The Librarians
(USA, 92 min.)
Dir. Kim A. Snyder
Programme: Premieres (World premiere)
There’s a point late in The Librarians where a member of the profession claims to be a firewall against fascism. On the surface, it feels hyperbolic, as if the battles about which paper books are to be selected for inclusion on school shelves somehow poses existential concerns for a grand Republic. However, given all we’ve witnessed in this brisk, politically charged film, it’s entirely believable that these (mostly) middle-aged women are the bulwarks in a culture war that crushes freedom for a generation of kids.
Director Kim A. Snyder returns to Sundance after docs like Newtown (2016), a film about the school shooting that posed an engaging if superficial look at the family members who had undergone such personal tragedies. Snyder, a former Variety writer, went on to win a Peabody Award for the film’s reporting, so the division between how it played as a documentary and the effect it had journalistically, seems never more stark in retrospect.
The Librarians may be a less overtly horrific story, yet the growing demand for the removal of books from the school system is certainly evocative of apocalyptic times. There are several clips from François Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s chilling post-war fiction about a world consumed with the destruction of ideas, the title referring to the temperature at which paper burns. Clips of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, with his reedy voice and violent rhetoric, are cut side-by-side with the words coming from raging audience members at various school board meetings demanding that the children be freed from books they claim to be filth.
Snyder weaves these less-than-subtle moments that include numerous quotes from the likes of George Orwell, Thomas Mann and so on, to create a broad telling of the bravery of people who advocate for the safe space in libraries to disseminate ideas without succumbing to the censorious pressures of a vocal minority. As the film illustrates effectively, the drive from organizations throughout the States are but another way that a particular brand of Christian conservatism advocates to change the country to fit its own agenda, just as it has attempted through the courts, through local governments, and through the presidency itself.
Mom’s for Liberty, one of the more vocal and illustrative organizations that has helped fund book banning initiatives throughout the country, is shown to have a direct relationship with funders who do not want to simply remove books from shelves, but instead to spread their ideology that believes homosexuality to be a grooming process that promotes pedophilia. This line of thinking, in their eyes, makes librarians complicit in ruining the lives of children through their diabolic drive to promote smut.
Diving into the list of unacceptable books, several touch upon subjects such as gender and sexuality (in ways age-appropriate as determined by pedagogical experts), a large number of them deal with historical facts about racial violence such as the story of the KKK, or novels that through fiction tell dark tales of the American past, such as Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved (1987) that’s often the center of such censorship.
Titles like Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale that warn about societal descents into religious intolerance are held up for contempt, but even the likes of Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, or an illustrated version of The Diary of Anne Frank is excoriated for having images of statuary bereft of clothing, as if that’s the most appalling lesson to take from the young girl’s life.
While Snyder’s film overtly sides with those wishing to keep the control of the libraries away from those lobbying to pollute school board meetings with their own prejudices, a quote from Thomas Mann deflects any charges about both sides-ism that some may level at the project. Mann’s line “Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil” was stated in The Magic Mountain written a decade before the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. It’s a quote that has served as prescient clarion call recognizing that to acquiesce to those wishing to banish ideas is to let them already win according to rules of civility and openness being exploited by those that wish to destroy freedoms.
As Snyder and her subjects illustrate throughout, it’s only by standing up to people who wish to remove material they deem objectionable to serve their own narrow purposes that these freedoms can prevail. It’s a fair argument, and one well made, even while other issues regarding freedom of expression are sidestepped when it comes to elements felt objectionable from other areas of the political spectrum. It’s a fine line navigated in Canada via hate speech laws, but more complicated in a far more totalising environment such as in the USA with a supposedly inalienable right to freedom of speech, no matter its subject.
Given that public schools are de facto government institutions, and given the vagaries of the application of that amendment, it’s easy to see how academic nuance and the need to have discussions about providing children with avoid age-appropriate materials are subtleties overwhelmed by overt machinations from people who wish to implement conservative religious ideologies. The subject is far messier than the film presents, of course, but perhaps as Mann’s quote implies, this time of political turmoil spurred by people holding onto abhorrent views about other people’s experiences must be met with an equally narrow yet powerful response.
Deeper stories about the nature of the First Amendment and how actual limitations about book inclusion are done in practice, let alone the fascinating ways in which the First and Second Amendments are functionally polarised via the American experience, are thus left to other, perhaps more nuanced projects. But here, with The Librarians, Snyder provides the voices of the bookish who brave the front lines of these battles for the sake of their students, demanding that no one party can force their ideas upon another.
A library at its most ideal is a neutral ground, a forum for contradictions and ideas that range from the radical to the common, the offensive to the glorious. In this way, these guardians advocating for libraries to be spaces of exploration, where decisions about what’s to be included within are free from puritanical interference, seems as noble as any. If Snyder’s film The Librarians feels in the end little more than an opportunity to do some cheerleading for those engaged in the fight against book bans, it’s a noble project nonetheless.