When Steven Spielberg speaks, I pay attention. I love film, and Spielberg is still capable of genuinely surprising and captivating work even as he aims squarely for middlebrow sensibilities. (Nobody saw his recent remake of West Side Story, but I suspect it will age into being regarded as his late-period classic, a love letter to everything glorious about old Hollywood musicals and spectacle redone for the modern era without a hint of self-consciousness.)

So when he sat down the other day for a “Masterclass” interview with Time magazine, he raised eyebrows by backtracking on one of the more memorable examples of early digital-era Hollywood revisionism: his decision to censor E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial for its 20th anniversary re-release in theaters and on DVD in 2002.

As movie buffs (and, perhaps, angry Second Amendment enthusiasts) well know, Spielberg removed the rifles and shotguns that once were in the hands of the federal agents blocking the path of Elliott and his friends during the film’s climactic bicycle chase, replacing them with . . . extremely long flashlights, held at inexplicable angles. It looked weird then. He regrets it now:

That was a mistake. I never should have done that. E.T. is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through. E.T. was a film that I was sensitive to the fact that the federal agents were approaching a bunch of kids with their firearms exposed, and I thought I would change the guns into walkie-talkies. Years have gone by and I changed my own views. I should have never messed with the archives of my own work, and I don’t recommend anybody really do that. All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like, and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there. So I really regret having that out there.

Take a moment to give Spielberg real credit for being honest about this. He is admitting that he bowed to social and corporate pressures in an earlier era without considering the long-term artistic ramifications, not only for his own work but for others’. When Spielberg did this it seemed like a consequence-free one-off, related only to the news of the moment — this was in the immediate post-Columbine era when, sad as it is to now have to say, school shootings were still a novel horror. “Kids are watching! Remove the guns from the scary black-helicopter people’s hands!” It seemed like an easy call.

But even then the idea of “benign” revisions to well-known pieces of art was so off-putting that it raised hackles — Spielberg’s friend George Lucas is still reviled by many for an unrelated sort of revisionism around this time — and now it has taken a much darker turn 20 years on. Now we live in a world in which television shows are simply altered or memory-holed retrospectively, sometimes for narrative purposes, sometimes because of unfortunate later developments involving cast members . . . and soon, because of unfortunate politics. That is the subtext here.

There is an easily drawn line between creating competing “alternate” versions of a piece of art and active revisionist censorship. To object to an artist revisiting or improving their work for aesthetic reasons is to otherwise invalidate every “director’s cut” ever made, and friends? Nobody should be forced to see the theatrical cut of Blade Runner. Nobody minded when Kevin Spacey was digitally erased from a film by Christopher Plummer before theatrical release; we only minded that the film itself was boring. (Stanley Kubrick alone got away with outright memory-holing his work when he cut the original ending of The Shining — still unavailable on video to this day — a week after the film’s theatrical release. He got away with it because he was Stanley Kubrick.)

This brings me to my final point, which was set forth by my friend and fellow cineaste Sonny Bunch years ago: Always buy your favorite movies or television series in physical media. To rely upon streaming services is to be prey to the whims of vast, impersonal corporations whose profit calculations (or internal political oscillations) will inevitably triumph over any considerations of art or authenticity. Your favorite movie may be edited! It may be altered by CGI against your wishes. It may simply be suppressed altogether. And you will have no recourse. For lovers of the art of cinema and television, remember this above all else: If you rely upon an umbilical connection to the internet to provide you with something, you do not truly own it, and never did.