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Mass Distractions and Easy Targets
In early April, Sarit and I saw Up in Mabel’s Room at the AFI Silver. This delightful farce from 1926 was not only hilarious but also rather risqué, which felt strange for a film almost a century old. In reality though, the playful sexuality in Up in Mabel’s Room was not strange at all. Prior to 1934, filmmakers had relative freedom depicting sex, violence, and other vices. The studios came of age during “The Roaring Twenties” and their output often reflected that decade’s loosening social mores. Film historian and author Steven K. Smith hosted a webinar earlier this year on “Pre-Code Films.” He explained that in the 1910s and 1920s, self-appointed morality guardians grew more and more concerned over what they considered the filth coming out of Hollywood. By the late 20s, religious leaders, municipal leaders and other “reformers” had enough. They became convinced that movies corrupted America, and youth in particular. State and local censorship boards mutilated films and charged the studios for doing it. No seal of approval and the film couldn’t be shown in that state or town. Faced with satisfying dozens of censorship boards, each with their own standards, and with federal regulation a possibility, the studios tapped former Postmaster General Will Hays to solve the problems. He developed what eventually became known as the “Hays Code”. The full code is too long to list here, but an excerpt noted in an NPR article sums it up nicely:
Prohibitions on:
While Hays may have been ineffectual at stopping the studios from pushing the envelope, he also hired the man who would eventually change everything. Joseph Breen, a former PR man for the Eucharistic Congress, a seminal event for the Catholic Church, started as Hays’s assistant. In Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration, biographer Thomas Doherty wrote that “The bankers and moguls paying his salary would have been surprised to learn how cozy and conspiratorial were the back-channel communications, how comfortably Breen nestled with the clerics. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America only provided his day job; the Church of Rome held his immortal soul. He would render unto Hays due service, but his true mission was to convert Hollywood.” With Breen as the inside man, the Catholic Church struck hard against Hollywood. Doherty explained that “after more than three years of unholy and unwholesome screen fare, Catholics formed an organization to beat back the plague. Its official name was the National Legion of Decency—morally upright Protestants and Jews might enlist as well—but the group was known as the Legion of Decency or, more ominously, simply ‘the Legion.’ The adjectival Catholic was understood.” The Legion, with Breen’s stealth guidance and support, organized nationwide film boycotts. Faced with the boycotts’ economic threat and a renewed push for federal regulation, the studios capitulated. More from Doherty: “By February 1934 Breen had wrangled control of the Studio Relations Committee (SRC), a weak-kneed advisory body tasked with enforcing screen morality. On July 15, 1934, he formally took charge of the Production Code Administration (PCA), the implacable new regime that replaced its toothless predecessor. Where the Studio Relations Committee made suggestions, the Production Code Administration gave orders.” No film could be made without Breen and his hand-picked team approving the script. Once the film was ready, the PCA reviewed it again to determine if it could be released. The PCA would demand script revisions and film cuts. The studios and filmmakers would have to comply to get the film to audiences. Doherty added that “Taken together, the two design renovations—the transfer of power from producers to regulators and the application of the Code during the script phase of production—created a smooth, conveyer-belt system for the censorship of studio films. The mechanism served the needs of commerce and morality, art not being a party to the negotiations.” Breen, and those who supported him, convinced themselves that audiences could not decide for themselves whether a film had moral value. He had to decide for them. By Breen’s measure, his system worked. One last note from Doherty: “The baton pass between two female stars embodied the realignment. By year’s end, six-year-old Shirley Temple had elbowed aside the forty-something Mae West as the number one box office attraction.” In fact, West’s movie career faded, as she was neutered from doing her brand of comedy. The PCA would be modified over the years, weakened somewhat in the 50s and 60s, before its replacement by the current film ratings system. Did movies as a whole suffer due to this censorship? That question remains difficult to answer. Hollywood enjoyed many successful years both in quality and box office. Clever screenwriters and directors found ways to hint at what they were not allowed to show. Still, I can’t help but wonder what Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder or Alfred Hitchcock could have done without the PCA’s restraints (Wilder and Hitchcock were still working by the PCA’s end but were in the twilight of their careers). Another question also bothers me: Didn’t these “moral guardians” have anything better to do? When the PCA came to be America was still suffering from the Great Depression. Jim Crow laws disenfranchised minorities in the South and other areas. The U.S. Senate failed to pass legislation banning lynching. Meanwhile, fascist dictators gained power around the world. Still, movies were the real problem I suppose. I noted in a 2017 column how Breen, a documented Anti-Semite, used the PCA to prevent filmmakers from criticizing the Nazis. He abused his power to ensure that any attempt to address what was going in Germany was either stopped or watered down enough to be meaningless. Breen got away with this because of his unchecked power and his illusion of moral authority. Unfortunately, while the PCA is gone we are seeing many more Joseph Breens emerge across America, especially in state legislatures. Not afraid to tackle the tough issues, legislators in 16 states are going after men in dresses and makeup. These states all have bills that would target drag shows, grouping them in with strip clubs, pornography stores and other adult entertainment. Some of these bills prohibit state funding from being used for drag shows, while others would ban Sunday drag shows or the drag story hours at libraries. The stated reason offered by many proponents of such bills is protecting children from sexually explicit material, but that rationale does not hold up under any type of scrutiny. States already have laws against exposing children to pornography or other material of a sexual nature. Some drag shows are sexually explicit, and some are not. Drag performers in schools or reading to children at a drag story hour are entirely G-rated. The state bills make no such distinction. For example, the new Tennessee law (before a federal judge blocked it) labeled any “male or female impersonator” as “adult cabaret entertainment.” According to Business Insider “The sweeping language in the bill does not specify exactly what conduct or type of outfit would qualify a performer as a ‘male or female impersonator,’ whether the performance would have to be adult in nature to fall under the ban, or if performances in private locations where children may be present, like a person’s home or private venue, would be impacted.” The Website FiveThirtyEight "analyzed language in 29 anti-drag bills from 16 states and found lawmakers have struggled to differentiate between a drag queen and, say, a performer in a Shakespearean play or a trans person who also happens to be a singer. Different amendments have been added to try to narrow the bills to avoid running afoul of the First Amendment, but those changes often muddy the water by using subjective language, which will leave local law enforcement and judges to decide what is and isn’t allowed. Meanwhile, the justification for these bills echoes past eras of heightened LGBTQ+ discrimination and prejudice. The variety of definitions in these bills raises a pivotal question: If you can’t explain what you’re trying to ban, should you really be trying to ban it?” Milton Berle wore drag sometimes. So did Bob Hope. Other performers to do that included Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Sammy Davis, Jr., Burt Reynolds, Dustin Hoffman, Julie Andrews, Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes and Tom Hanks. Dolly Parton once said, “If I hadn’t been a girl, I’d have been a drag queen.” When I was a kid, I regularly saw Corporal Klinger on “M*A*S*H” who wore dresses to try to get out of the army. Somehow, I survived. In an interview with FiveThirtyEight, an Arizona legislator said the quiet part out loud “I think young children would be confused and possibly disturbed at the image of a person who appears to be a biological male, dressed in the rather flamboyant, and sometimes kind of risqué drag outfits. And the second reason I have a problem with it is when they target children, I think there’s an element of indoctrination there. I think there’s an element of ‘Let’s expose ourselves to children and try to convince them that this is perfectly normal.’” Ahh, so it’s all part of a secret plot to confuse, disturb and then indoctrinate children. If only parents in the 50s knew that before they let their kids watch Berle and Hope. Also, what exactly is wrong with children getting used to people dressing how they like? We don’t know the full impact of this anti-drag movement, but the early signs are not encouraging. Many drag queens report that their livelihood may be threatened. Gay pride parade organizers have said they may need to cancel this year. The anti-drag politicians have inspired violent protesters to intimidate drag show performers and audiences. Let me take a step back to explain that I don’t like drag shows. I find seeing a man pretend to be an exaggerated form of a woman neither interesting nor entertaining. That’s my personal taste. My wife Sarit loves drag shows. She can rattle off the names of the “Ru Paul Drag Race” contestants the way I rattle off my favorite film directors. We can each decide what we watch, just as parents can decide if it’s appropriate for their children. No one needs state governments to decide for them. The modern-day Joseph Breens are not content to pick on drag shows, not when they can go after the more dire evil we face: books. For 2022, the American Library Association reported “1,269 attempts to ban books and other resources in libraries and schools, the highest number of complaints since the association began studying censorship efforts more than 20 years ago.” This year Florida passed three laws that include removing books and educational materials. Books removed included The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and Beloved, by Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison. What other books are banned? The free speech organization PEN America, in its own analysis found that “Overwhelmingly, book banners continue to target stories by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.” PEN also noted that bans this school year are increasingly affecting a wider swath of titles, including those that portray violence and abuse, discuss topics of health and wellbeing, and cover death and grief. The book banners increasingly described books as “pornographic” if they had any sexual content at all. Some states, such as Missouri, are not stopping at school libraries. State legislators there are considering defunding public libraries because the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association challenged a state law passed last year removing certain material deemed too sexually explicit from school libraries. As with the drag show bans, supposedly the book removals are all to protect the children. Book banning activist Keith Flaugh told the New York Times that “This is not about banning books, it’s about protecting the innocence of our children, and letting the parents decide what the child gets rather than having government schools indoctrinate our kids.” There’s that indoctrination word again. Indoctrinated to what exactly? Caring about people that are different from them? Learning how other children handle tragedy and trauma? Parents should have the right to decide what books are best for their kids. I’d hope they would consider guidance from trained educators instead of politicians, but that’s their call. These same parents should not decide what books are best for other parents’ kids. When the belligerent parent groups get books removed, they are effectively removing the choice from other parents. Then again, it’s not really about choice and certainly not about protecting children. Just as with Joseph Breen decades earlier, it’s about eliminating subjects and ideas that they don’t like. It’s about controlling who gets to see what. The whole “protecting children” rationale rings hollow when considering what’s really threatening America’s youth. The number of children and teens killed by gunfire in the United States increased 50% between 2019 and 2021, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the latest annual mortality statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC also found that guns are the leading killer of children and teens, now surpassing car accidents. Guns are responsible for 19% of all childhood deaths. Surely all the activists and politicians rushing to protect children from books and drag shows are eager to do the same with guns, right? You already know the answer to that question. Despite the high-profile school shootings and rising gun deaths, many of the states targeting books and drag have actually loosened gun laws. For example, Tennessee, the same state that banned drag story time for children earlier this year, did not take up a red flag gun bill after their recent school shooting even though it was supported by their Governor. A Tennessee legislator said of drag shows: “We don’t put up with that crap in Tennessee, and we shouldn’t. And the rest of the country should follow suit.” When asked about school shootings, that same legislator replied “We're not gonna fix it. Criminals are gonna be criminals.” To him and many like him, the Second Amendment is absolute, while the First Amendment is negotiable. While smarter people than me can debate what steps are needed to reduce gun violence, the numbers show that firearms are a real threat to America’s youth. No such numbers illustrate any danger to children posed by books or drag shows. The efforts to “protect” children from those fake risks are driven only by fear, just like Joseph Breen’s crusade against movies he found objectionable. Just like all the hand wringing about Rock N Roll music in the 50s and 60s or rap music in the 80s and 90s. Focusing on these distractions while ignoring real problems might not help anyone, but it’s so, so easy. Gun violence, health care, poverty, racism, antisemitism, the economy, and protecting democracy are difficult. So why do that when instead you can attack people who look different than you? Or books with words and themes you don’t like. Or entertainment that has more sex or violence (the fictional kind, not the real thing) than you would prefer. If someone challenges you on any of this scapegoating, just say “it’s for the children.” While the threats the Joseph Breens in the world combat may be fake, the damage inflicted by their attacks are all too real. They can enable intolerance at a time when we all need more acceptance and understanding. They can stoke fear against “the other.” What “the other” is can vary. Now it can be against drag performers, trans people, and others in the LGBTQ+ community. Or the intolerance can be against new ideas. Or maybe against empathy with those from different backgrounds and different experiences. Think about regimes in other countries or in other times in world history that restricted what people could watch or read. Do we view any of these regimes kindly? Freedom of expression and freedom to decide what to read or see, are the hallmarks of America at its best. We can and should decide what movies meet our own standards for morality, decency, artistic quality, and entertainment. Parents play a vital role making those decisions with and for their kids. Sometimes I’ll hear of a parent letting a young kid see Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom and I might think “That’s a little earlier than I would allow.” That’s fine, as long as I don’t try to require that these parents adhere to my standards instead of their own. Joseph Breen left the PCA in 1954 and died in 1965, but what he represented still lives on. Doherty wrote that Breen “felt a sacred duty to protect the spiritual well-being of the innocent souls who fluttered too close to the unholy attractions of the motion picture screen.” Today’s Joseph Breens also see themselves as our protectors, but only from what they decide are the dangers, regardless if there’s any evidence to justify their fears. Like the original, these Breens do not really care whether we want their protection. They may not even care about who might get hurt from their efforts. But we should care, because the Breens slowly erode our ability to think and decide for ourselves. It is that erosion, not movies, music, books, or drag shows, that’s a real threat, against which we must all protect ourselves. Adam Spector May 1, 2023 Contact us: |
