by Finnegan Burres
In 1922 the MPPDA, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America, hired the postmaster general of the Harding administration, William Harrison Hays, as president with the intent of cleaning up the face of motion pictures. This decision was made in response to several major scandals of Hollywood from the early 1920's, after which the MPPDA decided that they wanted the overall face of motion pictures to reflect the pressure applied by politics and religious advocates. Hays would go on to scrub Hollywood clean, most notably with the Production Code of 1934.
Two such fellows, by the names of Daniel Lord and Martin Quigley drafted the Production Code in 1930, starting a period of defiance in regards to this code. Filmmakers began to push the limits put forth by the Catholics, before Will Hays would adopt the code under the MPPDA in 1934, earning its notorious name, "the hays code", and dictating that all films produced must first receive a permit after approval of the film. The code set the standard as to what was morally acceptable to depict or imply through motion pictures, and would be used by Hollywood for thirty years until the alphabetical rating system was adopted in 1968.
To the modern day reader, the Production Code itself may seem quite restrictive, and indeed it is. However, we must also recognize that it was upheld for three incredibly influential decades of filmmaking. The document does reveal its catholic roots in two strictly prohibited subjects, mockery of the clergy and the use of profanities in the form of "God", "Lord", "Jesus", etc. The document also strictly prohibits "white-slavery" and "Miscegenation", further signs of the time in which it was drafted, that seem very strict. Of course, this strict list ends with the ruling that none shall make any willful attempt to offend any race or creed, so at least we can say they tried, kind of. The document then goes onto a larger list of subject that, though not completely prohibited, are in any case brought to question. This list involves mostly suggestive contents, like committing crimes or performing seductions - examples of things the clergy and federal government saw as unseemly behavior.
This code would slowly begin to lose its traction as more filmmakers pushed against it, until finally the first amendment allowed for a persuasive enough argument that shattered the code and gave a lot more leeway for filmmakers to address serious, difficult, and uncomfortable content while still being manageable in regards to the maturity of their content by means of an alphabetic rating system. However, we must recognize that the code being broken doesn't erase thirty year of tropes, cliches, norms, and expectations in film that developed under the code itself.We must also recognize other forms of censorship as well, such as the influence of the red scare and McCarthy, because these too had similar effects to the Hays code in that they played a large part in shaping the trends of film that would follow them.
An approach that addresses a modern context for this code is imagining how different our own concept of film would be under a code like this. Any movies that depict guns, violence, couples of multiple races, would all cease to be produced. And, not only did this happen, but it happened for thirty long years. So, we can see how films by Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Martin Scorsese, Film makers who use violence, sex, "profanity", all hold a far greater value when compared to a prior time period in which they all may very well have ceased to exist under a very strict code.
The Hays code created a narrow bottleneck for Hollywood for a very long time that perpetuated concepts in society that, to us, in this time, seem ridiculous and overly strict, but created a contrast with the films that would come after, that emphasize a new value and meaning of the ability to freely depict what you want in film, and to have the freedom to speak against the government and the norms of society, a very crucial aspect of successful comedy.
Sources Cited:
Doherty, Thomas Patrick. Pre-code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in
American Cinema, 1930-1934. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Print.
"Motion Picture Production Code." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 24 Jan.
2016.
*note: all information used from wikipedia was verified in the Doherty piece
No comments:
Post a Comment