The Librarians (Snyder, 2025)
Kim A. Snyder’s Newtown was one of my favorite films of 2016, so I walked into The Librarians with understandably high expectations.
As with Snyder’s gut-punching portrait of Sandy Hook Elementary parents wrestling with the murder of their children, The Librarians sizzles with righteous indignation and is steeped in unimaginable pain. Snyder is a maestra at weaving the voices of multiple participants without them becoming a sea of talking heads. Perhaps that is because she also has a sharp eye for distinctive details. While the emotions in Newtown were very similar, the ways they got articulated were as varied as the families touched by the shared tragedy.
Where The Librarians differs is in its lack of a single event to narrow its focus and distill the broader conflicts that inform it. Yes, the film is catalyzed by the creation of a list of 850 banned books created by a Texas legislator, but that event is rightfully treated as the first skirmish in a much broader cultural and political battle.
I don’t mean that as a criticism so much as an observation. I spent the back half of The Librarians trying to figure out why it wasn’t landing with quite the same force as Snyder’s previous film even though I fancied myself as sympathetic to its arguments. Part of the reason may be that the harm created by the book bans remains mostly abstract. The Librarians speak eloquently but at second-hand of the importance of the psychological and emotional impact of the ban on young people of color and LGBTQ+ youth. The one exception is an adult gay male who speaks up when he realizes his mother is an advocate for banning books.
I worry too, that focising on race and gender orientation issues is falling into the culture-war trap set by the banners since it is they are so obviously wedge issues and not the genuine impetus for attacking librarians.
But there’s another problem facing The Librarians that the film touches on but doesn’t quite know how to solve. Increasingly, those who are brainwashed by disingenuous political or social campaigns seem to shrug off even the most blatant evidence of duplicity. When one elected school board member actually does her own research and reports to her friends and compatriots that the movement she has been spearheading is based on incorrect assumptions, she is simply called “woke” and moved to the enemies column. More than differing opinions about critical race theory or LGBTQ+ acceptance, the current sides of the culture war are differentiated by their willingness to dehumanize and lie about those who only days earlier were accepted as good people sharing similar values.
I don’t blame the film for not coming up with a new strategy to deal with this level of voluntary brainwashing. I do wonder, though, who is likely to see the film and be persuaded. Maybe that’s not fair, and I own it. Perhaps there may be some who agree with the politics but are not yet aware of the level of disingenuity with which principled people are attacked, though I find that unlikely. Perhaps there may be some who really believe that middle-school and high-school libraries are pedophile training grounds where groomers stalk naive kids with impunity. Maybe they will see a sincere librarian and realize they are not the monsters that outside agitators have painted them to be. But if the responses of those within the film are any indication, I sort of doubt it.
A small glimmer of hope. Towards the end of the film, a Texas board votes to keep libraries open pending court action when asked to close all the community libraries rather than accept a court order to return some banned books. Is there a lie that even the willingly gullible will not swallow? A line which even cauterized consciences will not cross? I hope so. Because however great a filmmaker Kim A. Snyder might be, Sandy Hook didn’t catalyze any major federal gun legislation.
And if the bullet-riddled bodies of our children is not enough to convince power and privilege holders to value anything other than their continued power and privilege, it is hard for me to see how the pleas of our nation’s Black and gay children to be allowed to read won’t fall on similarly deaf ears.
