “Newsies”) and “God” (in “The Little Mermaid”).Challenges to school productions, teachers say, carry far more weight than they once did because of the polarized political climate and the amplifying power of social media.“We’re seeing a lot of teachers self-censoring,” said Jennifer Katona, the executive director of the Educational Theater Association, an organization of theater teachers. “Even if it’s just a bunch of girls dressed as ‘Newsies’ boys, which would not have been a big deal a few years ago, that’s now a big deal.”Teachers now find themselves desperately looking for titles that are somehow both relevant to today’s teenagers and unlikely to land them in trouble.“There’s a lot of not wanting any controversy of any kind,” said Chris Hamilton, the drama director at a high school in Kennewick, Wash. Hamilton said this past year was the first time, in 10 years of teaching, that a play he proposed was banned by school administrators: “She Kills Monsters,” a comedy about a teenager who finds solace in Dungeons & Dragons that is the seventh most popular school play in the country, and which features gay characters. “The level of scrutiny has grown,” Hamilton said.Around the country, in blue states as well as red, theater teachers say it has become increasingly difficult to find plays and musicals that will escape the kind of criticism that, they fear, could cost them their jobs or result in a cutback in funding. “People are losing their jobs for booking the wrong musical,” said Ralph Sevush, the executive director of business affairs at the Dramatists Guild of America.“A polarized society is fighting out the culture wars in high schools,” he added.Stephen Gregg, a longtime playwright in the school market, said removing gay characters from plays, as he has been asked to do, “sends a terrible message.”Alex Welsh for The New York TimesStephen Gregg, a playwright who has successfully been writing for high school students for three decades, said he was startled this year when his publishing house forwarded him an email seeking “major edits” to his science fiction comedy “Crush,” seeking to replace an anecdote about a gay couple with a straight one and explaining, “As we are a public school in Florida, we can’t have gay characters.”Gregg turned down the request, thinking, he said, that “you probably have gay kids in your theater program, and it sends a terrible message to them.”Several school productions made news this year when they were canceled over content concerns. In Florida’s Duval County, a production of “Indecent” was killed because of its lesbian love story. In Pennsylvania, the North Lebanon School District barred “The Addams Family,” the most popular school musical in the country, citing its dark themes.“There was a very clear streak of teacher cancellations this whole school year, and it is happening in parallel to, and related to, the efforts to ban books,” said Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education programs at PEN America. “Sometimes it affects plays in production, and sometimes it affects the approval of plays in the future. The whole climate is impacted.”Some productions have overcome objections. In New Jersey, Cedar Grove High School canceled a production of “The Prom,” a musical whose protagonist is a lesbian, but then relented and staged it after public pressure. In Indiana, after Carroll High School in Fort Wayne canceled a production of “Marian, or The True Tale of Robin Hood,” which is marketed as “a gender-bending, patriarchy-smashing, hilarious new take on the classic tale,” students staged it anyway at a local outdoor theater.A Florida school district canceled a production of “Indecent,” shown here on Broadway in 2018, because it concerns a lesbian love affair.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAutumn Gonzales, a teacher at Scappoose High School in Oregon, faced objections over a production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” a musical that has a character with two gay dads. She stuck with it — the show had been chosen by her students — and the production was allowed to proceed. But she is being extra cautious about next year. When her students expressed an interest in “Heathers,” which has suicide themes, she told them, “That is not going to happen.”“I’ve always tried to go for a middle ground,” she said.“We’re not going to do ‘Spring Awakening,’” she said, referring to the 2006 musical about young people and sexuality. “This just isn’t the community for that. But I’m also not going to deny the existence of gay people — that’s not any good for my student actors. I’m not going to be inflammatory for art’s sake, but I’m also not going to shy away from deeper messages.”The constraints, advocates say, are having an effect on the education of future artists and audience members.“Students deserve to have the opportunity to be exposed to a wide variety of work, not only the safest, most benign, most family-friendly material,” said Howard Sherman, the managing director of New York’s Baruch Performing Arts Center, who has been tracking the issue for years.In some areas, the contested plays cannot even be read: In Kansas, the Lansing school board, responding to objections from a parent, barred high school students from reading “The Laramie Project,” a widely staged and taught play about the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student in Wyoming.“Every year there have been a few schools that have banned a production, but this is the first time the play has been banned from being read,” said the play’s lead author, Moisés Kaufman, whose theater company offered to send its script to any Lansing student who asked. “I don’t want to be an alarmist, but it is alarming.” More

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      in Movies

      Pema Tseden, Pioneering Tibetan Filmmaker, Is Dead at 53

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      His films captured contemporary Tibetan life as Tibetans saw it, devoid of the stereotypes long associated with their homeland.Pema Tseden, a filmmaker and author who presented an honest look at contemporary Tibetan life despite intense scrutiny from Chinese censors, died on Monday in Tibet. He was 53.His death was announced in a statement by the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he was a professor. The statement did not specify a cause or say where he died.Tibet and its people have often been misrepresented with clichés. For the West, it was utopia, a fantasy based on the depiction of Shangri-La in the British author James Hilton’s 1933 novel, “Lost Horizon.” For the Communist Party of China, Tibetans were serfs or barbarians in need of rescue and rehabilitation, with propaganda films portraying Han cadres as liberators. Pema Tseden (pronounced WA-ma TSAY-ten in his native dialect), who like most Tibetans had no family name and went instead by his two given names, said that as a child, he had longed for accurate representations of his home, people and culture that existing Hollywood and Chinese films didn’t provide.“Whether it was the clothes, the customs, the manners, every element, even the smallest, was inaccurate,” he said in a 2019 interview. “Because of that, at the time, I thought that later on, if someone made films with even a little knowledge of the language of my people, the culture, the traditions of my people, it would be completely different.”In his films, Pema Tseden rarely depicted Tibet’s Chinese population, which swelled after the Red Army seized Tibet in 1951. To elude Chinese censors, he eschewed references to the Dalai Lama, who has been seen in China as supporting Tibetan independence. This allowed him to avoid overtly political critiques while still tackling broader themes, like the loss of traditions and identity in the face of modernization.Genden Phuntsok, left, and J. Jinpa in a scene from “Jinpa,” Pema Tseden’s film about a truck driver who runs over a sheep and then picks up a hitchhiker.Icarus FilmsHe was the first Tibetan filmmaker working in China to shoot a feature film entirely in the Tibetan language. He was also the first Tibetan director to graduate from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy, which cultivated the country’s leading directors. But like all artists in China exploring ethnic minorities and religion, he was subject to additional vetting from state censors and required to submit scripts in Chinese for review.“His challenge, of course, was to make films that would reflect a Tibetan sense of identity, a Tibetan cultural sensibility, while not upsetting the Chinese authorities,” Tenzing Sonam, a Tibetan filmmaker and writer living in Dharamshala, India, said by phone. “Pema Tseden navigated that fine line incredibly well.”In “The Silent Holy Stones” (2005), he depicted everyday Tibetan experiences: monks becoming engrossed with television, villagers rehearsing for a New Year’s opera performance. And in “Old Dog” (2011), images of barbed-wire fences stretching across the Tibetan grasslands examined the power of the state and the complexities of privatizing ancestral lands.Pema Tseden’s “Old Dog” (2011) examined the complexities of privatizing ancestral lands.Icarus FilmsHis movies were “not just about Tibet,” Tsering Shakya, a Tibetan historian and scholar at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, said in an interview. “This is about China and people who are left behind by China’s economic miracle.”As Pema Tseden’s clout grew, China’s film industry and its audiences began to accept Tibetan as a language used on the big screen. And by combining Tibetan traditions of oral storytelling and song with modern filmmaking formats, his movies gave rise to an entirely new genre that some called the Tibetan New Wave.“The stories his films contained — which are always meticulously framed and exquisitely modulated — speak powerful truths in the gentlest of voices,” said Shelly Kraicer, a Chinese cinema curator and researcher who wrote subtitles for some of Pema Tseden’s work. “He’s a key world filmmaker.”He sought to build a tight-knit network of Tibetan filmmakers, including Sonthar Gyal, Dukar Tserang, Lhapal Gyal and Pema Tseden’s, son, Jigme Trinley, who went on to direct their own films. Drivers, assistants and other members of the crew sometimes juggled more than one role, appearing as extras and coaching actors in regional dialects.“He created from scratch an embryonic Tibetan film circle, film industry,” Françoise Robin, a professor of Tibetan language and literature at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris who knew Pema Tseden for over two decades, said by phone. “He’s very faithful in friendship. Some people worked with him for 10 years.”“Tharlo” (2015), the story of a shepherd who travels outside his isolated village to register for a government ID, premiered at the Venice Film Festival.Tsemdo/Icarus FilmsPema Tseden was born on Dec. 3, 1969, in Qinghai Province, part of a northeastern region of Tibet traditionally known as Amdo. His parents were farmers and herders.He was raised by his grandfather, who asked him to copy out Buddhist scriptures by hand after school, a practice that instilled in him an early appreciation for Tibetan language and culture. He worked as a teacher for four years before studying Tibetan literature and translation at the Northwest University for Nationalities in Lanzhou. He then worked for several years as a civil servant in his home province.Starting in 1991, he published short stories set in Tibet, written in both Tibetan and Chinese, about individuals confronted with sweeping changes. They underscored the importance of forging a connection with nature and animals, showing “the complexity of life in the simplest language,” said Jessica Yeung, a professor at Hong Kong Baptist University who knew Pema Tseden for a decade and translated his work. He later adapted some of his stories into films.After attending the Beijing Film Academy in the early 2000s, he released “The Silent Holy Stones” to critical acclaim, as well as several other films. A decade later, “Tharlo” (2015), about the journey of a shepherd who must travel outside his isolated village to register for a government ID, premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It won numerous awards, including a Golden Horse Award for best adapted screenplay in Taiwan. Among Tibetans, it also became a seminal work for aspiring filmmakers within a few years.“A Tibetan film should show Tibetan life,” Pema Tseden said in an undated interview that was recently released by Kangba TV, a Tibetan-language broadcaster. “In my case, from my first film onward, I wanted my movies to absolutely include characters who are Tibetan, who would all speak Tibetan, and whose behavior and way of thinking were Tibetan. This is what makes Tibetan films different.”Pema Tseden’s subsequent films benefited from his higher profile. “Jinpa” (2018), about a truck driver who runs over a sheep and then picks up a hitchhiker, was produced by the Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai’s Jet Tone Films and premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Orizzonti Award for best screenplay. “Balloon” (2019), about a family coping with an unexpected pregnancy amid China’s family planning laws, also premiered in Venice. A forthcoming film, “Snow Leopard,” about the tense relationship between humans and predatory animals, is currently in postproduction. At his death, he was working on another film.Information on survivors in addition to his son was not immediately available.Li You More