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• 1 2018-07-13T23:39:18-07:00 The Fall of American Censorship, 1953-1973 2 plain 2018-07-14T00:10:54-07:00

  The Fall of American Censorship

  In the 1960s, two frameworks of censorship collapsed simultaneously: the Supreme Court-determined law on pornography; and 2) the Motion Picture Association of America's self-censorship system, called "The Code," which was terminated in 1966 and in 1968 replaced by the "Ratings" system.  The MPAA Ratings (which since 1966 have evolved continuously, from SMA (Suggested for Mature Audiences), to M (Mature" and G (General) 1968, to 1970, G (General), R (Restricted) and an unofficial X for explicit content), to further changes through 1990s.  Since the late 1990s, the ratings have been:  Rated G: General audiences – all ages admitted; Rated PG: Parental guidance suggested – some material may not be suitable for children; Rated PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned – some material may be inappropriate for children under 13; Rated R: Restricted – under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian; Rated NC-17: No children under 17 admitted [1990–1996] / No one 17 and under admitted [1996–present].  Note that "X" was abandoned by the MPAA because "X" was rapidly appropriated by the pornographic film industry in the 1970s, and permanently branded in the popular mind with porn.  The Ratings  accomplished several things.  Implemented under the leadership of MPAA President Jack Valenti (President Johnson's former Press Secretary), the "ratings" to restrict by age had been implemented already, for specific files, as the McCarthy Era thawed in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Elmer Gantry (1960) Splendor in the Grass, and Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1962) were all age-restricted (16 and up for Splendor; 18 and up for Elmer Gentry and Lolita).  Indeed, the Roman Catholic Church's own Legion of Decency had been pushing for a ratings system for years, to warn parents and youth away from certain content. Note  (Casper 2011: 118-9) 
  
  It seems that neither the Legion of decency, nor the relatively conservative Jack Valenti, appreciated how many producers and how many movie-goers would prefer to see films rated R or X, and how the creation of these categories virtually invited graphic sex and violence, artistic or not; emancipatory or reactionary and exploitive or not.  They were not watching the rapid developments in the un-censoring of pornography.  
  
  As historian Roger Darnton has shown, the publishing of political dissent and sexual pornography have long been linked.  Rousseau and Voltaire published from Switzerland because it was also an uncensored pornography publishing center (where anything could be published, including explosive political and philosophical works), and books could be smuggled easily enough into  France and the rest of Europe.  The suppression of free speech in the 1950s U.S.A. shuddered when assailed several times by the Civil Rights movements, broadly conceived.  McCarthyite America was a thought-policed, mockery of a marketplace of ideas.  But the Civil Rights movement as early as the Montgomery Bus Boycott emboldened thousands to defy the authorities, across numerous branches of life. Beats and Homophiles and Feminists asserted their rights and won them.
  
  From Chicago, Hugh Hefner scored a victory in the mass-market publication of Playboy in its first issued of December 1953 with a virtually pirated and certainly stale feature: Marilyn Monroe's nude 1949 calendar shoot.  Because both Playboy/Hefner, Marilyn Monroe, and this set of images are iconic topoi in the past of the modern world, this moment is of considerable interest.  And because "Hef," Monroe, and Playboy have gained mass-cultural mythic status, legend and fact need to be parsed.  
  
  Monroe originally posed nude for calendar purposes.  Sexy pinup calendars were among the most common masculine decorations in blue-collar work-places and bars, and that is the context of her posing.  Hefner, scraping together a first issue in a big gamble with his mother's investment money, needed really sexy fireworks to fulfill his promise of a completely uncensored, but classy and not underground, color magazine.  For the visual erotics side of the gamble, Hefner pushed aggressively for a very cheap but very valuable set.  Monroe by 1953 was famous, a movie star now.  By accident, this set of photos was being under-utilized in the nude calendar pinup market.  Surviving copies show that the original producer licensed the series to numerous small-scale companies for their annual advertising calendars, traditionally hung in bars and mechanic shops.
  
  When Monroe subsequently "made it" in Hollywood, and soeone recognized the nude model from the memorable 1949 shoot, the story broke in 1952.  Marilyn decided not to run from the incipient scandal.  Indeed, she brilliantly took the offensive, giving an exclusive interview to Stars and Stripes, with a circulation of millions to U.S. servicemen all over the world in the midst of the Korean War. "I’m not ashamed of it, I’ve done nothing wrong…I was a week behind in the rent ... But when the picture came out, everybody knew me…I’d never have done it if I’d known things would happen so fast in Hollywood for me."Note
  
  Hugh Hefner's position at the intersections of freedom and exploitation are evident in his republication of the Monroe calendar shoot.  He essentially bent image-property law to follow Monroe's public admission of having posed, and then "outed" her farther with a cornerstone pornographic moment in the fall of censorship.  Hefner later settled a suit for republishing frame-still photos of Cybill Shepard lifted from The Last Picture Show (1971).  But Hefner stood solidly for civil rights during the crux of the movement: he was an early and steadfast financier and organizer in the Civil Rights movement, founding, ultimately, in 1980, the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award.Note 
  
  A series of pornography cases came before the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1950s-70s that struggled to create clearer definitions of that "obscene" and therefore not protected by the first Amendment.  The 1868 "Hicklin Test" ("deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences) was abandoned in Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957), restricted definition s of unprotected "obscene" material to that  whose "dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest" to the "average person, applying contemporary community standards."  The new keywords were "taken as a whole" and "community standards."  Roth allowed the flourishing of a range of relatively explicit material, so long as it belonged to a work that taken as a whole was not "prurient," (that is, was serious), that the standard for this distinction would be "community standards."  
  
  Under Nixon's 1969 Chief Justice appointee, Warren Burger, a majority of the Supreme Court agreed to crack down on the proliferation of pornography, imposing in 1972-1975 a new and clarified three-prong test of "obscenity," Miller v. California  413 U.S. 15 (1973).  This three-part "Miller Test" is stated as follows: 
  1. "Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
  2. Whether the work depicts or describes, in an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions, as specifically defined by applicable state law; and
  3. Whether the work, "taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." (Miller 413 U.S. at 24-25.)
  This 5-4 Burger Court Decision was in direct ways a repressive law, giving states the specific definitions they needed to successfully close adult theaters and suppress publications.  But the crucial phrases: "community standards" (offensive" in #2, and "lacks ..serious, literary, artistic, scientific, etc, ..value"  These standards could be as depraved as any community becomes, so of course Los Angeles defined a historic low in what was "offensive" and what was "serious"  Art had already been debased to commerce in Hollywood since the 1920s, so just about anything counted as art.  And since nothing can offend those decadents who, since Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle have tried everything, the "community standards" of Los Angeles can easily be predicted to permit the portrayal of anything imaginable.  Thus was born the multi-billion Pornography industry in the San Fernando Valley. 
  
  LA's Beat Avant-garde of the late 1950s and early 1960s displayed grotesquely explicit bodies in sexual ecstasy and violent agony, often metaphoric.  Edward Kienholz's angriest work was his Psycho-Vendetta Case (1965), protesting the execution of condemned murderer Caryl Chessman.  The titles on the work instruct the viewer to lick Chessman's arse. "Limit three Times."  He also began in that year a gruesome trifecta savaging the whole tormented suburban-corporate American family, with  John Doe (1959),  Jane Doe (1960), and Boy, Son of John Doe (1961).
  
  Television and the Hollywood Movies of the Code Era (1934-1966) were not able to differentiate their product very widely.  All genres needed to be acceptable to a certain definition of "family" morality: literally meant to be "mass" consumed by all genders, age groups, social classes, races, etc.   Television before the Cable era remained committed to a universal, uniform mass audience. The rise of Cable after the mid-1970s broke this logjam, as the Ratings system did for movies after 1968, and unleashed all forms of expression in Television, which became majority-cable by the 1990s.
  
  The fall of censorship meant that it was Prague Spring in Euro-America in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  The years of Nixon's tyranny were also those of a global rebellion for equality, labor rights, peace, democracy, and freedom, when totalitarian and capitalist imperial states were equally reviled in the name of human emancipation.  The films of the New Hollywood are a triumph of that thaw, when capitalists ironically invested in proliferating opposition to its global exploitation. Perhaps this is because it also invested in the portrayal of its own beneficence and in the justness of the authoritarian regimes that kept it safe.  The films of the New Hollywood were highly political, but their politics varied from Left to Right.  As historian Steve Ross has shown, when Hollywood has flexed its political muscles, it has done so in support of the Right more often than in support of the Left.Note