The Nu-Normal #18: The Long Retcon
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The Nu-Normal #18: The Long Retcon
What is retroactive editing and what can it tell us about art?
Lately, I’ve noticed an interesting trend developing in a number of distinct yet comfortably related media spaces.
Since the mid-2000s, the gaming industry has operated with the capability to implement “bug patches” for online and console users, designed to fix and maintain sprawling MMO-RPG platforms while also updating and tweaking their products and services for the growing needs of consumers and (*ahem*) their all mighty bottom line.
However, as a recent GQ article points out, this model of “retroactive editing” for media content now appears, with the advent of entirely on-demand streaming platform behemoths and vast digital archives of licensed material, to be slowly encroaching on the realm of film, TV, and music.
So, what is retroactive editing and what can it tell us about art?
It’s All in the Edit
After the release of season four, volume one of Stranger Things in June, series creators The Duffer Brothers spoke with Variety and discussed their plans to go back and retroactively edit a moment from season two of the series, which has since become a fan-identified plot hole.
It was a small, relatively innocuous change (fixing an offhand mention of a character’s birthday to be consistent with events portrayed in a later season), but the creators made light of the act as doing a “George Lucas,” referencing a continual sore spot for the Star Wars fandom where the franchise creator went back and “updated” later editions of the original trilogy with new digital effects, pointless scene additions, and other non-sensical changes.
As Jack King writes in the GQ piece:
“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 [weren’t] a news story, the vast majority of viewers simply wouldn't notice. …
A show like Stranger Things, the most-watched series on Netflix in the English language, boasts huge cultural cachet: if the Duffers were to do it, who's to say that other creators wouldn't follow suit? 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.”
Of course, things eventually got out of control (because, why wouldn’t they?), and a TikTok user later went viral with claims that Netflix & the Duffers were retroactively “sneak” editing the series, removing entire scenes to change character motivations.
This assertion also made it into the GQ piece before fans quickly called the user’s bluff and actually checked the older seasons, finding them untampered and intact. As a result, GQ was forced to correct its article (via Deadline) and the Stranger Things writers were pretty smug about the whole thing:
On Twitter, the Stranger Things writers then followed up with this sick burn:
“It’s hilarious that an article bashing the show for retroactively editing a scene (based off a false TikTok rumour) has now had to retroactively edit their own article. Oops”
But at least the irony was not lost on King or GQ for the whole ordeal, as this correction disclaimer indicates:
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that a season one episode of Stranger Things had been edited retroactively to remove a shot of Jonathan photographing Nancy while she was changing. (And yes, we are aware of the irony).
Ouch.
Harm Seduction
As this whole situation illustrates, it’s not so much that retroactive edits of this kind actually took place but more the simple fact that, in theory, they could be done and, as the argument goes, likely will occur in the future. It’s this “slippery slope” of trend momentum that I think is interesting and worth interrogating further.
After all, within the music sphere, we’re already seeing how public pressure can influence massively successful recording artists in real time. As Bloomberg reported earlier this week, Beyonce is re-recording the song “Heated” from her recently released Renaissance album to remove an ableist slur after disabled advocacy groups highlighted the insensitivity of certain lyrics:
“‘Heated’ was co-written by Drake and featured a term that disability advocates say diminishes the lives of people with spasticity, a medical condition that results from neural pathway damage. … Representatives for Beyonce told CNN on Monday that ‘the word, not used intentionally in a harmful way, will be replaced.’”
Even more curious is that this isn’t even a one-off incident in popular music. In June, Lizzo apologized for using the same slur in her song “Grrrls,” after public outcry gathered steam on TikTok and other social media platforms. Beyoncé has also since removed an interpolation of Kelis’ hit single “Milkshake” from her Renaissance track “Energy” after the singer publically outed her for the lack of permission or proper credit provided for the sample to be used.
Taylor Swift scrubbed references to homophobic language off “Picture To Burn” as a show of solidarity alongside mounting pressure from her LGBTQ+ fanbase. Disney has inserted warnings and “context” notes to old films that use harmful racist stereotypes. Television shows like Community and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia have removed or taken down episodes that include highly problematic instances of blackface. So, it’s worth noting that these types of retroactive edits aren’t exactly new, either.
As Kate Demolder writes for RTÉ:
“These moves neither bray toward a politically correct mob nor translate into political programmes, instead opting to commit to the ever-evolving culture of living under an international climate. Both policies align more clearly with the oft-referenced ‘call-out culture,’ but it seems that the time for solely highlighting individual blunders for the edification of a global audience has passed. Instead, the trend of accusing and retracting language in modern-day music exists within the comfort zone of two separate goals: the righting of a specific, harm-inducing wrong and the redress [of] a larger imbalance of power. Neither account for cancel culture nor censorship, but are both purposefully linked to it in a way that allows for the casting of blame in an ever-shifting landscape. Left unanswered, then, is the unwillingness to change in a world seen to presently benefit you, and the desire to condemn those who question it.”
The point is that retroactively editing media to conform to new social norms and standards has been occurring for some time. What makes these new instances interesting then is the time scale from public release to the edit and the associated delivery mechanism.
Rather than having to buy or purchase a new or updated edition of a piece of media, the ubiquity of streaming means that the media item itself can be updated and edited without the fan/user/consumer being any wiser. And as the need for physical media declines in the face of convenience and ease of digital access (something I’m definitely guilty of), it appears that this slippery slope will only get slipperier.
Art Consequentialism
Okay, now that we’ve established what retroactive editing is and how it’s currently playing out in our current media landscape, we can circle back to our second question: what does this phenomenon tell us about art?
In a great piece for Columbus Monthly, titled “Beyoncé, Streaming Services and Worm-Filled Cans,” poet, cultural critic, and essayist Scott Woods makes a claim that really resonated with me:
“I don’t engage an artist’s work because it’s pure, but because it isn’t. People change. Rockers catch religion. Rehabilitation generates reflection. I’m OK with letting artists show us who they are and compelling them to do better the next time at bat as they learn and grow as human beings and not just dance party avatars. There is something truly wrong and broken about art that you cannot trust to, if nothing else, be its honest self.”
This conflation of art and purity really stood out to me. Because, to suggest that art should be otherwise, as Woods does, and I—at least on principle, tend to agree with—means… what exactly? What’s the opposite of pure? If, like me, you quickly Googled ‘pure antonym’ to find the answer, well, you would be shit out of luck. The returned result of ‘impure’ isn’t exactly helpful, but once again, I think this is a point worth interrogating.
Within the realms of philosophy and cultural criticism, there are several positions on the issue of artistic value. One of the more interesting and obscure ways of thinking about this problem comes from a series of 2013 Blogspot posts by Michael C. Bitton.
In a piece titled “Art Consequentialism,” Bitton lays out his core thesis:
“Crudely put, the goodness or badness of a work of art is directly dependent on the quality of the real-world consequences it leads to, where consequences are judged based on their ability to maximize wellbeing and minimize suffering. If you compared two works of art and one had better consequences on the world than the other, there is no quality or combination of qualities that the second work could possess that would steer me from my preference for the first work. Of course, what we should be striving for is the optimal equilibrium of cultural output. … Art consequentialism allows us to unify our understanding of art with rational and moral thinking.”
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have some issues with Bitton’s position, which I’ll get into in a moment, but I think his framing is quite useful for thinking through the scenarios that involve retroactive editing.
In the cases of Beyoncé and Lizzo, it’s clear that an art consequentialist view is useful for evaluating the desired outcome. The original versions of these songs included ableist slurs, so they were edited retroactively and amended. The same goes for Taylor Swift, Disney cartoons, blackface episodes, etc. Wellbeing maximized and suffering minimized overall. Fair enough.
But what about Stranger Things? Is there any real harm done when a fictional character’s backstory mentions two conflicting dates of birth across four seasons of television? Perhaps not. Maybe at the expense of the show’s creators and writers for messing up their own continuity. For the art consequentialist, then, which version is better? More pure, to circle back to Woods’ above?
Artistic Integrity vs. Aesthetic Sincerity
In arguing for art consequentialism and the position that objectively “good” art must seek to accomplish something, Bitton acknowledges that his position might not be for everyone:
“I suspect that this seems intuitively wrong to most people, as it fails to take into consideration originality, popularity, timelessness, emotional impact, [the] profundity of ideas, or any other typical criteria for evaluating art.”
Yeah, no kidding. I can think of plenty of art that does not “objectively” maximise well-being or minimise suffering. And yet, I firmly believe that this art nonetheless has real, intrinsic value.
For Britton, the concept of “artistic integrity”—the notion “that an artist is given the control to make whatever creative decisions [they] want to achieve [their] end-values—is inherently crazy because it denies or overrides other external factors involved in the creation of art, namely the production and use of resources like time and money. As Britton puts it:
“Art is … driven by heuristics, intuitions, and impulses. Its end values can be aesthetic beauty, high praise from peers, accurate self-expression, feelings of catharsis, pride in one's own abilities, the exchange of ideas, or a million other things. … Maybe there's something different about art. Maybe, unlike those other disciplines, art is precisely about pure creativity, about not having any rules to follow, about not making sure to maximize cost-effectiveness, and about not having any practical use. If that is the case, then, unlike those other disciplines, art must not take place in the real world.”
Frankly, I think that thinking of art’s objective value purely in terms of material, real-world benefits and consequentialist ethics, which just so happen to be constrained by capitalist modes of production and distribution, is an inherently crazy position. But that’s just me.
Bitton’s position appears to ignore the ability of art to register at the level of the sublime, something which laser-focused advocates of reason have been aggressively bumping their big brain heads against for centuries. It’s not that the creation and production of art should be forever “exempt from utilitarian calculations,” but we should also acknowledge that truly great art, historically speaking, requires more than stone-cold cold reason to blossom.
In this view, I’m more inclined to agree with C. Thi Nguyen’s position on cultivating “aesthetic sincerity” over any sense of artistic integrity:
“In practices where we pursue originality, there can be no guarantee that an artist will find an audience or that audiences will find art to their liking. But that is the cost of engaging in any deeply unpredictable creative endeavor. The best we can do is to collectively adopt commitments to aesthetic sincerity—to promise each other to be guided by our sense of aesthetic value. We cannot coordinate on a specific aesthetic result if our interest is in finding new results, but we can coordinate on staying together within the realm of the aesthetic.” (48)
Here, we can see a better way to evaluate the need and implementation of retroactive editing. George Lucas’ treatment of his original Star Wars trilogy was divisive because it was deemed by fans to be aesthetically insincere, not adding to the media through originality but twisting and distorting the aesthetic qualities that were already there and highly revered.
Likewise, with Stranger Things, changing a birthday for continuity purposes is in line with the creator’s vision of aesthetic sincerity in having a television series that is narratively coherent. We may quibble about whether they should do it or not, through the various platforms and mechanisms that make such a thing possible, but the reasoning behind the act itself is not insincere. However, removing entire scenes and changing the course of the entire series, well, that smacks of insincerity and flies in the face of fan goodwill.
Sometimes, media becomes all the better for its flaws and blemishes.
If we constantly airbrush and sanitise the past, we might lose the perspective necessary to evaluate the need for change that fuels so much of our creative endeavours.