Love that, especially that last part--without the slightest encumbrance of vanity--and what you say about how just being a fuckup is genderbending as far as the rigid production code is concerned.

Thank you. It took some time to dawn on me how much wider the acceptable emotional range for male characters is in pre-Code movies, because the greater sexual agency of female characters was so much more immediately obvious—and then I couldn't stop noticing that that was what the Code cracked down on, because then we snowball into the idea that a man experiencing anything other than competence and anger is a slippery slope to being gay, and now here we are up to our eyeballs in toxic masculinity. I hold the Production Code responsible for a lot of America, and not in a way I appreciate.

That's a perfect icon for this conversation.