As written on MetaFilter recently; I’m not going to reproduce the original quote I’m responding to (I think it’s a bit rude to purloin somebody’s in-thread words in my personal blog) but it’s there if you click on the link.

Quick context: NY library has put Tintin in the Congo, Hergé “troubled” Tintin volume, under lock and key so it’s only viewable upon request. A debate ensues about censorship and racial sensitivity, in which Huck Finn among other things is brought up, as well as Hergé’s mid-career change from casual racist to thoughtful world observer. “Liza” is incensed that “racist” Tintin is getting an action movie made about him, while Huckleberry Finn is several orders of magnitude better than Tintin.

Yours truly:

Liza, I don’t think anyone is proposing a last-man-standing Huckleberry Finn vs. Tintin cage match, where the Southern Scamp and the Belgian Brawler are both given switchblades and forced to throw down like in the “Bad” video. Besides, Tintin has Captain Haddock backing him up, so you know somebody’s gonna get glassed in that fight.

There’s room for both to exist in the world, and while I agree that Congo is irredeemably racist, it’s valuable context for how the Hergé books themselves change from being thoroughly colonialist to well-researched, world-embracing volumes. I don’t think Hergé ever got entirely past his racism — I don’t think anybody does, really — but I find, as an adult having read the Hergé books as a child, and having looked into Hergé’s life story, that the Hergé story of transformation from blithe racist to thoughtful creator is as fascinating and valuable to me as Huckleberry Finn’s journey.

Whether or not that justifies keeping Congo on the shelves — or the equally execrable Tintin In The Land of the Soviets, which exudes Ignorance On Parade just as much as Congo does — is obviously a tough call. Aside from this current library issue, both of those books have a history of being dropped from publication periodically, and brought back in. Personally, I prefer the “stick a note in there if the Introduction doesn’t cover the book’s troubled past” approach.

Given how Hollywood treats such things, I’d imagine you’d be glad that nobody is turning Huckleberry Finn into a “fucking action movie” — it’s eerily plausible to envison Huck Finn (Spackle Culkin, the as-yet-undiscovered Culkin brother) and Disenfranchised Jim (Cedric the Entertainer) rocketing down the Mississippi on their rad steampunk raft, joined by hip con men Duke and King (Johnny Knoxville and Dane Cook), fighting racist Klan robots invented by evil cotton baron Maximillian Sherburn (Al Pacino). In the last five minutes, Huck discovers that racism is caused by an evil giant spider from space (voiced by Nathan Lane, who camps it up maybe a little more than necessary), and a dying Disenfranchised Jim tells Huck that the magic was inside him all along and Huck destroys the spider with a hadouken made from pure American exceptionalism. Racism is solved and nobody speaks of it ever again.

Michael Bay produces, Stephen Sommers directs. Released on the third Monday of January. FINN!

So yeah, I don’t think a Tintin movie is really something to get that outraged about.

Filed under: Bande Dessinée by Shepherd