The Big Screen (61 page)

When
Blow-Up
arrived in America, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) declined to give it a seal of approval. The major distributors were signed on to a voluntary agreement to seek and accept that imprimatur for every movie. But M-G-M passed the film over to a subsidiary company (Premier Pictures) that was not an MPAA signatory. They went ahead with its release. Nothing happened, except that
Blow-Up
made a lot of money, received ecstatic reviews—Arthur Knight said in
Playboy
that it was as important as
Citizen Kane
,
Open City
, and
Hiroshima Mon Amour
—and Antonioni's direction and the script were nominated for Oscars.

One concern over the picture was for its flashes of nudity. Yet the more suggestive scene in
Blow-Up
was that photo shoot with Veruschka. She wore enough clothing to escape protest, but the scene's sense of an exploitative thrust in photography was reason to be disturbed. It was asking the old questions “Is this a movie? Is it for us? Why are we looking?” Such questions were more radical or disconcerting than a tuft of pubic hair glimpsed in a scrum. But censorship didn't always get its own point, and censorship was on the ropes in the 1960s.

In 1958 Louis Malle had made
Les Amants
, in which his own lover, Jeanne Moreau, played a dissatisfied socialite who finds sex and love with a younger man she meets by chance. The film contained a good deal of nocturnal nudity, elegantly done, and a moment when the man performs cunnilingus on the woman. We do not see his action, but we see her face and hear her rapture—it is quite like the famous moment in Gustav Machatý's
Ecstasy
(1933), where the young Hedy Lamarr (called Kiesler then) runs around naked and feels a rush like that enjoyed by Moreau.
Les Amants
was a big hit in France, but when it came to America, in 1959, a theater manager in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, was charged with the public depiction of obscene material. He was convicted, but he appealed all  the way to the Supreme Court, which overturned the verdict in 1964. Justice Potter Stewart, writing about pornography, said, “I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” (However, later in life—he died in 1985—Stewart said he regretted the decision.)

Increasing time and talk were given over to our “need” or “right” to see more sexual frankness on-screen, but very little consideration was given to how far this medium, with its breathtaking manipulation of reality, had always been about desire. Ever since the rule of Will Hays, American audiences had been resigned to the industry's pious warning that it needed to be careful on our behalf. Otherwise local authorities might take the law into their own hands and ban films, or cut them. (Pennsylvania was one state that banned
Ecstasy
outright.)

In most cases, motion pictures had always been stories about attractive people in which the lush craft of photography and the stealth of music combined to make them seem lovelier still, and more seductive. In nearly every genre (even the Western), love situations were obligatory, and Howard Hughes had seen no reason why a Western should not be about sex—witness Jane Russell in
The Outlaw
(1943), with the producer's diligent efforts to create a bra for her that seemed not to exist. It wasn't just that we learned how to fall in love, like “love at first sight.” There was a deeper message: that we
should
fall in love, because that was what life (and seeing) was about. Movies were dating events then—and usherettes had flashlights to make sure couples in the back row were not completely imitating the screen's indicated action.

So there were rules on-screen, the Code's conditions: no nudity, no undue suggestiveness, no hint that sexual relations outside marriage were pleasant, no miscegenation (no cegenation, either) and no undue kissing. The rules didn't always work. For
Notorious
(1946), Alfred Hitchcock looked at the standards for how long a screen kiss could last and simply had Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kissing and talking, and kissing again—who could have guessed that a lover might like to be talked to, or need to draw breath? On
The Big Sleep
(1946), late in the day, Howard Hawks threw in a conversation between Bogart and Bacall about horses and jockeys and being in the saddle, and the censors apparently missed the message and the lewd grin on Bacall's face.

With the pill, shorter skirts, rock and roll, and young purchasing power, it was only a matter of time before the Code gave up. But there were other pressures to take into account. The movies, as they withered, were looking for any possible advantage over the small screen. One had been to make the movie screen wider (CinemaScope) or “explosive” (3-D). Another was to get people to take their clothes off and talk dirty.

In May 1966, Jack Valenti (formerly a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson) was appointed to head the MPAA (a move engineered by Lew Wasserman). Valenti knew that changes had to be implemented before ridicule set in. The undermining had been years in the making.

As early as 1960, Alfred Hitchcock had dined and finessed Geoffrey Shurlock, director of the Production Code Administration, over
Psycho
. Hitch had been warned by many people that
Psycho
would never be approved by the Code. So he cultivated Shurlock and talked to him about the problems an ingenious, creative movie director faced. Shurlock was flattered; he took an interest in the project and the dilemma. Just as a plot point, Hitchcock needed to have a toilet being flushed. Then there was the matter of the slaughter in the shower, to which Hitch said he would do it as quickly as possible and take care that we never saw a knife piercing skin. He was persuasive, and the times were ready. So a toilet was flushed, and the idea of a woman was slashed to pieces. You can hear the knife working on the sophisticated soundtrack.

There was another pressure, a way of confusing other desires. With the coming of television, the ordinary, old-fashioned rapture in which people followed filmed fictions clashed with the commercials interrupting every story. “Why are we watching commercials? Is it to pay for the medium, this new toy? Is it because we want to have these things? Or are the advertised products kin to the ideals in the story?”

Television commercials became small movies, shot with care and skill and sometimes with resources that outstripped those of feature filmmaking. The commercials of the 1950s and '60s look quaint today, but that doesn't mean they weren't compelling at the time. (Didn't Don Draper and
Mad Men
make them?) The shining light was working in a quite new way. Viewers might laugh the ads off and say they were fanciful, and advertisers learned that a touch of humor helped sweeten the selling—it relaxed the suckers—but the public soon knew some ads by heart, and if they observed the marketplace, they realized that advertising succeeded. The huddled masses paid heed. Only desire, that precious, fundamental urge, was compromised.

Jack Valenti looked at the disarray of 1966: at
Blow-Up
and
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(1966), which had so much “bad” language it was warned in advance by the MPAA. (Then a Warner Bros. executive saw the light: “We've got a $7 million dirty movie!”) Valenti was not happy that “individuals” seemed to be making movies their way, instead of working in the system. So he introduced a new set of ratings to replace the seal of approval, and to keep some control: G—all ages could see it; M (for Mature)—all ages could see it, but parents were advised to take care; R—no one under the age of 16 could see it if not in the company of a parent or adult guardian; X—no one under 17 could see it.

A board was hired by the MPAA to view the films and award the ratings, and soon it became clear that the board was willing to talk to filmmakers and negotiate. It became practice to trade scenes and words, glimpses and cuts. By 1970 the concept of “Mature” had raised so many uncertainties that it was replaced with PG, for “parental guidance.” In 1984 the system was G/PG/PG-13 (an age indicator)/R/X. By then, the X  rating, awarded to
Midnight Cowboy
(1969) and
Last Tango in Paris
(1972), among others, had become hopelessly confused with “pornography.” Two years later, the rating on
Midnight Cowboy
was amended to R, after it had won for Best Picture. A true X had restricted commercial viability: many localities and newspapers were so alarmed by X that they would not review or advertise such pictures. And so, in 1990, NC-17 was introduced as a new label, its first unhappy recipient was Philip Kaufman's
Henry and June
(1990).

By now the availability of direct sex, soft core, hard, and harder—sometimes of startling physical detail and cruelty—seems to have diminished the quest for sexual action in movies. Instead, violence has occupied the vacant taboo space, though it was not a cause, like sex, in the 1960s. It was Kaufman who, at the time of
Henry and June
, remarked that if America was nervous about a shot of a hand caressing a breast, it seemed happy to see a sword slicing it off. If a child—the seven-year-old, the three-year-old—sits between both parents at such an excision, doesn't the power of the process strike at something that is always alone? Call it the singularity of self; call it independence or loneliness. Or will the child assume that, because everyone else is watching, the act must be an established item of discourse?

I know this leads into infinite and unanswerable questions on the influence movies have had, but that is a central task of this book, and I will not dodge it just because the “evidence” is scattered and contradictory. Just because it's so hard to measure the impact of movies quantitatively does not mean the impact is a myth.

I am not saying movie violence is responsible for this or that recent massacre. (I won't name one for fear of being outdated). I am not sure Stanley Kubrick was sensible to withdraw
A Clockwork Orange
in Britain—after he had made it, and made it so scary. But the ability to observe such things passively, or as spectators rather than participants, is deeply influential.

Consider: if I were to propose that movies of the 1930s and '40s helped teach us how to smoke, and made smoking seem cool as well as hot, who would disagree?

If I added that over a period of fifty years moviegoing indicated a scheme of being “good-looking” and lovable and attractive that helped define attraction, you would say, well, maybe so. And you might snatch a quick look in the mirror to make sure it was you. The mirror is still in our top-ten technologies.

If I asked whether the “silly” ads for everything from vodka to soup have been effective, you would admit that the evidence of American business tends to support that notion. Would it have persisted with advertising without some certainty of result? Or is business insane?

So, don't movies affect us? Don't we want them to move us? Aren't we talking about one of the most profound appeals to desire the human race has ever created out of nothing?

You can always feel honest desire. It is what makes people write and see and make films. It is what makes us want to see and feel. It is all we hope for in the light. This is October 28, 1972, Pauline Kael in
The New Yorker
, as later published in a book called
Reeling
: