Funny Movies

 

Puritanism -The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

- H. L. Mencken

 

One hears all the time that Blazing Saddles (or Airplane or Animal House or Caddyshack or Young Frankenstein or Dr. Strangelove or Smokey and the Bandit or many others) could not be made today. It is probably true. We are in a prudish and puritanical time. It is interesting to remember that such films could not have been made much earlier than they were either.

Restrictions come in various forms – including direct government censorship (which is supposed to be illegal in this country), pressure from self-proclaimed defenders of public morality, and so-called self regulation  done as appeasement. Before the 1960s movie makers faced all three. State and local governments prohibited the showing of films on forbidden topics. The Catholic legion of decency and other pressure groups pushed filmmakers to avoid themes and content they considered immoral. The movie industry’s  trade association enforced  the Motion Picture Production Code which specified what was allowed and what was forbidden in movies. These days there are no production code and no censorship from American governments, but the pressure from the defenders of morality is pervasive and intense. Feminist, race hustling, LBGTQ, green, multicultural, “progressive”, and various other woke puritans are on full alert in social and other media to try to make sure that no one, anywhere in the movies is having any good, raucous, politically incorrect fun. They are as dogmatic and seem to be just about as successful with the movie industry as the other legionnaires of decency were in the old days.

Those of us who like that sort of fun can be glad there was a long period between one bunch of prudes losing power and another one gaining it. We can also be glad that for now at least, funny films from those days are still available. However it might be a good idea not to count on that remaining true. Streaming services seem like good targets for pressure to stop offering content someone deems inappropriate. I’d recommend a person going ahead and get copies of the stuff he likes  on his own media in his physical possession just in case.  The forces of decency are on the march.

It is an interesting aside that the puritans in the saddle today and the successors of the ones who were in the past generally despise and would like to cancel each other. There are amusing irony and useful lessons in that, but I doubt if many in either group would see them.

 

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A Sensible Precaution

 As well as I can remember, I’ve never read a book by Dr. Seuss as a kid, parent, or grandparent.  So I will not miss his recently banned books and will not be paying the hundreds of dollars that used copies of them are being offered at online. However I would miss Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, Romeo and Juliet, Tamburlaine the Great, Blazing Saddles, The Searchers, Madame Butterfly, Don Giovanni, and many other things our present day legions of decency and listers of prohibited books might decide to ban next.

It is a problem with an obvious solution. One should not trust any streaming service, corporate vendor, library, or broadcasters to keep something available once the cancelling gang goes after it.  Instead, a person should have his own copies of the books, movies, and music he likes in his physical possession completely independent of and separate from any other party’s storage, devices, or offerings. (Antique stores and independent book, music, and video sellers are good places to shop and often staffed by people interesting to talk to.) The cancellers may be able to remove a book from Amazon’s or the public library’s shelves, but they cannot touch yours, at least not in this country and not yet.  

That may seem excessive. It certainly can be expensive and take up a lot of space, but  it is a sensible precaution. Foolish, unreasoning, barbarous minded, dogmatic fanatics will try to do foolish, irrational, barbarous, fanatical things.  Given the present political climate in the country and the general level of cowardice in corporations and institutions, the cancellers will often get their way. One cannot tell what they will next decide is problematic or when enough people finally will come to their senses and tell them to go to hell that it will not matter.

Gone with the Wind and HBO

I am not as fond of the movie Gone with the Wind as some people are. It is surely an impressive production, and Gable and Leigh do a fine job with their characters, but there are a number of movies from the same year of 1939 that I enjoy more and think are better. Its pro-Confederacy propaganda is not the worst I’ve seen in movies from about that time, but it is bad enough.  (The worst I know about is Curtiz’s Santa Fe Trail with its thesis that things would have been fine if not for those busybody abolitionists. It was part of the political correctness of the day not to offend southerners by saying anything insensitive or divisive about the Confederacy.)  Its at least implied support of slavery is worse.

However it is wrong to judge art solely by political ideology. To cite a couple of extreme examples, Leni Riefenstahl and Sergei Eisenstein were talented film makers whose works promoted two of the worst regimes and ideologies in world history. One worked for the Nazis, and the other served the Soviets. That does not mean that one should not watch Olympia or Potemkin, and it certainly does not mean they should be banned.  It would take a Manichean dogmatist or at least an idealist in Mencken’s sense (a person who observing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, assumes it would make better soup) to think so.  

It was crude and stupid virtue signaling for HBO to pull Gone with the Wind  to return it only with a disclaimer which one presumes will alert those otherwise unable to figure it out that the movie slants things toward the viewpoint of the Johnny Rebs (which may say something about the opinion the bosses at HBO have about the intelligence of their customers).  It was also worrisome. The availability of movies or other works of art should not be  dictated by the  sensitivities and demands of pressure groups – whether Black Lives Matter, the National Legion of Decency, or anybody else.  We are not there yet, but there are people working to get us there.

 I have thought it was a good idea for a person to have his own copies of the books, movies and music he really likes, in his own possession, not in anybody’s cloud, or depending on anybody’s continuing to offer a given product.  I was less concerned about censorship or altering works than about the risk that vendors may just stop carrying some things one might want.  I still think that is the main reason for having one’s own libraries, but the risk of  censorship and/or bowdlerizing seems to be a little higher than it used to be.  

I have read that many vendors of DVDs and Blu-Rays sold out of Gone with the Wind after HBO pulled it. So lots of people may be starting to worry.   It is likely that to the extent that people do decide to buy their own media, their interest in HBO will decrease. That is okay. It would serve them right.

Phoniness on Campus

Many people have commented on the hypocrisy and illiberality of   faculty members and officials at universities who support – directly or tacitly – those trying to suppress the presentation of dissenting viewpoints by students and invited speakers at colleges and universities.  The hypocrisy  is surely obvious enough with professors and administrators creating so-called safe spaces to pamper students they agree with and shield them from the imagined dangers of being offended about anything while allowing  or approving of vulgar insults, racial slurs, and assorted types of intimidation  sometimes including investigation by the campus cops for students with attitudes and opinions they do not like.  The illiberality is just as obvious with the fairly explicit abandonment in some places of the liberal idea of a university as a place where ideas, hypotheses, and opinions of all sorts may be presented and discussed freely, openly, and rationally without fear of punishment or censorship and with the acceptance by officials at some universities of threats,  disruptions, and even mob violence as means to prevent speakers with unpopular views from being heard.

However there is also an interesting bit of hypocrisy  in  this that has not been noticed as much. For years  defenders of affirmative action quotas or preferences at universities have used the idea of the importance of a diversity of thoughts  and viewpoints (together with specious claims that a simple wide range of skin color somehow guarantees that) as the main argument  and justification for their policies and actions.  Lately some professors and administrators have  awkwardly revealed just how sincere that argument was.