It is perhaps unfair to review a film based on the comments its director made at a festival Q&A, but what Kim A. Snyder said at the Sheffield DocFest summed up the flawed worldview of this film better than the documentary itself did. Filmed largely during the Biden years as a portrait of how individual librarians were handling being targeted by right-wing activists, it is on the surface an examination of how school libraries became the front lines of the ideological battle currently underway in the USA. No issue, starting with the picture books that teach our children to read, is too small to be political. The trouble is The Librarians is so anxious to avoid the bigger picture it doesn’t so much as ignore the forest for the trees as ignore the trees for the leaves.
The impetus of the movie was a Texas state politician’s request in 2021 that school libraries pull a list of books. It escaped nobody’s notice that the books were almost exclusively gay or not white, either in author or in subject matter. A lot of librarians obeyed without a public fight. Some others refused, at the price of their jobs or their safety, which is clearly what sent Ms. Snyder and her crew to filming interviews in and around Texas. The success of the Texas book cull inspired various others around the nation which led to various other librarians to begin fighting back in different ways. One is interviewed exclusively wearing a t-shirt to advertise the memoir she’s written about her ordeal, which is somewhat too meta than is appropriate for a documentary.
But the larger impression, and problem, is these middle-aged, middle-class women – virtually all the librarians featured here are women, with seemingly comfortable lives – seem unprepared to stand up for the principles inherent in their chosen career. They do not seem to understand why some people and organisations, on principle, do not want children to get information about their bodies, or sexuality in general. Perhaps there are a few too many teary or sarcastic conversations about how upsetting it is these ideological battles will need to be fought, book by book. That said, in the face of the current fascist creep that has taken pretty much all the American middle class by surprise, the women interviewed are remarkable for their courage in speaking out. It’s also remarkable how feeble most of that courage seems. There’s a lot of polite sitting around in meeting rooms, a lot of speechifying, and a lot of going home afterwards. The teenagers who go to school board meetings and tell the adults to their faces what they think of these bans have the righteousness of youth on their side. Their indignation and anger at the censorship warping their educations are also correct, but it’s easy to discard the fears of a nebulous future when the guarantees of the present moment – like personal safety, or a guaranteed pension – are slipping away much more noticeably.
Yet this review would probably not be taking such a hard line if Ms. Snyder had not told the Sheffield audience that she is looking forward to librarians being able to heal and “moving out of a partisan space.” But how does someone heal from losing their career or having their education ruined if there has been no justice? To say this cowardice is a betrayal of Ms. Snyder’s own subject feels a little extreme, but it’s hard to know what else to call it.
And yet this is apparently the new normal now, and under this mindset there’s no point looking at the bigger picture when one can focus on how upset nice individual middle-class elementary school librarians are. Except: they are the first leaves turning to ash in the forest fire that is the current American political moment, and it’s unimpressive that Ms. Snyder chose to draw no larger conclusions and learn no larger lessons. We all know those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it, but it’s a horrifying shame that librarians surrounded by the world’s knowledge all day long are also on that list.
The Librarians recently played at Sheffield DocFest.
Learn more about the film at the Sheffield site for the title.
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