The demands for movie reform should thus be seen as part of a broader reaffirmation of traditional patriarchal values at a moment of cultural crisis. This reaffirmation, itself a displaced expression of anxiety for the economic system among the middle class, focused primarily on a concern that the family unit was in danger of disintegrating. Motherhood…underwent a strenuous revival….The overt concern of movie reform groups with the deleterious effects of movies on children aligned them with the larger trend, while the underlying anxieties of white Protestants regarding their declining control of the culture were reflected in the overt anti-urbanism and implicit anti-Semitism of the campaign. (258)
*Cp Grand Design, 41: “The institution of
censorship in Hollywood was not primarily about controlling the content of
movies at the level of forbidden words or actions or inhibiting the freedom of
expression of individual producers.
Rather, it was about the cultural function of entertainment and the
possession of cultural power.”
The debate among the institutions of censorship over what the SRC [ Studio Relations Committee] described as “social problem” pictures was centered on the efficacy of narrative recuperation in contradicting scopophilic pleasure, expressed in terms of the extent to which a film’s morality was to be assessed on the basis of “the effect of the whole.” (259)
from Richard Maltby, “’Baby
Face,’ or How Joe Breen Made Barbara Stanwyck Atone
for Causing the Wall Street Crash,” 251-78 in Janet Staiger,
ed., The Studio System (Rutgers,
1995)
For
all industry parties, issues of oligopoly control and trade practices were much
more important than censorship. But
questions of censorship were of greater public interest, and could also be
resolved at less economic risk to the majors.
These factors encouraged the MPPDA to displace disputes over the
industry’s distribution of profits onto another arena—quite literally, from the
economic base to the ideological superstructure of movie content.
Maltby, “The Production Code and the Hays Office,” in Balio, Grand Design,
37-72.
*Compare/contrast
Žižek, “Ego and Superego: Lacan
as a Viewer of Casblanca”:
We
can see how the functioning of this fundamental prohibition is properly
perverse, in so far as it unavoidably gets caught in the reflexive flip by
means of which the very defence against the
prohibited sexual content generates an excessive all-pervasive sexualization - the role of censorship is much more
ambiguous than it may appear. The obvious retort to this point would be that we
are thereby inadvertently elevating the Hays Production Code into a subversive machine
more threatening to the system of domination than direct tolerance: are we not claiming that the
harsher is direct censorship, the more subversive are the unintended
by-products generated by it? The way to answer this reproach is to emphasize
that these unintended perverse by-products, far from genuinely threatening the
system of symbolic domination, are its built-in transgression, its
unacknowledged obscene support.