I’ve been watching some film noir lately, and just posted a piece over on Pop Occulture Magazine about Film Noir and Censorship. I encourage you to go over there and read the article in its entirety, but the long and short of my hypothesis is this: Overt censorship of films lasted exactly as long as it was needed to (starting in 1934 and lasting roughly 30 years), in order to teach people to interact with the new media, and internalize the propaganda and civic virtues which it very overtly taught.
After that point (the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood), control over movies (but not television - which was even more tightly censored) seems to have relaxed, and movies began to take on their more modern forms. My hypothesis is basically that people nowadays don’t need as overt propaganda to be controlled as people used to, because our parents’ generation was new to the media and needed to have everything spelled out for them in great detail. You can see this same effect if you look at print and television ads from even twenty years ago: they were far far more wordy and explicit than they are nowadays. I’ve heard media theorists suggest that these developments in advertising were a result of consumers becoming “bored” by this more wordy explicit style. But I would wager that people simply no longer needed it because they had through constant exposure to it, managed to internalize all of it.
On that note, it’s interesting to look at opinions of people about film noir, which was largely a creation of the restrictive Hays Code era of movie making. One author points out that the restrictiveness didn’t have the desired effect:
Because the Code specified that movies would not depict criminals profiting from their crimes, all the great noir pictures ended with criminal anti-heroes coming to a bad end. Yet the effect was not the one that the censor presumably intended, namely a ringing affirmation of the moral order. Instead his failure only confirmed us in our sympathy for the criminal. He had become the American everyman …
Maybe though, on some other deeper level, that really was the desired effect: teach people overtly to honor and respect police, while simultaneously training them to unconsciously identify with the criminals. It is a delicate and powerful double-bind to program into a group of people.
The same author goes on to lament the loss of a set of standards in movie making, comparing modern movies to playing tennis without a net or any boundaries. He believes that the restrictive structures caused movie-makers to be more creative. It’s an interesting point in itself that deserves further consideration. But at the moment I want to focus on his analysis of movies after the Hays Code period:
What has happened since the end of the Hays Code in the 1960s, and its replacement by the Motion Picture Association’s “rating” system (G, PG, PG-13, R) with its exaggerated reverence for consumer choice, has been an aesthetic and moral collapse of standards, especially in the last decade or so, and a spate of caper films in which the crooks get away with the swag and live happily ever after. These are what I call prison fantasies, since they dramatize and therefore flatter the belief of every career criminal that there will be one big score which will allow him to live like a petty grandee in some sun-soaked kingdom by the sea. Like other sorts of fantasy, this one seems to me to have no aesthetic function, since art crucially involves some kind of corrective to the expectation of uncomplicated fulfilment.
His choice of the phrase “prison fantasies” is, I think, very telling - because in the previous passage he detailed how American movie-goers ended up identifying with the criminals. If these movies really were intended as part of a social engineering and control system, then we could very well call movies nowadays “prison fantasies,” as we are all prisoners of propaganda which has been bred into us and our culture since before we were even born. Untangling yourself from the whole mess is a very complicated affair it turns out, frought with wrong turns and misdirection. Are we getting any closer though?
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Another quote worth introducing in this conversation which I also plan to build on later. It is from Edward Bernays’ book, Propaganda - which was coincidentally published only one year after talking movies were released to the public:
I also found a source online where you can downlaod a PDF of this book.
I first heard of Bernay after watching Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent- a must see film! And the director Mark Achbar also directed the movie The Corporation, in which Naomi Klein is interviewed. She is the author of No Logo a great book which influenced the band RadioHead.
“The pivotal moment politically for me was in December 1989, when there was a massacre at the University of Montreal. A man went into the engineering school - he had failed to get a place - and he separated the men from the women, shouted, ‘You’re all a bunch of fucking feminists’, and opened fire. He killed 14 women. … It was a cataclysmic moment. It politicized us enormously. Of course, after that you call yourself a feminist.” Naomi Klein
One of the things interesting in film noir is that the woman is sexually subversive.
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/noir/pp-all.html
Oh, thanks! I’ve been looking for Propaganda for forever, I can’t even get it through the library!
Something by Hakim Bey: Boycott Cop Culture!
http://www.left-bank.org/bey/resoluti.htm
Gnomely: this is the thread I got out of what you were saying. Were you intending to draw these two things together?
Feminism: where did it come from? What were its cultural antecedents? Who created them and for what reason? In some sense, you could quite possibly point to film noir and its depiction of the female flouting conventional roles as a strong cultural precursor. As to the other questions: well, don’t forget that Edward Bernays was one of the pivotal figures behind “Liberty Torches” or conflating the Suffragette movement to female independence and ultimately used the cigarette (on behalf of his corporate clients) as a symbol of that. He also believed the cigarette was for women a subconscious symbol of the penis: penis envy solved. Bernays, not surprisingly, was also the man who invented product placement in movies.
Pieces coming together at all yet?
Great essay by Hakim Bey, by the way!
Well, the problem with being a random & stream of conscious person is one is always sure what they are saying is largely irrelevant.
THe mention of Bernay reminded me of Noam Chomsky which in turn reminded me of The Corporation and in return Naomi Klein- my favorite feminist in the world. And even though I have no theory I like feminist film theory. Horror films are my obsession and of course in horror films the female is often represents a monstrous feminine.
blockquote>As a form of modern defilement rite, the horror film attempts to separate out the symbolic order from all that threatens its stability, particularly the mother and all that her universe signifies.
and in horror films you see “a potentially subversive recognition of the power and potency of a nonphallic sexuality” so again I make no attempts of not being inane.