Those bad old tropes: Cancel or critique?

Given today's long-overdue focus on systemic racism — and the raging culture wars that awareness has engendered — it's reasonable to wonder what the future will be (and should be) for storied but politically offensive movies like "Gone With the Wind," "The Searchers," "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" and "The Jazz Singer."

These are just a handful among the hundreds — maybe thousands — of old Hollywood films with scenes, themes and language ranging from highly objectionable to abhorrent. The romanticization of slavery in "Gone With the Wind," one of history's most beloved movies, is truly shocking when watched today — but so is the less-familiar image of Al Jolson falling to his knees in blackface in "The Jazz Singer" and the insidiously cheerful musical sexism of 1954's "Seven Brides."

For years the battle over such films has been between those who want these sorts of bigoted movies deplatformed and those who dismiss such ideas as "cancel culture" and prefer the world to go on as it always has.

Sometimes it feels like middle ground is hard to find. But I was cheered recently to see that Turner Classic Movies had chosen a thoughtful third way for dealing with what it called "problematic" old movies in a series called "Reframed," which aired this month.

Rather than burying offensive films in some basement vault and pretending they never were made, TCM instead picked 18 movies — including the ones above — and aired them over four weeks. In the featured films, men abduct women, Asians are mimicked, Native Americans are dehumanized, and African Americans are ridiculed and demonized (not to mention bought and sold).

But instead of presenting them without comment, TCM added intros and after-discussions in which its film expert hosts discuss the movies through "a modern lens."

"Male domination as romantic fantasy" is discussed in connection with "Seven Brides," a musical comedy in which seven backwoods frontiersmen kidnap seven women to be their wives.

"Gone With the Wind" was flatly (and rightly) characterized as "supporting a white supremacist point of view."

Mickey Rooney's appalling comic portrayal of the Japanese photographer who lives upstairs from Audrey Hepburn's character in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" was discussed as a vile relic of World War II animosity.

Discussion. Analysis. Reconsideration of the stereotypes and bigotry that suffuse these films. A review of the historical context in which they were made. These strike me as healthy ways to approach troubling old movies (as well as troubling books, statues and school names). Suppression, by contrast, is a form of denial, of erasing the reality of past attitudes.

Not that TCM did it perfectly. The "Reframed" discussions are heavy on white presenters. There is an annoyingly measured quality in the discussions — even of the most egregiously racist films. (Perhaps that was unavoidable from a group of avowed cinephiles speaking on a network whose core business, after all, is showing old movies.)

One of the big questions that went undiscussed in the segments I saw was how we should feel about these films. What if we fall for the romance of Rhett and Scarlett in "Gone With the Wind," despite knowing all the reasons we shouldn't? What if we root for cowboys over Indians in a western? Are these things unavoidable — or are they moral failings?

"Reframed" comes in the wake of, among other things, a Los Angeles Times op-ed article written in June 2020 by John Ridley, the African American director, screenwriter and novelist, who called for HBO Max to remove "Gone With the Wind" from its rotation of films — then, after a period, to return it to the air, presented with more context. HBO Max did exactly that.

Hollywood is rethinking what gets made, who gets to make it and what from the past should still be shown. According to a recent article in the Hollywood Reporter, for instance, Disney holds a monthly meeting with a committee of outside advisers to discuss inclusivity, diversity, stereotypes and insensitivity in programming. Some studios and streaming services are using content warnings about negative depictions in old films.