Essay: Casablanca In Color? I'm Shocked, Shocked!

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Grant, nevertheless, that colorization does turn art into junk. Our culture produces megatons of junk every year. Why not let the market decide? What's with the boycotts? If the colorized version is as bad as the critics claim, it will fail for good capitalist reasons. No one will watch it. When enough people lose enough money in any venture, it dies; 3-D died. At best (or worst), colorization might carve out a market niche for a small group of cultural illiterates, the video equivalent of Classic Comics.

Let the individual choose. Anyone can rent the black-and-white Casablanca. And even when the philistines insist on putting a tainted Casablanca on TV, all you have to do to restore artistic integrity is turn off the color on your set. Why the panic?

The critics are panicked that you won't turn off the color. They propose to do it for you. "It's a decision the public shouldn't be forced to make," says Critic Gene Siskel. The Minister of Culture could hardly have said it better, though some of the subtlety might be lost in translation from the Russian.

The critics' real fear is that colorization will win the market. Colorization will so corrupt tastes that people will lose their appreciation of the beauty of the black-and-white original. The original print will exist, but in a vault. In the culture it will die. Junk will drive out art.

"If colorizing is popular," writes the New York Times's Richard Mooney, "it will inevitably drive the original versions out of circulation." The sheer volume and, with improvements, prettiness of colorization will dull the taste, then the demand for the original. "What worries me," says Producer George Stevens Jr., "is that, psychologically, the films will cease to exist in black and white. The new version will replace the old in the public's mind." In short: the market shapes tastes; a corrupt market will corrupt tastes.

My, my. An industry that feeds teenagers three helpings of Porky's and six of Friday the 13th now complains about the corruption of tastes. But more than mere hypocrisy is at work here. There is a logic problem. For decades Hollywood has flooded the market with every conceivable variety of junk and then defended itself against the charge of degrading public tastes with a "Who, us? We just give them what they want." Tastes shape the market.

Except, it now seems, for colorization. Moreover, whenever bluenoses demand restraint against the porn and violence that are the staple of popular culture, they are met with "Who appointed you guardians of the public taste? Let the people decide. If they want junk, that's their prerogative. What did we fight two world wars for if not the right to buy Penthouse at the 7- Eleven?" But not, you see, for the right to rent a colored Casablanca.

Of course, the premise of the anticolorizing purists is correct. Even if you don't watch junk, the sheer weight of mass-produced junk, in the end, flattens and debases the culture and leaves you poorer. The market does shape demand. In a mass culture of such power, the very presence of junk corrupts, like secondhand smoke.