First and foremost, after doing research from tvtropes.org, I found that the “Hays Code” in the 1930s was basically a set of rules towards filmmaking in America that shaped our cinema for many decades. It was designed to prove to both congress and the public, that Hollywood had ‘cleaned up its act’. A major drawback of this code, was that it greatly restricted what was being produced, and limited the content of many great films. In Joel Spring’s “Movies as a Form of Education: The Film Production Code of 1930”, he writes how “in Hays words, the censorship code required that in films, ‘crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin shall not be made attractive; that correct standards of life shall be presented; that law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, or sympathy for its violation'” (Spring83). in my personal opinion, this code cause a lot of drawbacks when it comes to filmmaking.
I can understand why this code was implemented, because they wanted the public to have a better opinion and view of Hollywood productions, but for a lot of filmmakers, it limited what they could show in their films. In real life, crime should not be portrayed in a positive manner, but the point of movies is that they allow you to escape from reality for a couple hours. For many movies, the main content has to do with crime and/or other wrongdoings, and in many cases, they are from the perspective of the wrongdoer. This is what makes many movies interesting, and that is one of the reasons that I think the restrictions that the code implemented were a bit too harsh.
Although I do not agree with the extreme censorship, I do somewhat agree with how “the 1930 code was premised on the idea that entertainment should provide audiences with moral, social, and political lessons” (Spring84). It is good that the code wanted viewers of the films to gain a positive moral and/or lesson from watching movies, however, i believe that sometimes, it is okay to not provide these lessons. I think that filmmaking is all about creativity, and it’s not always positive morals that make a good movie. Filmmakers should have been given more of a creative range when it came to the content of their films; it’s the unique viewpoints and perspectives that make a movie interesting.
aspenladieu 