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.