I’m dating myself (again), this time, I suppose, by admitting that I still buy DVDs. That’s my Generation Jones fondness for ownership, and my own hoarding instinct, but there’s something else at play. Rely on a streaming service and things can, in our age of cancellation, either disappear, never to be seen again, or they can be tinkered with, perhaps to remove a scene now deemed offensive or, less malignly, for artistic reasons.
GQ:
Given the relative permanence of TV and film, you’d think the screen industries will remain unscathed — but you’ll be so, so very wrong, if Stranger Things creators the Duffers get their way.
In an interview with Variety in early June, the sibling directorial duo confirmed plans to “George Lucas” — ie. retrospectively edit, as has been the Star Wars progenitor’s unpopular bent with later editions of the original franchise trilogy — a moment in Stranger Things season two, owing to a fan-identified plot hole. It’s a simple mistake of an expansive series costing $30 million an episode, really: the creative team set an episode of Stranger Things 4 on March 22, forgetting that it had been established as Will Byers’ (Noah Schnapp) birthday in the earlier season.
To be fair, March 22 is a day that needs to be respected. Not only is it (it appears: I haven’t watched the show) Will Byers’s birthday, but it’s also mine, K-Lo’s, and William Shatner’s (Captain Kirk’s too).
GQ:
The error is mostly anodyne, singularly offensive to the most hand-wringing of pedants (it’s giving Genius At Work), and certainly not something that needs to be fixed after the fact. The given reason for the tweak? They didn’t want the fans to feel sad, or to be mad at them for their negligence.
Confirmation was given to Variety later that month. “We have George Lucas’d things also that people don’t know about,” Matt Duffer said, declining to touch upon the specific alterations made to previous seasons…Editing a continuity error after the fact would be fairly innocuous if not for the implied slippery slope. No one can ever convince me, a rational person, that anyone aside from a subset of weirdos online would actually care — but hey, said tweaks bode no dramatic change, and if this wasn’t a news story, the vast majority of viewers simply wouldn’t notice. Season one came out six years ago, after all: it’s not as though most watchers are tracing back character beats like an archivist for Ancestry.com, as much as I’m sure the Duffers would like to think the Kool-Aid has been more widely sampled.
A show like Stranger Things, the most highly watched series on Netflix in the English language, boasts huge cultural cachet: if the Duffers are doing it, who’s to say that other creators won’t? One day patches might become as commonplace in screen media as they are in video games, and that is a truly worrying precedent for consumers and the integrity of art alike.
In principle, retrospective tinkering (or more) is fine (if “censors” are not involved), but ideally the viewer should, if he or she wants (and their psychiatric nurses are okay with it), be able to compare different iterations of the same product. If we’re talking relatively small changes (repackaged films such as the various editions of Apocalypse Now and Blade Runner — I have the DVDs, each version, perfectly normal thing to have done — are a different matter), that is unlikely to be possible with streamed content. DVDs, of course, can also be messed around with, but not remotely. The answer, therefore, for strict originalists, unwilling to try their luck and the law by recording content streamed on, say, Netflix, is not to hesitate too long before buying the DVD version of any movie or show they wish to preserve in all its original glory.
Now I think of it, maybe it’s time for me to invest in the complete Breaking Bad (the greatest TV series ever made, in case you wondered). There’s a show that could fall foul of someone someday . . .
There is a wider, more serious point to be made about how new technologies are changing our ability to rewrite history. The Internet may indeed be the greatest store of information that any society has ever had, but I’m not sure we fully understand how effectively it can be used to mess with the past as well as the present. Conventional wisdom has it that, once something is on the Internet, it’s forever. Maybe, maybe not. That people can just make things up online is hardly a revelation, but smaller, subtler changes can be made, with little or no chance of discovery, obscuring the original item, which will be lost, probably, beyond recall.