🧵this is a fascinating defense of the Hays Code to me, a person who has thought extensively about how the Hays Code changed the texture of life in America across multiple decades
(preface: I am not in favor of the Hays Code and these ppl are nuts) 1/ https://t.co/GcY1rtpNGa
— Katharine Coldiron 🌟 (@ferrifrigida) February 13, 2023
As I understand it, there’s a subset of young people on line who, having grown up between the market-pornification of everything and the explosion of #MeToo moments showing the ever-present risk of exploitation, would just as soon never see anything remotely sexual in their public media, ever. (Some of the examples online are pretty bizarre, but that’s the nature of Very Online discourse.) And because every twitch in the zeitgeist can be twisted for profit, the individual quoted in the above tweet calling for a return to the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, aka the Hays Code, has a glossy expensive website and print magazine funded by… well-known moral arbiter Peter ‘I suck blood from young men to preserve my own youth, but in a sterile and strictly medical fashion’ Thiel.
This is absolutely one of the weirder timelines. On the other hand, Katherine Coldiron’s discussion is quite interesting, IMO:
pre-Code movies demonstrate that life and people in America really have not changed much; we’re motivated by sex and money, we make bad decisions, we like to laugh, we work equal parts bc we have to and for the satisfaction of working 2/
in pre-Code movies, women work and have sex, people are cruel and weak, and things don’t always work out okay at the end of the story. Sometimes they do. The stories make you think, and feel kinship with these long-dead actors, bc their struggles are not different 3/
There aren't many of these movies compared to the number of movies produced under the Hays Code and they're not easy to get hold of, but it's worth it, even when the movies aren't objectively good. This one changed my entire mindset, & set off years of thinking about the Code 4/ pic.twitter.com/6l4NiHry0W
— Katharine Coldiron 🌟 (@ferrifrigida) February 13, 2023
In brief, the Code set back the liberation of American thought for three decades at least. The point was to make movies acceptable to *everybody* – and the floor was naive housewives in the Midwest. by which I mean – the current floor for acceptability goes as low as 5/
the linoleum that covers pornography and snuff, so the *most* sophisticated viewers. the Code made the floor for acceptability the *least* sophisticated viewers. 6/
People who’d never seen a Black person in real life, for example. Or people who could not have explained the anatomy of the opposite sex. These are the viewers the Code was invented for – to keep them safe from anything on screen that would make them uncomfortable & 7/
keep them from going to the movies.
The homogenization of the movies over the next 30 years was a deliberate conservative/reactionary move; it was not a simulation of how life was really lived in America during those years. It was a fantasy. 8/
Saturday Night At the Movies Open Thread: The ‘Magical Mirror’ of the Hays CodePost + Comments (178)