![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
All weekend, I can be your secret
I have been thinking about a passage in John Van Druten's The Voice of the Turtle (1943) for the last few days. It's a small, sincere, and sophisticated play that feels as though it has dated very little since its snapshot of the dating scene of WWII-era NYC, since it concerns a pair of strangers who over the course of a weekend find themselves trying to decide if the sex they had on short acquaintance and strong attraction is the foundation of a relationship and if so, what kind. Both have been hurt by former partners—dumped by her married lover for introducing sentiment into their affair, the heroine is trying to convince herself of the attractions of celibacy, while the hero has tried to protect himself since his similar jilting by letting himself be taken for granted as a booty call; neither tactic is generating much happiness for either of them, but the prospect of emotional as well as physical intimacy is terrifying. Their conversations are poignantly frank that women can feel sexual desire and men want love and commitment, however counter these facts run to their supposed societal roles. Since people haven't stopped wondering whether it might not be safer to break up than get their hearts broken, the conclusion has not turned saccharine with time. But there's a scene early in the first act, where the heroine is questioning her sexual normality, specifically her ability to engage in premarital sex at all, which got my attention:
"Well, do ordinary girls? I was raised to think they didn't. Didn't even want to. And what I want to know is—don't they? They don't in movies. Oh, I know that's censorship . . . but . . . the people who go and see the movies . . . are they like that too? Or don't they notice that it's all false?"
I've encountered internal references to censorship in Code-era movies, my favorite being The Gang's All Here (1943)'s magnificently metatextual "If you don't cut that out, the censors will!" It's not like no one noticed at the time. James Agee was constantly complaining about the limitations of what could be treated maturely or even just half-realistically on the screen and I imagine anyone who had paid attention through the Code transition felt similarly. It is nonetheless useful for me to receive these periodic reminders that even as I am continually parsing the world as it was strained through Hollywood from the world as inhabited by people who went to the movies, those same people were giving equally serious thought to the relationship of their pop culture to reality and the measurable distortions thereof. I am mildly, morbidly curious whether this speech survived into the chastified 1947 film, in which I am otherwise desperately uninterested; to add insult to injury, it stars Ronald Reagan. The heroine, incidentally, feels terrific object empathy for telephones that no one answers and radios no one is listening to, which hasn't dated in the least, either.
"Well, do ordinary girls? I was raised to think they didn't. Didn't even want to. And what I want to know is—don't they? They don't in movies. Oh, I know that's censorship . . . but . . . the people who go and see the movies . . . are they like that too? Or don't they notice that it's all false?"
I've encountered internal references to censorship in Code-era movies, my favorite being The Gang's All Here (1943)'s magnificently metatextual "If you don't cut that out, the censors will!" It's not like no one noticed at the time. James Agee was constantly complaining about the limitations of what could be treated maturely or even just half-realistically on the screen and I imagine anyone who had paid attention through the Code transition felt similarly. It is nonetheless useful for me to receive these periodic reminders that even as I am continually parsing the world as it was strained through Hollywood from the world as inhabited by people who went to the movies, those same people were giving equally serious thought to the relationship of their pop culture to reality and the measurable distortions thereof. I am mildly, morbidly curious whether this speech survived into the chastified 1947 film, in which I am otherwise desperately uninterested; to add insult to injury, it stars Ronald Reagan. The heroine, incidentally, feels terrific object empathy for telephones that no one answers and radios no one is listening to, which hasn't dated in the least, either.
no subject
But I think my favorite TV-edit was in Young Frankenstein, where Teri Garr's line "He must have an enormous schwanstucker" is badly dubbed (and I suspect the obvious dubbing was deliberate) to "He must have an enormous personality".
no subject
I regret deeply that this euphemism never seems to have caught on.