Greed, Dahl/Fleming, Legacy and Media Literacy

As a writer, as well as someone who is deeply invested in the place of storytelling in culture and human life more broadly, I'm interested in all of the things the current controversy surrounding changes being made to the works of Ronald Dahl and Ian Fleming. It's a convergence, a nexus point, for a number of different issues at the heart of how we see storytelling that has come to have some degree of cultural prominence, how we individually feel about or see works which have had some degree of meaning to us, and how we feel about the concept of storytelling as part of a cultural legacy. 

All of that is extremely interesting to me. That's not the conversation that is generally happening though. The conversation that's happening, the perspective which is being adopted and pushed is related to the concept of "censorship," in one way or another. Americans have big feelings about the concept of censorship, so being able to tie anything to it, in any way, by even alluding to the whisper of it, is more or less guaranteed to engender a reaction. 

What's happened is that this has been framed as an issue related to "cancel culture." Basically, "The wokes are coming for your beloved classics." That is complete and utter bullshit, and factually, is not what has happened. It does fit with the current moral panic about what we euphemistically call "social justice." Social justice is just a euphemism for a belief that equity is one of the moral imperatives in a society, and especially one which claims to be democracy. The degree to which the people who have a pathological need for others to recognize them as reasonable, sensible and being capable of being moderate, have continued to fall for this canard feels like something out of a Christopher Guest or Armando Iannucci faux documentaries. The lengths they'll go to to defend having been conned, without admitting to being conned, are absurd. We've been watching this cycle repeat itself now for over a decade, and no learning has occurred. 

What's happened, in reality, which is different from the fever dream that is now the delusion right wing America exists within, is that a business decision has been made on the part of people who own a product, in order to make that product more enticing to perspective customers of a new generation.  

As far as we know, no publishers who previously published these works have told the copyright holders they would no longer publish them. This would also be a business decision, the variety publishers and distributors of fiction of any kind make all the time. There certainly hasn't been any attempt by government intervene. There's been no law dictating whether these works can be produced, sold or distributed. There hasn't even been a dedicated effort to pressure the rights holders to change these works.  

What's happened, in reality, is that the copyright holders have made a decision to change the text of these "classic works" in order to continue appealing to the widest possible audience, amidst changing social norms. There have been instances of individuals bringing up parts of Dahl and Fleming's work that are related to these changing social norms, but there hasn't even been any kind of organized effort to prevent them from being produced. 

In reality, "the wokes" haven't even cared enough about Ronald Dahl or Ian Fleming to attempt to even organize boycott, and if individuals have attempted to, they've failed at gathering anything like enough attention for those to have had any cultural impact. 

The copyright holders, whether they're formed as "estates" or "foundations" have made fortunes on the profits from these works. The Ian Fleming James Bond novels spawned one of the most successful film franchises in history, on top of the success of the novels themselves. Every Bond film is adding to that fortune. 

The same is true of Dahl's works, and children's books are big business. For writers, a successful children's book is the ticket to what is basically a never ending stream of income. It's something you will find suggested in a few million, "How To Make A Living As A Writer" articles and books. It's akin to the advice given to musicians about making a Christmas record. Many of Dahl's works are still part of every children's library in the country, and many of those works have been adapted to film, with varying levels of monetary success. 

Both men made fortunes based on their works during their lifetimes, and are long dead. They established plans for who was passed the power to make decisions about those works, and who would control the money they continued to generate. Ian Fleming Publishing holds the rights to Fleming's work. The Ronald Dahl Story Company, which was purchased by Netflix in 2021, owns the rights to Dahl's work. 

We're talking about a lot of money. Scrooge McDuck money. People (probably a legion of lawyers and descendants of the authors) are swimming in the fortunes these works have generated. The rights are profitable enough for Netflix to decide it was worth more to buy the Ronald Dahl Story Company than to buy the rights to individual stories and characters. 

This is about money, and by extension, copyright. It's really a question about whether works which have reached a status where they are considered "culturally significant" are owned by the culture(s) which have given them that significance or they are owned by a small few. 

There has been an ongoing (circular) discussion about the works of Mark Twain, not dissimilar to discussions which have happened related to Dahl's work (and Fleming's work to a much lesser extent). The copyrights to Mark Twain's works are held by Richard A. Watson and J.P. Morgan Chase Bank as the trustees of the Mark Twain Foundation. The response to those discussions has been to leave the works intact, and to let the discussion about their legacy be part of their cultural legacy. There may not be a more influential  writer in the canon of "Great American Literature" than Mark Twain, and as far as the copyright holders were concerned, it was better to maintain the text as it was originally written than to attempt to avoid any drop in revenue which might result from questions about Twain's cultural legacy. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is littered with that specific, most horrifically deployed racial epithet for Black people in American culture. Putting that in context of the novel's perspective and that it's clear Twain meant for the book to refute racist sentiment, leads to thorny discussions, as well it should. How can this have been an attempt to refute racism? Well, that's how deeply seeded in our cultural consciousness the most debilitating and mind numbing ideas of racism have been. 

Every year, when the Mark Twain Prize is awarded by The Kennedy Center, there are a handful of pieces written which question the wisdom of continuing to have the award named after Twain, because it is essentially the highest status award a storyteller in the United States can receive. It's considered akin to receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom. As with Dahl and Fleming, there's been no coordinated effort.

I point this out, specifically because it is an option. 

This is one of the many questions about copyright law that has existed for a long time. When has a work crossed a threshold that its value to the culture it exists in supersedes the right of the person/people who have the copyright? That's the issue at hand, more than anything else. It's not about censorship. It's about what the right thing is to do with works which a substantial portion of two nations (Dahl and Fleming are both British, in case you didn't know) consider of cultural importance. Who gets to decide what is in the best interest of works that are of substantial cultural importance? 

In this case, it's the rights holders. There is an argument to be made that they are making a decision based on what's best for the legacy of the works they're charged with protecting. Is changing text in those works so that they won't alienate new readers in a new cultural landscape, and therefore have the best opportunity to continue being of substantial cultural importance (and relevance) in the best interest of those works? The risk to leaving them as they were originally written is that if cultural norms continue to change, they could essentially disappear. It happens all the time. 

Legally, it's both their right and their duty to do what they believe is best for those works. I may personally think they're just trying to continue to swim in money like Scrooge McDuck, but the argument  about the well being of the works and authors legacies isn't unconvincing either.

This is part of the problem, underlying this argument. When Dahl's or Fleming's rights holders decide to change the "official" version of those texts, those official version are what will be printed or otherwise sold from that point forward. The original and the official become two different things, and because the official version is the only one being legally distributed, it's more or less a matter of time before the original passes out of circulation, become a curio or an object of collector's fetish. 

We've lost more of the early history of film than we've preserved, because the people who owned those works didn't think they were worth protecting and preserving. That's not just a few works which may have at some point had high regard, it's the early history of a new art form, and most of it is gone. Those works don't get to have a legacy celebrating their place in that history or dissecting what their legacy is. They're gone, and basically no one cares. A small number of people care about this. Politicians and the editorial pages of major publications are railing about the loss, nor are they trying to secure funding to continue preservation efforts. The general public doesn't give a shit.  

The number of novels which have fallen into obscurity outnumbers the books in any library, on the shelf at any bookstore, the number of books currently available in Amazon's vast digital inventory. With the exception of collectors, historians, sociologists and a few others with a particular interest in them, the entire genre of the etiquette manuals for women has essentially disappeared. They're not impossible to get, but this was one of the most popular genres of book in the 1900's. It was big business. There's a reason those have passed out of relevance, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, a whole other variety of novel, is still being taught in classrooms across the United States and many countries where English is the dominant or national language. As much as the way we use language has changed, the themes are relevant today (maybe too relevant), and it's one of the pillars from which an entire genre of fiction creates its foundation. That a nineteen year old woman wrote one of the foundational texts of one of the most popular genres in modern fiction is not the sole reason it is still relevant, but it is among the many reasons it's relevant. For science fiction (and horror) readers, and people who love literature, it is relevant to ask why and how a genre which a young woman helped established became thoroughly dominated by men for throughout the 20th century. Asking a question like that would be engaging in "wokeism" though, however relevant it may be to literary history and the history of a particular "great work," isn't it?

Here's the other thing about Frankenstein, it's now considered public domain. Basically anyone can distribute copies. If someone decided they wanted to distribute a heavily edit version of the original text, there is nothing to stop anyone else from distributing the original. Copyright prevents anything other than the "official" versions" of Dahl and Fleming's work from being distributed or sold. 

Instead of addressing any of the many genuinely troubling issues the concept of "free speech" seems to be facing, we've seen weeks of this bullshit, an intended consequence of the way copyright law works turned into yet another example of the bullshit moral panic the right has been pushing for a few years. We'll see if in the coming days and weeks there's quite the same shit storm over the Republican controlled legislature of Florida deciding they like the idea that bloggers who cover Ron DeSantis have to register with the state. Somehow, I'm not optimistic this will get the same feverish coverage, even as it presents a much more direct assault on the concept of free speech and freedom of the press. 

All versions of The Great Gatsby printed or sold since the mid-90's have had changes to the original text, made to clean up some inconsistencies in timelines and character histories. There hasn't been a collective pants shitting over this, has there? Why? In reality, no one gives a shit. The history of works by Shakespeare and Faulkner include significant changes to their presentation from one point in time to the other. There's no urgent national discussion because the reality is the general public does not give a shit. 

It's not controversial, at all, to say there is a significant issue with media literacy among the general public. No small part of that arises from the fact that arts education has been systemically under funded, devalued and treated as a luxury, by the predecessors of the people currently driving this inane discussion about Dahl and Fleming. Media literacy is one of the results of arts education. We can attempt to create curriculums which are going to instill media literacy, but they are almost guaranteed to fall far short, and those that exist already do. We can teach the concepts necessary for media literacy, but arts education teaches how to apply them beyond a few narrow examples, and how to extrapolate those concepts into new areas. The arts shouldn't be considered magic some small elite few are gifted with the talents and traits to engage in. Each medium has a set of skills, and the people working in those mediums apply their personal perspective to how to use those skills. There are tricks of each trade. 

Here's the thing, when you teach someone how to do the trick, it's harder for the next person who comes along to successfully trick them. They see the mechanics of how it works. It's part of why illusionists past out of fashion, and have become a kind of cultural curio. The secrets of the illusions became easily found during the period illusionists were drawing huge crowds, what are the equivalent of stadium sized audiences in their day, there was a press ready to reveal the secrets to every illusion the second they discovered them. It's not magic once you can see the sleight of hand or know where the mirror is positioned etc. It's just an illusion, a trick, which might be interesting, but it's not magic. Part of arts education is teaching people how the tricks work. 

A media literate populace, who have at some point been taught to do the tricks being used to generate a never ending outrage fueled sense of grievance, are going to catch on. Why is it elite institutions put such a focus on "debate" as being central to their curriculums, and still have debate teams and debate clubs, but poor schools have out of date textbooks? The popular conception is that debate is a central part of democracy, but it's hard to think it's not also related to the question of who gets taught how the tricks of rhetoric and formal logic work, who gets the benefits of that knowledge, including who gets to be part of shaping what the narratives and discussions of tomorrow are. In short, who gets formal training in the art of persuasion, and therefore understands what the tricks and skills are to that endeavor? 

Part of having a populace which is media literate, is having a populace who understands how these industries work, like say, how copyright generally works. But, that would also mean a media literate populace would understand things like the effects consolidation within the media industries. When, for instance, publishing houses or film studios are being swallowed up by mergers creating multimedia conglomerates, it also means an ever increasing number of culturally significant works are coming under the control of an ever decreasing number of people. You don't have to hate Disney to worry about the fact that they now control a breathtaking amount of culturally significant intellectual property, and I don't just mean Star Wars or Marvel. You do have to understand what it means to know that there are important questions to what is happening, today, with the recent merger between Warner Brothers and Discovery and that their recent decisions related to intellectual property suggest a deeply troubling future. There should be serious discussions about what this consolidated control of this number of media industries and cultural significant creations means, but there isn't, because the general public has no clue how important it is, both in the present and for the future. This exact same process is happening within the publishing industry too. 

The entire freakout around the works of Dahl and Fleming, as its playing out, is bullshit. There could be meaningful questions brought to table, but they're not going to be. That would require either a public which is media literate or it would require institutional powers who desire a media literate public, and we currently have neither. The status quo is very good for all of them. The wealthy stay wealthy, tomorrow's hucksters have a well established pathway to power, all remains as it has been. 

Plainly, no one gives a shit.