![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Some blue-nosed bastard blew the spot
Do you suffer from low blood pressure? Do you rarely give vent to volleys of profanity? Are you insufficiently appalled by minoritarian attempts to censor the existence of any kind of life that isn't so straight, white, and Christian it could pass for an altar candle? Peruse at your leisure this selection of the records of the Motion Picture Association of America Production Code Administration and you too can be even angrier at the Breen office and the cheesecloth through which it pressed this country's images of itself until we inherited a very skimmed version of the world indeed. I've considered the Production Code a personal enemy since I knew what it was; I've read censors' notes before. I am not surprised by the pettiness of the cuts and compromises required to get a film approved for exhibition in the U.S. after June of 1934. But after reading a dozen files in a row detailing objections, corrections, requests for total story rewrites based on some sterilized sham of morality, I feel like a mercury thermometer drawn by Tex Avery. The censorship of the PCA is not just puritanical, mendacious, and incalculably destructive, it's childish. It treats euphemisms so indistinguishably from their taboos that one character cannot refer to another as "a pain in the pants" because if you think far enough down the chain of associations, there might be an ass under that trouser seat. "God bless" may not be used in a sarcastic manner and "cripes" is just as profanely unacceptable as "hell" or "damn." I haven't a clue what's supposed to stand offensively behind the phrase "hold your hat," but it is specifically prohibited. I lost track of the number of times an "open-mouth kiss" is called out as inappropriately lustful, suggesting at least the silver lining that even if the scene had to be trimmed or reshot, the actors were properly going at it in the first place. Take a drink every time you encounter an objection to an "illicit relationship" or a "sex affair" and your liver won't thank you in the morning, you won't be able to find it. Quite a number of funny lines, obviously, are lost in this process of prudish pruning. Enormous swathes of human reality are nuked from orbit. It really does leave the oft-satirized impression that in their quest for the squeakiest of clean scripts, the censors proceeded from the dirtiest possible intepretations. "Nerts" is out of bounds as a minced oath for the already mild "nuts." Heavens to Betsy, there is so much passionate kissing in this picture, it might suggest an affair between the leads—well, yes, Harold, that is rather what an audience goes to the movies for. The treatment of racial material and what the PCA in its infinite primness called "sex perversion" is harder to mock, seeing the templates it established for who can be spoken about, who can be real onscreen. On no account let us glorify adulterous relationships. As to this day, the standards for violence and the standards for pleasure are a double standard apart. None of what I read individually shocked or was even necessarily news to me, but the cumulative whammy in the current climate seems to have left me wanting to do something profane, illicit, and sexually perverse. Like continue existing, I suppose. Or get a time machine and kick Joseph Breen in the nerts.
no subject
Its oaky to shoot someone, especially if they're from an ethnic minority, but kiss someone?
no subject
As an experience, it reminded me of Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006), only without the countervailing viewpoints. (I wish the PCA archive included the screenplays under discussion, but it does not.)
Its oaky to shoot someone, especially if they're from an ethnic minority, but kiss someone?
In all fairness, the repeated objection to open-mouthed kissing really did interest me because it identified the familiar Hollywood closemouthed lip-press as so artificial that the censors constantly needed to remind everyone to keep it chaste.
no subject
no subject
*hugs*
no subject
no subject
Thank you! I remain incensed.
no subject
no subject
I remember the contretemps over any queer content, including, I believe, two little old ladies at the diner. I don't know if I know about the rest and would be interested to hear.
no subject
I think he also had to fight about the inclusion, in the background of a scene set in a movie theatre, of a poster for a movie titled Horse Dad, which showed the image of a cartoon horse wearing a suit and smoking a pipe. S&P objected to the pipe, in case it promoted smoking. Hirsch asked if there was really any danger that horses would take up smoking pipes.
no subject
no subject
It could have cleared one!
no subject
no subject
Please! All in for the nerts express!
(You said behind.)
no subject
no subject
I do not recognize the reference!
no subject
I don't know, they just gave me this production code
While it would seem to be stretching the point
to imagine any censor board being so hide-bound as to make
such deletions in a Shakespearean classic, nevertheless
it might be well for you to bear this possibility in mind.
"We're not the ones who worry about the use of 'God' in secular references, which we have tallied for you here, it's those darn local dioceses."
Well, do you think you could give it back?
GOD'S DEAR LADY.
no subject
no subject
Boy, was that battle lost from the concept.
no subject
"Hold your hat."
But the real reason I'm bothering to comment is to link to this site. It's almost certainly put together by "AI". The first few entries are quite straightforward, but they get increasingly English As She Is Spoke. I suspect that those entries have been subjected to Google Translate twice or more...
Re: "Hold your hat."
Right? I wouldn't agree with it, but I would understand the rationale behind an objection to the similarly sartorial "keep your shirt on," which contains the necessary implication of taking one's shirt off. I couldn't construe anything equivalent in "hold your hat"/"hang on to your hat." It didn't secretly mean "you can leave your hat on."
I have 2 wild guesses. (1) The context made "hat" mean... something else? Or (2) The censor had actually never run into the expression before, didn't know what it meant, didn't want to risk looking ignorant, so just assumed filth.
"When correctly viewed, everything is lewd!"
But the real reason I'm bothering to comment is to link to this site. It's almost certainly put together by "AI". The first few entries are quite straightforward, but they get increasingly English As She Is Spoke. I suspect that those entries have been subjected to Google Translate twice or more...
I think I got spam once that started with "asperous alley."
Re: "Hold your hat."
I was particularly fond of the entry which listed the phrase's source as "[Colloquial; aboriginal bisected of 1900s]".
no subject
no subject
Really, nobody I know is insufficiently appalled, but just for the sake of that extra WTF!
no subject
Whew, that about sums it all up, yeah. :-\
no subject
Solidarity?
no subject
You do splendid tirades.
no subject
*hugs*
You do splendid tirades.
Thank you! Augh.
no subject
Nine
no subject
Amen!