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Does Racism and Hate Speech Belong in Film?
It depends on whether you want honest movies or not
There has descended upon the world of teaching and movies a plague of comfort.
Influencers and administrators aver that students in classrooms should feel comfortable. Pundits assert that movies ought to be healing, nourishing, reassuring, uplifting, socially impactful, and life-affirming.
Doesn’t that sound nice?
To me, such thinking represents the death of learning and the destruction of worthy filmed dramatic narratives.
The last thing teachers should want in their classrooms is for anyone to feel comfortable. Certainly there is no place for hostility and intimidation. But comfort? Educators should not comfort new writers but provoke them, upset them, disturb them into thinking for themselves. Rather than force-feeding new writers a set of spoon-fed principles that may be precious to their instructors, good teachers encourage them instead to discover their own voices.
From time to time, in order to underscore a point in a lesson, good teachers might argue on behalf of positions they do not actually hold. Indeed, for the purposes of a class, teachers might occasionally pretend to embrace views that they find loathsome.
