Tom Hanks seems to firmly oppose “cancel culture” and the modern efforts of policing content for what some people may deem offensive.
Hanks is doing press for his debut novel, "The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece." He’s reacting here to a certain movement in publishing these days, one in which classic books, that contain language and certain ideas, though once accepted, now considered offensive, are being revised/re-written.
In an interview with BBC, Hanks says that nobody should tell him what he should be offended by.
I'm of the opinion that we're all grown-ups here. And we understand the time and the place and when these things were written. And it's not very hard at all to say: that doesn't quite fly right now, does it?' Let's have faith in our own sensibilities here, instead of having somebody decide what we may or may not be offended by. Let me decide what I am offended by and what I'm not offended by. I would be against reading any book from any era that says 'abridged due to modern sensitivities.
In recent months, so-called sensitivity readers have updated works belonging to Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, and even R.L. Stine.
The key takeaway here is the shade that Hanks is throwing at people who want older art, like “Gone With the Wind,” shunned from society for depictions that reflected the era in which they were made.
The reactionary times we live in are trying to negate whatever happened in the past. Instead of learning about it, and making sure the same mistakes don’t happen again — they are just trying to erase history.
Steven Spielberg also admitted last month that getting rid of the guns in “E.T.” was a silly mistake on his part.
Spielberg managed to sneak the guns back into the 30th anniversary release, after Spielberg said that he had “realized what I had done was I had robbed people who loved E.T. of their memories of ‘E.T.'”