How responsible must a show/film be to the zeitgeist?

[T'Chenka]

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in regards to the 2018 film Green Book. I watched the 2020 Netflix transgender documentary Disclosure last night, and there were several critiques of films for having a cross-dressing or trans killer in them (Dressed To Kill, The Silence Of The Lambs) at a time when trans people weren't in a lot of media.

Basically, the argument is that a film has a responsibility to be very mindful of how something  it always seen is represented on screen, as it may impact how people view that thing. The counter-argument would be that a creator wants to tell the story they want to tell with the characters they want to use, and it's not fair to say to a writer "just wait 25 years until there are much more normalized trans representations on screen, and then it would be more appropriate to have a movie with a trans killer in it amoungst a sea of other non-killer trans films".

In regards to Green Book, the big critique of the film was that it centered on a white racist protagonist, who is learning to not be racist when he befriends a black man. The argument is that we don't need these kinds of "flawed white guy hero" stories in our zeitgeist right now and it would have been better to tell the story from the black man's perspective and make the racism a more front and center part of the film. The counter-arguments are numerous. Firstly, it was a true story if one if the writer's father (the white guy) and "uncle" (the black man), and he wanted to tell their true story with minimal embellishment. Would it be appropriate to tell a"true story" film to change it's story to appeal to what the culture "needed" in 2018? Don't the writer and producer have the right to make a good movie with a good message as they see fit in a free country without worrying about how their film might not be "woke" enough?

PLEASE share your thoughts as I 've had this on my mind for a long time, and I really need to hear all different opinions from different perspectives in order to think this through and form a more solid opinion. I lean one way in this debate but I don't feel as if I've thought through everything enough, which is where other persoectives can help a lot. I also know that the correct answer isn't 100% one side or the other, as it's clear to me that both sides of this argument have to factor into the "correct" position at least a little bit.

[T'Chenka]

I mean, in Silence Clarice Starling literally says trans people aren't violent and Buffalo Bill isn't actually trans. Seems like even in 1991 they were careful not to implicate that community.

The doc also acknowleged this, but then attacked Clarice for calling trans people "passive".