Image description: a screenshot from the Wikipedia page for the Doctor Who TV series, with a user-added caption that reads “Preserve the media you can before it’s gone forever.” The Wikipedia article reads, “No 1960s episodes exist on their original videotapes (all surviving prints being film transfers), though some were transferred to film for editing before transmission and exist in their broadcast form. [88] Some episodes have been returned to the BBC from the archives of other countries that bought prints for broadcast or by private individuals who acquired them by various means. Early colour videotape recordings made off-air by fans have also been retrieved, as well as excerpts filmed from the television screen onto 8 mm cine film and clips that were shown on other programmes. Audio versions of all lost episodes exist from home viewers who made tape recordings of the show. Short clips from every story with the exception of Marco Polo (1964), “Mission to the Unknown” (1965) and The Massacre (1966) also exist.”
I agree with you that it’s a complicated issue with no right answer and I don’t think that warrants the total destruction of the piece of media in question. And I don’t think you meant that it did either, but it seems that people think you did.
This situation reminds me of the old episodes of Mickey Mouse (Steamboat Willy? I can’t remember the exact cartoon the episodes came from, if they even came from a specific series at all and weren’t just one-offs) where Disney has a disclaimer on them if they’re ever shown anywhere about how they are for archival purposes only and that they reflect the views and culture of the time that they were made in, and how that doesn’t make those views okay. Because they’re super fuckin’ racist cartoons, like full on black people = monkeys racist, and Disney knows that that’s not okay (more like they know that showing that would lose them money at any rate), but that doesn’t mean that they’re not worth preserving so that we don’t lose sight of what the past actually was like and allow people to slap rose colored glasses on the “better days” or something.
As others have mentioned too, it also depends on how the depiction is used. Like when there was all that outrage over the Cyberpunk 2077 Chimaera “Mix it Up” posters of the girl with the giant “package” under her one piece. Yes, those posters are gross sexual objectification and horribly transphobic, but that’s the point. They’re intended to show how fucked up the dystopia of 2077 America is and how advertising has always used sexual objectification to sell products, and if a company thinks that using trans people’s bodies will sell a product, they absolutely will. Just like they do every year with Rainbow Capitalism during Pride.
There are times when the destruction of something horrible is absolutely the way to go, like when Germany destroyed all the Nazi statues right after WW2 and put a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust where Hitler’s bunker had been. But even then, it’s vital to preserve that past so it can’t be washed away. The Germans also took photos of the statues they destroyed, to preserve it so that something like that can’t happen again. We can’t learn from our mistakes if there’s no evidence that they even happened.
I agree that preserving the bigotries of the past to show people what they were like critically is important. Although I don’t think Cyberpunk counts in this instance. Yes, the artist who originally drew that poster had the intention of satirising the way capitalist companies use trans bodies to sell anything. The problem is, then CD Projekt Red, the capitalist company, used the poster to sell their game. They did the exact thing they were trying to satirise. At one point they held a cosplay contest, and the winner was a cis woman who stuck a glowing dildo up her pants to cosplay as the woman in that poster. And CDPR put images of her cosplay all over their twitter. A cis woman dressed up as a satire of the commodification of trans bodies to win a contest, and a company used her image to sell a video game. You can’t have effective satire while doing the very thing you “satirised”. I believe the original artist intended to satirise, but the company that owns the rights to the image just played it straight and did the horrible thing in sincerity.
That’s a great point about the poster and the contest, I’d never made that connection before. I mostly remembered the backlash targeted against the original artist of the poster and the bitter irony of the company using the poster to do the exact thing it was created to criticize. I remember the cosplay contest and thinking that that was a gross costume, but didn’t think any further about their use of the photos of a cis woman cosplaying as an over-sexualized trans woman to sell the game or anything. Just goes to show that even as a member of the targeted community, you can miss these kinds of things.
It’s great that you’re so open minded to seeing things from another perspective.
I don’t blame the artist who originally drew that poster, but I do think she could have played it smarter than to give a AAA gaming company the rights to a controversial and nuanced satire of transphobia. The result of that is kind of inevitable when you consider the capitalist context of big companies like CDPR. I totally want to see political media exploring these issues in indie games, but trusting big corporations to have a nuanced discussion of the most delicate trans issues is a bad idea. A cis woman with a glowing dildo up her pants on CDPR’s Twitter was kind of inevitable