HAYS CODE DEFINITION
What is the Hays Code?
The Hays Code is a set of rules and guidelines that Hollywood films were made to follow between the early 1930s and late 1960s. Officially named the Motion Picture Production Code, these were a set of moral guidelines and rules that were meant to make Hollywood pictures “presentable” and “safe” for the public at large, which meant not covering or featuring certain controversial topics, themes, or actions.
Hays Code examples include:
- Keeping Catholic and family values
- No sexually explicit content
- Good guys always win, bad guys always lose
- Nothing that promotes “bad values” or “perversion”
- No swearing and saying offensive things
Once again we see another act of senseless violence which continues to escalate in our society. While there has always been violence to include murder, it has certainly increased since the 1960’s. I think part of it is due to the culture of death promoted by ideologies associated with politics and its rhetoric to include the abortion mentality that okays the murder of innocent children in the womb AND DURING BIRTH! . But it also has to do with our media and the glorified violence it promotes often allowing evil in the plot to win over good. That was not the case when there was the Hays Code in Hollywood and elsewhere. Censorship of glorified violence and disrespect for religion and humanity would go much further than just regulating guns and assault riffles, which need regulation. But people kill and their choice of weapons can be almost anything. Radicalized by the media’s idea of violent entertainment where evil wins needs to be addressed. The abortion culture needs to be eliminated too.
HAYS CODE DEFINITION
What is the Hays Code?
The Hays Code is a set of rules and guidelines that Hollywood films were made to follow between the early 1930s and late 1960s. Officially named the Motion Picture Production Code, these were a set of moral guidelines and rules that were meant to make Hollywood pictures “presentable” and “safe” for the public at large, which meant not covering or featuring certain controversial topics, themes, or actions.
Hays Code examples include:
Keeping Catholic and family values
No sexually explicit content
Good guys always win, bad guys always lose
Nothing that promotes “bad values” or “perversion”
No swearing and saying offensive things
5 comments:
Sort of off topic, but consistent with the theme. Father McDonald, our resident leftwing loon, will of course deny what this article says, because he is part of the problem, not the solution. Kind of like our heirarchy believe liturgical bliss and a new springtime is just around the corner if we suprress the TLM.
Here goes:
https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/09/fiddling-america-away/
It used to be that the USCCB had a movie reviewer who would give a Catholic perspective...but he went full homosexualist and they eventually ended the whole gig. When we were raising our kids we had to find a Protestant reviewer who did a far better job.
We probably don't think of the Great Depression as an age of scandal in entertainment, but it was bad enough that in 1936, Pius XI issued Vigilanti Cura, an encyclical addressing the degenerate rot in the film industry and prescribing solutions:
https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_29061936_vigilanti-cura.html
Of course, the Catholic Church commanded a certain level of respect and moral authority in those days (before the 1961-present era of managed decline).
Given the shameful and slobbering worship we offer to entertainers today, it's hard for us to imagine it, but there WAS a time when decent people shunned those who worked in the show business industry. There was a reason for this. People in show business tended to live immoral lives of promiscuity and family neglect. The SILENT film age was proof enough of the degeneracy of many of our entertainers. In spite of what we might think today, Hollywood's "royalty" wallowed in a subculture of sex, drugs and violence. Cocaine was as readily available as alcohol and names such as Louise Brooks, John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle (to name but a few) were associated with the excesses that the easy wealth and adulation of the silent screen enabled.
Like television, like the internet, like any other form of media, motion pictures have tremendous potential to do good things for us and, like all the aforementioned media, it has done the opposite. It all collapsed when LBJ advisor Jack Valenti took over the Motion Picture Association of America and abandoned the Hayes Code, instituting his rating system. The result? In 1970, an X-rated film won Best Picture at the Academy Awards (Midnight Cowboy--which would get an R rating today) and any sense of rules or decorum quickly vanished.
The film industry is all but dead. Multiplex theaters provide inane comic-book movies about super heroes with dialogue written for fourth graders. Porn dominates the internet. And we laugh at the past with our patronizing certainty that we "know better" than those foolish scions of a "dark age" who thought they were protecting the public.
Sure we do.
I recall when Blessed Patrick Peyton, CSC and Catholic actors and actresses, like Rosalind Russell, Jane Wyatt, and Spencer Tracey actually promoted Catholic values in the movie industry. Hollywood made dozens of movies which depicted Catholicism in a favorable light. That is generally not the case any longer, because the Catholic Church in the US elected in the 1960s to abdicate its role and influence in society. One of the more disgusting spectacles was the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston presiding over serial philanderer and abortion advocate, Teddy Kennedy's funeral. I am sure Teddy has at least one admirer here, but would be a villain to that same person if he had an "R" after his name.
I think there is a lot to say good about the role of the production code. I agree there is a real need for greater standards.
That said, let me point out two things:
- The Hays Code was not helpful on issues of race. Right there, in the item you posted, it says, "no miscengenation." All those wonderful old movies, nevertheless, weren't great on race and probably slowed down progress, which gave opponents of the Hays Code ammo against it.
- The Hays Code did nothing to deal with some pretty problematic messages in entertainment over the decades. A lot of films promoted religious indifferentism by boiling it all down to a lowest common denominator. And I think the really bad message that was constant for decades was that the most important thing in life is romantic love.
In any case, without a transformation of our culture, there's no going back.
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