[lit-ideas] The Hays Hollywood Morality Code
- From: Andy <mimi.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2011 05:56:56 -0800 (PST)
I recently wrote Maureen Sullivan instead of Maureen Dowd in referring to the
NYT. Sorry about that. It was just dumb, but it did remind me that I had long
had this vague idea that Maureen O'Sullivan was somehow connected to the advent
of the Hollywood dress code, in that this alleged dress code was put in at
least in part to address the scanty dress of films of the 30's, in which
Maureen O'Sullivan had played a scantily clad Jane alongside Johnny
Weissmuller's Tarzan of the 30's. Well, I read up a little bit, and it turns
out that you never know how deep a puddle is until you step into it. It turns
out that it was much more than a dress code.
We all know that all new technology is co-opted by the baser instincts. When
the Gutenberg press first began printing, a major press output in addition to
bibles was pornography. Likewise it didn't take long for movies to get violent
and, to use a judgmental word, rather depraved soon into their invention. So
the Motion Picture Production Code, or the Hays Code, was promoted in an effort
to improve humanity, or at least not to debase it further. However, good
intentions, as was seen with Prohibition, don't always work as intended. By
mandating that bad guys always get their due in the end, in 90 minutes even,
and all's well in the end, one has to wonder if it didn't lull people into a
sense of complacency. Around that time Edward Bernays showed corporations how
to manipulate desire, and planned obsolescence was on its way to being
institutionalized as a mechanism to improve the Depression-era economy, going
on to become the disposable
way of life we know today. The threshold for titillation is a moving target,
traveling ever upward. People do bad things because they can, so a lid does
need to be put on things, but Prohibition proved that laws often cause
problems. A lot of art has always been didactic, and has always failed. I
wonder if in subtle but powerful ways the blurring between reality and fiction
doesn't influence a lot of daily behavior. Below is a link from Wikipedia on
movies before the code. It's a look at America of the 30's through films.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood)
Andy
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