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Examples Of Sanitize In Spotlight

Decent Essays

In Spotlight, the filmmakers include a scene where one of the Boston Globe reporters, Sacha Pfeiffer, is interviewing Joe, one of the survivors. Joe tells Sacha about his first visit to Father Shanley’s house, and how Father Shanley the two play strip poker. Joe says, “Of course I lost. And things went on from there.” Sacha asks, “What happened specifically?” and Joe replies “Specifically, he molested me.” Sacha continues, and says, “Joe, I think the language here is going to be very important. We can’t sanitize this, just saying molest isn’t enough. People need to know what actually happened.” I will consider the word “sanitize” in this paper, and why the filmmakers chose to use this word and film the scene like they did. The Oxford English …show more content…

This definition is, “to render more acceptable, clean up, as by the removal of undesirable, improper or confidential material.” This second definition is different then the more technical and medical health-related connotation of the first definition, but it makes Sacha’s use of the word “sanitize” seem especially fitting. Sacha and the Spotlight team have been fighting to expose confidential materials, seen in their struggle to get the documents unsealed. When Mike gets a tip from Garabedian that the 14 most “damning docs” are already unsealed because of his public motion to oppose another lawyer’s motion, Garabedian tells Mike the documents are not in the courthouse, where they should be because “the Church doesn’t want them to be found. So they are not there.” This scene between Mike and Garabedian highlights what Sacha is doing by saying they cannot “sanitize” the language. The Church in the Mike and Garabedian scene has in a way “sanitized” the record by either of the two definitions—they have cleaned it, expunged it, and omitted unsavory information; in contrast, Sacha does not want to “sanitize”, clean up, expunge or omit the language of what happened to Joe. This is why she encourages him to not use euphemisms or tidier language for his

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