Even with the cultural sway of television and the rapid adoption of DVD
players, the experience of viewing a movie in a darkened room filled with
strangers retains a powerful attraction for Americans. Just consider the surge
in movie going after September 11.
Beyond offering distraction, entertainment, and food for thought, movies serve
as cultural landmarks in a variety of ways. Just as The Sopranos would
be inconceivable without The Godfather, Jaws intensified the
blockbuster lust of studio execs, and Star Wars sowed the seeds for the
frenzied cross-marketing that has since become ubiquitous in our commercial
culture. Besides functioning as an international confection factory, Hollywood
has also been a place of censorship and political persecution.
In keeping with the theme of "Security First" for 2002, the Action Speaks
lecture series at AS220 (115 Empire Street, Providence) continues Tuesday,
October 15, with a look at the introduction of the Hays Moral Code in 1934. The
panelists include Frank Couvares, a professor of history at Amherst College;
Michael Fink from the English and film departments at the Rhode Island School,
and the author of With a Pen of Light; and Marshall Berman, a professor
at City College of New York, and the author of All That's Solid Melts Into
Air.
Action Speaks, which highlights under-appreciated days that changed America,
is a production of AS220 and the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities.
Here's a rundown on subsequent weeks in this year's Action Speaks lineup:
October 22, "Rockefeller Drug Laws (1973): Drug Laws Introduced On the Heels of
the 1960s: Prison Population Swells"; October 29, "Reagan's Department of
Education Publishes `A Nation at Risk' (1983): Massive Assault on Public
Education Begins"; and November 5, "Sugar Hill Gang Releases `Rapper's Delight'
(1979): First Commercial Rap Hit Breaks Out: A `Mad' New Culture Is Born." Each
forum runs from 5:30 to 7 p.m., and will be broadcast on WRNI (1290 AM), on the
subsequent Sunday at 8 p.m.
Couvares, the author of Movie Censorship and American Culture, became
interested in the subject by the way in which the cultural conservatives of the
Reagan era echoed the reaction to new media during the early 20th century. He
spoke with the Phoenix from his home last week.
Q: How much censorship has there been of American movies and what
effect has it had?
A: Of course, you have to define censorship. There are at least
two kinds of censorship that are important in this conversation. One is formal,
legal censorship, and that, in the American context, is municipal and state
censorship. There is no federal censorship. But equally important is internal
self-censorship, and that's a system whereby the major studios created
something called the Production Code and the Production Code Administration.
That essentially required all the producers of movies to submit their scripts
and sometimes their unedited outtakes, as well as the first drafts of movies,
to this internal censoring bureau, which would go over them, sometimes with a
fairly fine-toothed comb.
Some of it became a kind of artful game, and you see writers, and directors,
and studio producers sort of loading a film with stuff that they know is going
to raise red flags. And then they basically bargain away the stuff they don't
care about to preserve the stuff they do care about. You don't want to make it
sound as if it is all a cozy game. The Production Code Administration really
does make a lot of things impossible in American movies. There are things that
no amount of cleverness or gamesmanship can get into a movie. That's, for
example, any frank discussion of abortion, any frank discussion or treatment of
homosexuality, any truly radical politics -- all sorts of things.
Any sort of suggestion that the conventions and tradition of marriage might be
illegitimate is completely verboten. You can not play with such ideas.
You can suggest there are a few corrupt policemen or politicians, and in the
great Depression-era gangster movies, you can push very far the idea that the
law is corrupt, that the capitalist order is somehow rigged against the poor
guy or the outsider. But once the Production Code came into effect in 1934, you
can't suggest that very far at all.
Q: Why did the Hays Production Code come about?
A: [After several decades in which states and municipalities promoted
censorship, Hollywood hired Will Hays to lead its trade association in 1922,
mostly to fight the rise of unions, but also to promote public relations.] Hays
is the perfect guy because he's a Presbyterian elder from Indiana, he is Warren
Harding's postmaster general, and the former national chairman of the
Republican Party, so he has impeccable Republican, Christian, and Midwestern
credentials.
For a while he co-opts enough people. He's seen to be on the job. So criticism
[about the immorality of movies], although it never goes away, reduces to the
extent that no further censorship legislation is passed anywhere in the '20s.
They get a decade of peace. But then comes the great Depression and most of the
studios are in receivership or close to bankruptcy. There are now much more
vulnerable to boycotts or group pressure. They're also much more desperate to
try to find some formula to win an audience back, because attendance plummeted
as the economy crashed, at least in the first few years of the Depression.
They push the envelope, they push the Hays people to let in more and more racy
material, more sexy stuff, more violence, more sort of sensationalistic
stories, as well as gangster stuff like The Public Enemy,
Scarface, and Little Caesar. These movies are only by a degree
different. But in the degree, they're sufficiently more graphic, more sexually
explicit, more irreverent toward conventional values, that they generate an
enormous reaction in a nation that is already reeling from the Depression.
People everywhere are feeling that the conventional [pillars] of stability
have been knocked out, so a movement emerges. The Catholic Church comes to
dominate it, partly because the church is the moral spokesman for what is now a
majority in most of the major cities of America -- that is immigrants and the
children of immigrants. The church has gotten accustomed to speaking for them
and for their moral interest. The Catholic Church takes the lead in forming the
Legion of Decency and launches a campaign to get Hollywood to significantly
strengthen the internal censorship mechanism, which had been quite flabby. They
succeed in getting Hays to create the Production Code Administration, this new
version of internal censoring . . . You get this basically Catholic censoring
apparatus within Hollywood.
The gangster movies are out, or at least they have to become entirely
different. You can't make these gangsters look as exciting and vibrant, and you
can't make the cops look as hapless. So Edward G. Robinson, from being Little
Caesar, become a G-man, and James Cagney, from being Tommy in The Public
Enemy, becomes a cop, or he becomes a crook who in the end breaks down, in
Angels With Dirty Faces, right before he gets executed. These movies
have to change. They can no longer be morally ambiguous.
These fallen women have to go -- these movies with Jean Harlow and Joan
Crawford, and others, that showed women who broke all the rules and who were
not sort of morally punished in the way that middle America wanted them to be.
They did all right. They got rich and married the boss, or they went their
merry way. Under [the new regime], they had to be punished -- have her daughter
get killed, have her get tuberculosis. That kind of stuff.
Q: What were the long-term effects of the Hays Moral Code?
A: First, it made Hollywood timid, unwilling to handle "difficult"
themes for a long time. Second, and more specifically, it pre-conditioned
Hollywood to knuckle under quickly to McCarthy-era pressure for political
self-censorship and internal purges. Avoiding controversy and bowing to
prevailing political and interest group pressures had become a habit. Third, we
will never know what movies were never made, or which careers were
attenuated.
Q: How is it that 1939, widely considered one of the best years for
American cinema, came just a few years after the introduction of the Hays
Code?
A: There is no contradiction between doing some things very well and
not being allowed to do other things. Hollywood was full of talented, even
brilliant actors, directors, writers, et cetera. The real question is, what
might they have been able to do with less censorship?
Q: Beyond the increased commercialism that came about with movies
like Star Wars, what factors do you blame for the decline of American
moviemaking since the early- and mid-'70s?
A: I think the last 30 years have been one of the great eras of
filmmaking. By what standard might it be rated inferior? Are we to believe that
the works of [Robert] Altman and [Martin] Scorsese, to name obvious masters, or
newcomers such as Todd Solondz and Christopher Nolan, to name just a couple of
younger "independents," represent a falling off from the era of [George] Cukor
and [Frank] Capra and [Preston] Sturges? I don't think so. I think these
laments are part of an unthinking "golden days," "decline of civilization"
reflex that provides fodder for certain opiners, but has very little
substance.
Q: Why is there so much violence in American movies, in contrast to
the paucity of pessimistic endings and graphic depictions of sex?
A: That is harder to answer. The most obvious response to the first
part of the question is, America is a violent society -- what would its movies
be expected to look like? The second is, when has violence not been a central
part of any artistic medium? Degrees of explicitness change, but The
Iliad is a chronicle of slaughter; Macbeth and [King] Lear
and Henry IV are full of violence; religious painting (not to mention
the Bible itself) from the Middle Ages to the present is full of images of
impalements, decapitations, crucifixions, tortures.
Regarding happy endings, I suppose the nature of modern entertainment
industries is to provide easily digested, consumable amusement. Some people
lament this, but it is only lamentable if it drives out other modes of thinking
and feeling, and, despite laments, there is no good evidence that it has. Also,
I suppose, in the modern, post-Enlightenment era, we are more likely to come up
with happy endings than bleak ones, though this varies greatly from one medium,
genre, and era to another.
I'm probably not the expert to consult on this, but my sense is that modern
Western culture is not so much optimistic as it is open to a very broad range
of narratives and moral perspectives. There's plenty of pessimism out there,
some of it quite fashionable (nothing helps cut foreign aid budgets so
effectively as a new orthodoxy about foreign aid never working; nothing allows
comfortable middle class liberals off the hook so much as pessimism about
politics making a difference. "They're all the same" means I don't have to do
much).
Finally, the world is probably better for not being stuck in uniformly
pessimistic or tragic modes of thought. If there's much we can't change and
ills we must endure as part of the human condition, it is also manifest that we
can change the world for the better, that we can, sometimes, overcome.
Q: Steven Spielberg's Minority Report was a stylish and
artful film that raised provocative questions about identity, technology, and
state authority, but it concluded with a conventional Hollywood happy ending.
What does this say about the contemporary state of American filmmaking?
A: If Spielberg violated the logic of his narrative by imposing a happy
ending, then he can be criticized for that, but not for contemplating a happy
ending. Sometimes it makes great sense. Think of Woody Allen's Hannah and
Her Sisters, onto which a comfortably cynical and downbeat ending would
have fit quite nicely, but in which Allen decided -- in my view rightly and
against the grain -- to end with happiness.
In any event, my main point is that it is not fruitful to use large and
somewhat flabby generalizations to characterize "the movies" (or "the novel" or
"the culture"). If cultural history teaches us anything, it should be that
"cultures" are big, complex, multi-layered, multi-dimensioned, and always
changing. Censorship, to return to the main theme, tries to make this
complexity more manageable, to bring clarity or simplicity to the modern
condition, which is confused and confusing, and almost impossible to understand
"whole." That's why it can't work, but also why it's always tempting.
Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis[a]phx.com.
Issue Date: October 11 - 17, 2002
