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.