The Mediator Between the Head and the
Hands Must Be the Heart
Part 1 in a Series on The Movies,
Politics and Predictive Programming
by Not Sure
11 June 2023
In the early
20th century, most American movies were made in New Jersey and
filming often moved to Florida during the winter. The first studio was built in Hollywood,
California in 1911. There were several
motivating factors for the westward move, including the patents monopoly that
the Thomas A. Edison company maintained and Kodak’s control over the film
supply. By the early 1920s, there were
several thriving studios on the West Coast and the movie business had also
acquired a reputation as less than savory and morally questionable.
By 1921, the
legislators of thirty-seven states had introduced more than one hundred
censorship bills, and by 1922, Hollywood was faced with complying with
hundreds, perhaps thousands of inconsistent and easily changed decency laws. That year, the Motion Picture Association of
America (MPAA) was formed as an industry trade association, to ensure the
viability of the young film business. A
photograph from their first meeting in March of 1922 shows fourteen men, seven
seated at a long wooden table, and seven standing behind the seated men. Twelve of the men were movie producers and
distributors and some of their names are still recognizable today: Fox,
Goldwyn, Loew and Laemmle. The man seated in the middle, in the largest
and most ornate chair, was William Hays.
Hays had been the chairman of the Republican National Committee from
1918-1921 and had managed Warren Harding’s successful 1920 bid for the U.S.
presidency. Harding then appointed Hays
to his cabinet as his first Postmaster General, the chief executive officer of
the United States Post Office. Hays
resigned from that position in 1922 to become the first chairman of the Motion
Picture Association of America. Standing
behind Hays was the other non-movie industry member of the MPAA, Courtland
Smith. Smith was the assistant
postmaster general and the president of the American Press Association, which had
been founded by his father, Orlando Smith, and was at the time the largest newspaper
syndicate in the United States. An
innovator in early sound newsreels, Smith would go on to become a
vice-president of Fox Film Corporation and the president of Pathé
News.
The story is
told that Will Hays founded the MPAA. He
was the Chairman and his starting salary of $35,360 is equivalent to $620,00 in
2022, but whose brainchild was the MPAA, really? That’s a history we aren’t told but based on the
MPAA from the mid-1960s on, it’s likelier that Hays was
a good politician who knew how to keep his master(s) happy.
1920’s
German cabaret during the Weimar Republic was known for its “freedom of
expression,” dancers with little or no clothing, drag queens, depictions of homosexuality
and the promotion of hedonism. Its
excesses were criticized by those on the left and the right. Socialists believed it represented the
wastefulness of capitalism and right-wing groups pointed to the moral decay as
a sign of a weak government. While much
of the decadence of the period was confined to the stage, there were a few
German films of the period with some nudity.
In the
United States however, there was much decadence and moral decay on film, in
what is now referred to as the Pre-Code era.
This period lasted from the beginning of the talkies in 1927 until 1934,
with the introduction of the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the
Hays code. The permissiveness displayed
in the silent films made many people uncomfortable, but when the actor Roscoe
“Fatty” Arbuckle was accused of the alleged rape and murder of model and
actress Virginia Rappe, this was a scandal from which
Hollywood struggled to recover. Enter
Will Hays.
Hays’ role
was to persuade censor boards not to ban specific films outright and to advise
studios how to produce movies which were unlikely to be cut. In 1930, Hays initiated “The Formula” as the
first attempt at The Code, but this wasn’t successful. Then he developed “The Don’ts and Be Carefuls,” but Hays’ attempts at pre-release
self-censorship largely failed and the cries continued for federal censorship. The Catholic bishops and laymen were
generally against censorship and approved of the idea of industry self-censorship, if it could be made to work. In 1934, there were widespread threats amongst
Catholics to boycott films deemed “immoral” and the Catholic Legion of Decency
was formed. Some high-level Catholics
stepped in to help the MPAA develop guidelines.
Laymen Martin Quigley, Joseph Breen and Father
Daniel A. Lord, S.J. spent several months discussing what behavior should and
shouldn’t be depicted in films. Father
Lord authored the code of behavior which was known as “The Production Code” and
the “Hays Code.” An old witticism described
this as “a Jewish owned business selling Catholic theology to Protestant
America.” The code was in place from 1934 until 1968.
In 1945,
Eric Johnston replaced Will Hays who stepped down after 24 years. In his tenure, Johnston oversaw the first
major revision of the production code since it was written in 1930 and set in
stone in 1934. This revision allowed the
treatment of some subjects which had previously been forbidden, including
abortion and the use of narcotics, so long as they were “within the limits of
good taste.”
In 1963,
while still serving as president of the MPAA, Johnston died of a stroke. The organization functioned without a
president for three years while studio executives searched for a replacement.
***
Redux 113 is
from a talk Alan Watt did for Republic Broadcasting Network entitled “Meet Your New Spouse: Rutting with Robots, Clankers for Wankers” © Alan Watt Oct. 12, 2007
“Now so much is happening all the time
and people tell me that they're bored. They're bored surfing the internet,
which I don't do because I've got so much going on inside my head. However,
people who are bored going through the internet don't realize that they're
being taken on a magical mystery tour. A magical mystery tour where anything is
possible because predictive programming moved from the novels into the science
fiction movies into regular movies and into dramas on television.”
Alan read from an article about a paper that had been published out of
the University of Maastricht entitled “Intimate Relationships with Artificial
Partners.” The author, David Levy,
proposed his thesis that intimate relationships with artificial partners “will
arise as natural extensions of more conventional human feelings of attraction.” Levy’s paper is more than three hundred pages
long and the word “heart” can be found 28 times, but in the context of heart
rates, the heart and stress, et cetera.
In Levy’s world, the heart is an organ whose function can be measured. The word “love” is featured. Robots will be programmed to fall in love
with humans. They will “feel” love for
humans. If the robot is emotionally intelligent
and says “I love you,” and backs that up with loving
actions, what’s the difference between robot love and human love? Alan said, “Imagine loving a robot. All
you have to do is buy them some hydraulic oil once in
a while and charge their batteries, eh?”
Ex
Machina, Blade Runner, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, The Matrix, The Terminator,
2001: Space Odysee, Her, Metropolis, the
television series Westworld. According
to AI researcher Dr. Kate Devlin, sex with robots is about so much more than sex
with robots. “It’s about intimacy and
technology, computers and psychology. It’s about history and archaeology, love and biology. It’s about the future, both near and
distant: science fiction utopias and dystopias, loneliness and companionship,
law and ethics, privacy and community. Most of all,
it’s about being human in a world of machines.”
Or…it’s about sex with a robot which is horrifying and sad.
Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis is a German expressionist science-fiction full-length science
fiction film made in 1927. In a
futuristic dystopia, wealthy industrialists live in their shiny city with gigantic
skyscrapers, while below ground, exploited workers operate oversized machines
that keep the city functioning. The son
of the city’s master spends his time playing sports and seeking pleasure until
he meets a young woman who has taken a group of underground children above
ground, to see how their “brothers” live.
The movie features a hallucination of a giant machine that is the temple
of Moloch, being fed one worker after another.
The gulf between the conditions of the rich who live in their skyscraper
castles and the workers whose lives are bleak, is the central theme of the film
and is explicitly referred to in the title card: The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands
Must Be the Heart. When the film was
released, it met with mixed reviews, but in recent years it has been hailed as
a masterpiece, visually awe-inspiring and essential viewing. Surely this movie was the first time a robot
was given female facial features and breasts.
A Well-Oiled Machine
The “close
ties” that have been cultivated between Hollywood and Washington D.C. for over
a hundred years is the topic of examination in this series. The lobby group, the Motion Picture
Association, plays a key role in this symbiotic relationship, as does the
Pentagon. We are shown the future that we
are being guided into. We follow the
stars into the next sheep pen.
Der Golem
is a 1915 German silent film, which has been partly lost. The same story was used in the 1920 film by
the same filmmakers entitled Der Golem: How He Came into the World. The story is about 16th century Rabbi Judah
Loew ben Bezalel who predicts disaster for his people and creates the clay Golem
to protect them. In Der Golem,
the emperor of Poland accuses a Jewish community in Prague of using black magic
and condemns them to leave the city. The
Rabbi prevails upon the emperor by showing him his creation, a giant clay
puppet that he has managed to bring to life.
The Golem escapes the control of the Rabbi and brings chaos and
destruction to the city until a little girl kills it.
It has been
a few years since I watched this film, but one scene remains etched in my
mind. The Rabbi asks to show the Emperor
the Jewish patriarchs so he will better understand them. He warns them that they must remain silent
and refrain from talking or laughing. The
court of the emperor gather in front of the rabbi, who steps up to the stage
and conjures smoke and flames. The
astonished crowd watch as an image is then magically projected on the wall
which shows his tribesmen traveling across the desert on foot and by donkey. The emperor’s court is silent and filled with
wonder. The rabbi is delighted at the effect this film has on the royal
court. Then a figure on the screen
appears, so much larger than life. “Ahasuerus,
the wandering Jew,” reads the text across the screen. So amazed by the spectacle, the court erupts
with laughter and chatter, fingers pointed at the “magical” screen. As they laugh, the castle began to crumble,
and the fearful royalty leapt from the windows, attempting to save themselves,
but the rabbi summoned the Golem who props up the ceiling and salvages the
disaster.
What was
most memorable to me was not the story of the clay monster, created to project
the Jews from antisemitism, or the impressive creature itself, der golem, but
how the filmmaker depicted those who were first exposed to film. This was magic, conjured by smoke and fire;
the transformative effect of the images was instantaneous.
© Not Sure
Additional reading and viewing:
How the Pentagon dictates Hollywood storylines
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/us-pentagon-hollywood-storylines-dictates-how
Theaters of War
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11841496/
Marcia Gay Harden says all three of her adult kids identify
as queer
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/10/entertainment/marcia-gay-harden-children-queer/index.html
Washington DC’s role behind the scenes in Hollywood goes
deeper than you think
The Personal Touch - Jack Valenti,
MPAA
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/08/13/the-personal-touch-3
Intimate relationships with artificial partners
It’s 2023, where are the sex robots? ‘They will probably
never be as huge as everyone thinks’
From Robotics to Virtual Reality: What’s the Future of Sex?
Metropolis (1927)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_4no842TX8
The Golem - How He Came into the World (1920) Paul Wegener
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jfhuI-o-f4
The Golem: How He Came into the World
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golem:_How_He_Came_into_the_World