Three Popular Critiques of VidAngel—and One That's Not So Popular
Not all criticism is created equal
Regardless of one’s view of movie filtering services, there’s no denying the marketing savvy of VidAngel. There are few companies whose commercials I watch (and re-watch) simply for the entertainment value. Whether they’re riffing off Redbox, parodying Game of Thrones, or using their clever tagline (“Watch however the bleep you want”), VidAngel’s brand of humor is zingingly zany. And they have a Jar Jar filter to boot. What’s not to like, right?
During its history, VidAngel has received a fair share of public scrutiny. There are several criticisms of the company, but not all of them are equally valid. Over the years, I have seen three predominant critiques, as well as one lesser-used criticism. In this post, I want to examine the first three to see if VidAngel really is a hellion in angel’s clothing.
Criticism #1: Copyright Violation
The largest and most damaging accusation is that VidAngel’s initial business model circumvented copyright laws in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Companies making these accusations included Lucasfilm, Warner Brothers, and Disney—all of which sued the content filtering company for damages. VidAngel made a public case against these accusations (which, for the record, I found convincing), but the courts saw things differently. In 2020, VidAngel finally reached a settlement: rather than fork over $62.4 million, they agreed to pay $9.9 million over a 14-year period.1
Criticism #2: Censorship
Another critique of VidAngel is that it is tantamount to censorship. But this argument is fairly easy to refute. True censorship is a form of suppression, in which certain parts of media are actively banned or prohibited. Censorship involves arbitrary supervision over the moral choices of others. A true censor acts as a tyrant, mandating levels of acceptability for those under its control.
In contrast, VidAngel is a service that gives audiences cart blanche to filter whatever [the bleep] content they—and they alone—find objectionable. VidAngel neither hinders audiences from watching what they want, nor does it force audiences to watch anything they don’t want. The service doesn’t practice censorship so much as bowdlerizing—i.e., giving viewers the chance to remove sections of a work of art that they might find objectionable.
In other words, rather than forcing consumers to act in accordance with its own standards, VidAngel removes content at the request of the consumer. In this case, the tail wags the dog, and that’s not censorship.
Criticism #3: Damaging the Movie-Going Experience
The third major criticism is that services like VidAngel can detrimentally interrupt the communication between filmmaker and filmgoer. Film critic Steven D. Greydanus explains:
Not all movies are for all audiences. Not everything a given filmmaker or artist has to say will suit our tastes, opinion, beliefs, preferences, or comfort levels.
That is as it should be. Our tastes, opinions, beliefs, preferences, and comfort levels are not the arbiter of all things, and the consumerist world we inhabit, with its social-media echo chambers, already caters to and reinforces our existing preferences and preconceptions quite well enough.
Not absolutely or dogmatically, but in general, I believe a movie that is too far outside our comfort level to watch as the filmmakers intended is probably a movie we shouldn’t watch at all.
Exceptions can be made for exceptional cases, but the habit of bowdlerizing films strikes me as a kind of solipsism. Instead of a true encounter or communication between artist and audience, we encounter only those parts of what the artist has to say that accord with what we have already decided to receive.
As Greydanus points out, there are exceptions to every rule, but bowlderization as a rule is where the danger lies. Making a practice of arbitrarily filtering unwanted content has at least the potential of producing negative long-term effects. Bowlderization is a course of action one should not enter into lightly.
Fourth Time’s the Harm
Based on the three criticisms above, it seems apparent that a blanket condemnation of VidAngel is misguided and unwarranted. Of course, I mentioned earlier a fourth, “lesser-used” criticism. And even though it’s the least utilized, I consider it the most compelling. It’s not a criticism of VidAngel as a whole—there are, I believe, legitimate and limited uses for such a service—but it reveals a tragic side-effect of the service, both from a marketing and patronage standpoint. This criticism warrants its own detailed examination, which I will publish at a later time.
For now, I can give a short teaser by saying this: If I were to use VidAngel, it would be primarily to block out sexually explicit material. Such a service could be helpful to me as a viewer. However, it wouldn’t help the actors who had to compromise their sexual purity to begin with.
Skipping over an exploitative sex scene doesn’t protect actors in the slightest. Such a course of action is akin to hearing a cry of distress from outside your house and choosing to plug your ears; blocking out the noise may increase your comfort level, but it doesn’t make the problem go away. If anything, using a filtering service like VidAngel would help me be less concerned about the objectification of actors and actresses made in God’s image, since at least my personal purity would remain intact, and that’s all the filtering service can help with anyway.
Using VidAngel would encourage me to stream or spend money on hypersexualized shows and movies I normally wouldn’t have patronized. Thus, I would be communicating to the entertainment industry that I want more sexual exploitation—which, of course, is the opposite of what I want to communicate.
There’s more to say, of course, but I’ll save it for another time.
This the first of a planned three-part series on movie filtering services. For the next entry, see The Unintentional Selfishness of Using Content Filtering Services.
Since then, the company has been restructured, with a VidAngel Entertainment branch (which still filters visual entertainment) and an Angel Studios branch (which produces original content, like the TV show The Chosen). And earlier this year, VidAngel relaunched its services with its clever dirty dog campaign videos.
Earlier this year I used VidAngel to introduce two R-rated movies to my teenage kids. These two films were not sex-romps, but they did have specific scenes that tailored to those with an appetite for such drivel. Hence, I disagree with Steven Greydanus' assessment, because sometimes movies are a hodgepodge of different moments, and a film which contains 95% of material that one would appreciate should not be avoided altogether due to the then-studio's demands to ramp up the sex quota.
Anyway, the results were mixed. The scene where it was successful was An American Werewolf in London, where, there is a pivotal scene taking place late in the film, at a porno theater... I was able to block out the visuals, (though not the background noises, which we tolerated), but the story-driven dialogue in that scene was kept intact. The scene where it was not successful was the classic Bill Murray movie Stripes, where there was a detour from the general proceedings and the cadets made a side-trip to a women's nude wrestling establishment. That scene appeared jagged and haphazard, as it kept the scene but only showed moments where the naughtiness was off screen... that made the dialogue bizarre and jumpy.
I don't think it made me less empathetic to the actors in the industry... but being that the industry is ALREADY at a place where such shenanigans is being downplayed (as evidenced in the many horror movie reboots that have opted to steer from nudity), and that many studios are aiming for the PG-13 imprint (not to mention the affects of #MeToo on the industry), I suspect that the industry (not perfect, there are pockets of lewdness in specific areas) are making adjustments to its final product.