Amber Ruffin teaches Turner Classic Movies that problematic flops need some context, too

Friday’s Amber Ruffin Show saw the host doing her best Ben Mankiewicz by parking herself in a leather chair next to some potted plants and supplementing one of Turner Classic Movies’ newest (and most controversial to your racist relatives) programming segment, Reframed Classics. As Amber explained to the uninitiated, old movies were often hella problematic when viewed through our current (and still woefully wonky) lens. So TCM’s been doing some contextualizing/retroactive apologizing for the movie businesses’ occasional/constant blind spots, offensive casting choices, and just plain wrong-headed bigotry. Long-cherished movies from The Jazz Singer (Al Jolson in blackface), Gone With The Wind (slavery’s not so bad!), Rope (gay people are thrill killers), The Children’s Hour (gay people are guilt-ridden depressives), Dragon Seed (literally everyone in “yellowface”), and Breakfast At Tiffany’s (Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi—’nuff said) have all had a thoughtful prologue added to them examining the complex issue of the things we love sometimes containing things we emphatically do not.