About a year ago, just after I started this blog, I posted a note on Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s book In Defense of Lost Causes (blog). Soon after, I put the book aside unfinished and embarked on a series of books in philosophy and revolutionary history to help give me the background knowledge I needed for understanding Zizek’s book. Now I have returned to it and have been inspired with another note.
One characteristic of Zizek’s thought is how quickly he turns to analysis of movies to illustrate his points. In the section titled “Stalinism Revisited,” when discussing censorship and artistic expression, he takes an example from Casablanca, which I reviewed for this blog.
Ilsa (played by Ingrid Bergman) goes to visit Rick (Humphrey Bogart). She knows that he hates her for abandoning their romance years before but begs him to give her papers of transit so that at least her husband Victor Laszlo, an important member of the resistance against the Nazis, may escape the city. When Rick refuses to budge, Ilsa breaks down in tears and reveals that she still loves him. They embrace. Fadeout to airport tower. Fade back to Rick, who says, “And then?” Then Ilsa explains why she left him.
Zizek says that this scene is striking because of what he calls “inherent transgression.” The film breaks its own rules, so to speak. It tells us clearly that during the fadeout to the tower, Rick and Ilsa definitely did it. All the signs are there: they embrace before the fadeout, we all know what such fadeouts mean, Bogart is smoking a cigarette afterwards, etc. The film also sends very clear signals that they did not do it: the conversation picks up right where it left off, both characters are fully clothed, Bogey still sounds hostile, etc. This allows the film to satisfy the Motion Picture Production Code of the 1940s and at the same time tell us a story that encourages our imagination to insert screwing.
The prudishness of the Production Code and the movie-makers’ skirting of it may strike us as quaint and amusing today, when so many movies contain overtly sexual content, but it occurred to me that our movies are in some ways actually more restrained.
Movies today can show more than they used to, but the current ratings system and cultural mores result in movies that are surprisingly tame for all that they proclaim themselves to be sexy. Tasteful montages of unidentifiable swathes of skin moving slowly are the norm for sex scenes, but since they are showing the act, usually missionary, little is left to the imagination. The libido must enjoy its movies in the narrow space between what isn’t allowed and what is explicitly shown. The old movies, in showing little, were able to suggest much.
One of Zizek’s claims is that despite the horrible repression of the Stalinist years, they also “saved what we understand as the humanity of man,” because rather than insist on the total destruction of dissidence, dissidence was often allowed as long as it was internalized. You could hate Stalinism as much as you wanted, you just couldn’t say so.
In the same way, we might say that the Production Code, despite the restrictions it must have put on artists, kept sexy infinitely alive by keeping some things secret. We will never know exactly what Rick and Ilsa did that night in Casablanca, but it can be as hot as we want.
For one thing, I like the concept that less is more when it comes to films like that. Sometimes I feel like more modern films guide the reader into what they are supposed to think, to the point where there isn't much room for interpretation.
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