AH, THE GOOD OLD SCREEN KISS

The Screen Kiss about to become obsolete? Go the way of the dinosaur? If the Screen Actors Guild has its way, I’m afraid that’s exactly the thing that may very well happen.

Well, I can’t say I am any too surprised. I was already aware--what with the smog wearing down the ozone layer and melting the polar ice cap and perfectly dreadful chemicals polluting our waters and bombs around big enough to obliterate Los Angeles and then some--life as we’ve known it was just about finished.

But I don’t know exactly what we’ll do without our Screen Kiss. We’ve been depending on it for so long to pass on our sexual mores, our tribal rituals in these matters, that without it on film to show our kids, we’ll have arrived at a most befuddling crossroads.

Other species, of course, from the rat to the monkey to the cockroach, live all jammed in together, so that their young can watch the grownups in every little action and simply behave accordingly when they come to maturity. But we humans live in separate spaces called house, called apartment, called bed room and bath room (not to mention car), and we do certain things in the privacy of these spaces, behind firmly closed doors--that our offspring would never see if it weren’t for the screen.

Such as the kind of kissing those actors create in front of a camera. It really isn’t the sort of thing you’d see Mom and Pop doing around the house, now is it? Though Mom and Pop did/do all kinds of other kissing, God knows. We are a very kissing species. At the drop of a hat we humans are pressing our lips to our fellow creatures’ lips (in fact most any part of our fellow creature).

Kisses are planted upon us almost immediately as we pop out of the womb. And soon we are urged to do the planting ourselves. Give us a little kissie-wissie, say Mommies, say Daddycumses. Dutifully we push tiny wet mouths against cheeks (or what have you) like puppies with cold noses, and soon, as do the rest of the tribe, go about kissing everything in sight: our teddy bears, our kitty-cats, our security blankets, our Cabbage Patch dolls. (And those of us who are lucky, our fellow actors.) The Pope kisses the earth when he arrives in a new country. The Faithful kiss his ring. European men kiss women’s hands. A cowboy his horse. Narcissus kissed himself. Those of us who wear lipstick sometimes kiss the air so as not to smear our own--and the other person’s--mouth. We even throw kisses from a distance. Right now a guy in a TV commercial is kissing the box his breakfast cereal comes in.

It is little wonder that one of the first things ever put on moving film was a kiss. The Kiss , it was called, appropriately enough, made by Vitascope in 1896 (1896!), and it had a running time of less than a minute. The couple doing it, a man and a woman, were not young, were not beautiful and their lips barely grazed. But there they were, two human beings, brazenly performing an act usually done behind those closed doors, now on display for all the world to gaze upon.

And gaze upon we did. Pandora’s box had popped open again and the voyeurism that is evidently latent in the best of us was set in motion. (Nor have we been able to get enough of the stuff to this day.) Vitascope, no doubt, was all too delighted when thousands upon thousands lined up for a chance to peek--at a price, most naturally!--at one of themselves kissing themselves.

The sound of all those coins clinking so merrily at the box office caused any number of would-be moguls to quickly bound aboard this new and exciting money-making device called the moving picture. Competition grew fierce as the new entries in the titillating game set about finding ways of doing that first modest osculating maneuver one better.

And an eager audience was waiting. And wanting just that. We humans, especially the American branch, have never been able to leave well enough alone, have we. We simply must have that new model car every year. Must have this year’s style in dress, in telephone, in computer, medicine, war weapons, diet and hair-do and/or music. How often do we read “new and improved” on the package of something we’ve already been using for years?

And so The Kiss lengthened, and lengthened, and lengthened, and lips began to do more than merely touch. They pressed, one set against another, they moved about on each other, somewhat in the manner of bees searching for pollen. (Was not Mae Murray said to have had “bee-stung” lips?) Nor did heads stay upright. They began to bend this way and that, hers , somehow, being the one to bend backward, the neck at a tilt like the stem of a broken flower, vulnerable and exposed, while he bent over from above, indicating strength and control. (Unless it was a ‘bad’ girl. Then she bent over him.) We got to know them by their kiss. Who was ‘good’ and who was ‘bad.’ A kind of choreography developed to give us proper signals about these things. But who was doing the signaling? Whose “good” and “bad” version were we being fed? There’s the rub.

For instance, in the ‘20s this fellow named Rudolph Valentino played a character called The Sheik , whose specialty was snatching up the lady and whipping her off to the desert. What he did with her there was left to our imaginations. Though one of the ladies, played by Nita Naldi, gave us an inkling. Said she (by sub-title), grabbing Rudy’s hand and . . . well, it actually looked more like a bite than a kiss, “Someday you will beat me with these strong hands. I should like to know what it feels like.”

Well.

Even in pre-feminist days, the persistence of such signals began to shake folks up a bit and it was eventually decided that a few rules and regulations best start governing screen shenanigans. And lists of cinematic do’s and don’t’s were made up forthwith.

Things of a sexual nature were among the first to be exorcised with speed and precision. Couples, for example, even though married, could no longer share a double bed. Nudity of any kind was absolutely verboten. Even naked babies were not permitted to be seen on the silver screen. A documentary, made in 1939--not in Hollywood, by the way, but by the American Committee For Maternal Welfare--was banned across the country and called obscene. Subjects--such as birth control, sex education, venereal disease, sex hygiene, abortion, and pregnancy--that would lead up to childbirth were all forbidden to be so much as mentioned on the screen. (Forbidden to be mentioned in schools , too.)

The Kiss, though, was allowed to remain (as long as it wasn’t ‘excessive’ or ‘lustful’). Ah yes, the Screen Kiss, so familiar to us all, was left, all by its lonesome, to be the guiding light that would illuminate our way along the dangerous and booby-trapped road of our sexuality, about which we knew nothing, those in charge evidently putting great store by the monkey-no-see, monkey-no-do theory.

Well, it hasn’t worked, has it.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), we humans are a most curious lot. Immediately something is prohibited, that is the very thing we must rush to find out about. And is that so bad? Isn’t that what made Christopher Columbus go searching? How the light bulb got invented? How those TV aerials on every house top came to be? We call ourselves ‘Homo Sapiens.’ Well, how are our offspring going to get ‘Sapiens’ if we don’t treat them with a little respect--like trust them to make the right decisions--if they are given all the facts with which to do so.

Plato told us at least 2,300 years ago that it was “better to be unborn than untaught, for ignorance is the root of misfortune. “

And our own Thomas Alva Edison declared before the Federal Trade Commission, back on Feb. 20, 1926, that the motion picture was the most perfect instrument for teaching. That 88% of knowledge was gathered through the eye. . . .

Wouldn’t it be sensible to pay heed at last to what these gentlemen had to say to us before we go off half-cocked about our old standby, the Screen Kiss? After all, The Kiss hasn’t done anything lately that it hadn’t done before. Ignorance is the culprit here, as usual. Isn’t that the thing we should start banning?