12 Movies That Prove Hollywood Has Always Been Obsessed With Crime, Violence and Sex
In a puzzling online discussion this week, part of Gen Z is looking longingly back at the era of the Filmmaking Code, also known as the Hays Code, a self-imposed (well, technically) set of censorship standards that Hollywood has rigorously adhered to since 1934. until the end of the 1960s. It all started with calls to return to the serene times when good people made good films without a single naked ass:
But obscene films are not a modern invention. From the beginning, films have been obsessed with sex (obviously). The production code simply required Hollywood to be more subtle in this regard, but before the Hays Code was introduced, films were very messy. When people talk about the “before the Code” era, they usually mean the “talkies” years, before the Code was formalized and put into action by the studios… i.e. roughly from 1929 to 1934, with 1933 being the peak year. It’s not that these films had a lot of nudity or sex scenes – society as a whole was still shedding the prudishness of the Victorians – but the films definitely had more freedom to explore adult sexuality. Even almost 100 years ago, these films recognized, for example, that women can have sex and even enjoy it, and addressed the problem of sexual power dynamics between heterosexual men and women. The code advocated by active Christian organizations did not impose an existing status quo, but created a new one based on a particularly narrow view of acceptable behavior. And it wasn’t just about sex: movies couldn’t show authority figures in general and religious leaders in particular as imperfect, unless the filmmakers were extremely careful to make it clear that such people were the exception. Other authoritarian impulses that led to decades of popular mass entertainment that told Americans that the police are never wrong and that the clergy will never hurt you. Crime never paid off, so even the most unjust laws had to be honored. homosexuality was strictly excluded, as was any romantic or sexual miscegenation. The “virtue” overlooked by Codex fans also completely erased female sexual power, weirdness, or the idea that a relationship could be anything but two heterosexual people of the same race.
Code-era films eventually found subtle ways to challenge the rigor of Hayes’ office – directors like Hitchcock knew how to heighten the sexual tension (and innuendo) to create scenes that feel no less sexual than actual sex scenes, as well as introducing mislead the censors. — and some of the greatest films ever made were indeed made by scrupulously following the rules of the Code, or by changing them in the right way. But to romanticize censorship, which was mainly designed to keep women in their places and value power over the problems of the less privileged, is rather misguided. Instead, let’s honor the free-spirited spirit of these pre-Code films, which prove that films have always had flaws in the brain.