I awoke Wednesday to a strange comment on the Youtube channel, in which someone claimed that the classic cop movie “The French Connection” had been censored.
You might have heard of this since, for whatever reason, this one went viral; everybody knows by now, and no one is happy.
The claim is that a part of a scene was snipped in the movie, one in which the main character, a tough cop named Popeye Doyle, uses a racial epithet that’s the most taboo word in America right now, except when it’s used hundreds of times in certain rap songs or Tarantino movies but nevermind.
I checked for myself. It’s all true.
The scene is at about the 10:00 mark, in a police station. Popeye Doyle talks to his partner, and as they are debriefing about something that just happened, Doyle says “never trust a ——-.”
He follows that up with another line that seems crucial to the entire movie, and yet was also cut: “never trust anyone.” Oh, and he also calls his partner an ethnic slur, one nearly nobody knows now, which was also cut. It’s all part of the same exchange in the film.
You can only find the censored part on the Bluray/DVD version of the movie. That’s because, apparently, Disney cut 45 seconds from the movie, and then they licensed it out to all other streamers, who are using the censored version.
That includes Criterion, probably the most anti-censorship organization going in the film preservation business.
And there’s no warning or message that the original film has been altered, either.
Does this mean anything?
Yes, it means that no movie on any streaming service can be completely trusted to be presented in full.
What happened to “The French Connection” wasn’t just one of those pre-movie trigger-warning message about modern taboos being violated in older movies. You can see plenty of those, for example, on Disney+, where anything older than 2012 probably has some warning about the presentation of racial stereotypes and other purportedly offensive material.
Nope, what Disney did is straight out of 1984. In that book, Winston Smith cut offensive passages out of older, historical material in order to maintain ideological purity. Big Brother demanded such destruction. Nobody was told about this, for the purposes of secular power and control. “He who controls the past controls the future,” etc.
As I said, in the streaming version of “The French Connection,” there are no warnings about the censored scene. You would never know it unless somebody found out and the news went viral.
I sure didn’t. In fact, I watched the censored version unknowingly back in January 2022, twice. (Therefore, do the math, the censored version has been up for at least 18 months.)
Here’s partly why this censorship is so bad: it alters the artwork as it was made. And not just dialogue-cutting. In my notes on the movie in January 2022, I said there was a weird jumpcut at 10:05.
I assumed the jumpcut was part of the movie’s fragmentation of reality, plus part of the documentary tones of the film.
But guess what? There was no jumpcut, not in the original that won an Academy Award for Best Picture in 1971.
When I went to make my “What Makes This Movie Great?” video on The French Connection, I couldn’t find the jumpcut to use as an example in the video. At that point, I was using the Bluray version for cutting and pasting clips into this video I was making.
Where’d the cut go?
I didn’t know, and so I assumed that my notes were erroneous, or I had written down the wrong timestamp.
But now I know: that was the censored version that had the jumpcut, which was made by some Winston Smith inside Disney headquarters.
They’ve altered artwork to suit some ideological standard. And they didn’t tell anybody. This is no different than taking a chisel to a famous statue and cutting something off or making several new marks.
Pardon my high horse: it’s fraudulent. It passes off a work of art as in tact when it’s not. We would believe we are seeing the movie as it was in 1971, but now we know we aren’t. This kind of fraud corrupts the study of art history, and history itself.
Why is this stupid?
One argument is that Disney’s presupposition in censoring the scene is they believe in “magic word” harm.
They edited out a bad word used badly, in a scene of dialogue.
But they left in all the scenes of police brutality towards black people.
I can’t conclude anything else but this: they believe that words are inherently more harmful than images.
Maybe they are right. I don’t think they are, not close. No matter what, this is bizarre to say the least.
Does the image not convey a similar thing to the word? Why not cut out the images, as American TV has done for decades, or as the Christian “Cleanflicks” company used to. (Check out the history of Cleanflicks and how much Hollywood HATED the censorship done to it.)
Second, and this is probably the better argument, any adult watching a movie knows that when a character says something hideous, that does not mean that the artwork is approving of that hideous thing.
It clearly doesn’t in “The French Connection,” a movie long lauded for portraying corrupt cops in a corrupt city, something that has existed in the past and will exist in the future (although we hope not).
You learn this in grade school. Actually, you just pick this up on your own: the character is not the author, which is not the artwork. None of them affirm each other just by being associated with each other. Gene Hackman is not a racist because he plays a character who utters a racist remark.
This most of us know, yet Disney assumes not just the opposite. It assumes the artwork is so corrupting of any audience and so off-brand that it will just delete anything it pleases without warning. That’s why they have effectively told us.
If Disney were consistent, they would have to delete the corpus of Tarantino movies if they owned the rights to them.
What does this all mean?
Maybe nothing, if you’re a casual film fan.
Actually, no. It means these giant corporations will cut out anything, doctoring artwork and not telling you they did it, thereby treating you both as children and as Big Brother’s prole-minions.
I don’t have to tell you that’s 100% against historical preservation, something that monks ancient and modern, museum curators, Criterion, and historians everywhere ought to demand because it is absolutely crucial to their enterprise.
It’s also against the people of the past, those who have studied the artwork, those who worked on it, those who have argued hard for and against it, and those who teach it and are learning about it.
This is manipulative iconoclasm, done in secret.
It’s more cowardly than any obvious destruction of religious artwork, any covering of nudes, or any government censorship of books. At least when those things happen, they tell you that they are doing them. Like them or not, Cleanflicks was completely clear about their agenda.
What else has Disney altered? That’s the question we are all asking, mainly because Disney bought 20th Century Fox, owning the entire archive of a great studio.
That’s how “The French Connection” was altered: it became Disney’s because it was a Fox Studio movie.
So what else have they changed without telling us?
Nobody knows. Paranoia now increases, and all trust between us and them has gone from high to low.
(By the way, I really hate anything that makes social trust go from high to low to nothing — you can read that bias into anything I ever write or say.)
Can I now trust any streaming service to show me a movie in full, as it was made?
How about any Bluray or disc? Are those the versions in their entirety?
Or is there a Winston Smith and Ministry of Truth, working behind the scenes to doctor 20th century artwork for whatever reason they wish?
Once AI improves, how many fake scenes or doctored movie scenes will be passed off as originals?
The only answer is that some of us need to turn into monks, curating and preserving originals for the sake of the historical record.
If the corporations can’t be trusted to be good archivists, it’s up to you and me to do it ourselves.
Disappointed but not surprised. Guess I’ll be buying the French Connection Blu-ray sooner than planned. Thank you for reporting on this Josh. Please continue to do so. Keep up the good work in general.