The Moral Dilemma of Censorship

She was young and obviously, painfully perplexed:

“I don’t know. It’s so hard to tell. I just don’t know anything about these. Do you know them?” she asked, pushing two brightly colored boxes through the air in my direction.

We were standing in front of the “new releases” rack in one of my neighborhood’s video rental stores. She wore the scarf, ankle-length dress and flat shoes favored by strictly orthodox Jewish women. A dark-haired little girl in a floral jumper clung to her skirt, while two little boys, their side curls flaring behind them like the wings of jet-propelled cherubs, zoomed in nearby orbit. Mom had the unnaturally bright eyes and ethereal pallor I associate with consumptives and weary young mothers.

“I just don’t know what to do,” she repeated. “All the time they nudzheh me for videos, more videos. But how to pick? The old ones, they don’t like--the black and the white, it’s old-fashioned. The Disney, they’ve all seen. I don’t want them to be bored. But these new films--so much shooting and stabbing and . . . ah, ah, ummmm, things.”

“I think I know what you mean,” I said. “You don’t want anything that’s too violent or,”--her reticence was contagious--”ah, ah, ummm, provocative.”

“Exactly,” she said, her relief glowing like sunrise.

I suggested a film from the Star Trek series. “Ah, scientific fiction,” she said, and a few minutes later she and the kids were rocketing out the door toward the station wagon.

As I checked out my own selections, the clerk, a Jewish immigrant from the Middle East, chuckled.

“You’re a braver man than I am,” he said. “The last time I picked out a film for one of those Hasidic ladies it was ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ The next day, her husband came in and yelled at me because I’d rented his wife a movie that promoted intermarriage. I’d forgotten that in the film one of Tevye’s daughters runs away and marries a Russian boy.”

The lesson, of course, is that one man or woman’s entertainment is another’s moral affront. And I recalled it last week, when Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles threw his not inconsiderable moral weight behind an effort to get makers of motion pictures and television programs to accept an updated version of the so-called Hays Code, which regulated the content of films between 1933 and 1966.

This particular revision was drafted by the Atlanta-based Christian Film and Television Commission, which claims to evaluate movies and television programs according to “biblical” standards.

I was a teen-ager before I’d ever heard of the Hays Code. But its existence explained something that always perplexed me about the movies and television shows I saw as a boy. Now, my very Catholic parents and my very Catholic grandparents and my very Catholic and very numerous aunts and uncles slept in double beds. All of the married people I saw on film slept--thanks to the dictates of the Hays Code--in twin beds. I assumed, naively of course, that it was because they were Protestants. As I became more sophisticated, I extrapolated still further that the Protestant predilection for twin beds accounted for the fact I knew very few of them.

Under the circumstances, it was not an unreasonable train of thought. That’s the trouble with censorship, however well-intentioned: It makes what is false and irrational suddenly plausible.

In the end, censorship--whether legal or disguised as a “voluntary” industry standard--doesn’t even resolve the sort of dilemma suffered by that conscientious and confused young mother.

In a way, we owe Cardinal Mahony and the Christian Film and Television Commission a debt of gratitude for making that clear from the outset. If they had proposed that the film community reach some vague accommodation with “traditional” or “family” values, we might have been in for a long and murky debate.

However, their code--with its long lists of forbidden situations, dances, kisses and even words--makes the issue clear. If the film industry accepts this code, it is not taking a small step onto a slippery slope, but a swan dive over the edge of a very sharp cliff of self-censorship. And however unhappy the public may be with the American cinema’s general condition, I doubt that many people really want the industry to take that dive. The situation is roughly like the one pollsters have long identified with regard to school prayer. If you ask Americans whether they favor prayer in public schools, a majority will say, “yes.” If you ask them whether they think government bureaucrats should write or select a prayer for public schoolchildren to recite, an even larger majority will say, “no.”

Americans, in other words, instinctively resist any suggestion that others are qualified to tell them or their families what they can think or say or pray or read or see.

Cardinal Mahony’s decision to endorse the proposed new code before a public forum on pornography is significant. For the impulse behind this proposal shares the anti-pornography movement’s curiously unshakable faith in causality. This is a belief that there is a simple, one-to-one correlation between books or films or paintings and behavior.

Experience suggests something far more complex. If the connection between artistic expression and conduct were as clear as the code writers insist, then the “good” artworks ought to exert just as decisive an influence as the “bad.” But if that’s true, how shall we account for the fact that European culture--awash in the aesthetic artifacts of more than 1,000 years of Christian civilization--has collapsed into barbarism twice in this century?

Art is, as the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle pointed out, connected to “the moral, religious, spiritual condition of the people.” But the precise nature of that connection remains irreducibly mysterious. For the true work of art is accomplished in a far country whose boundaries cannot be fixed--the wild and ungovernable territory of the human heart.

To recognize that fact is to accept its consequences: Like the confused young mother in the video store, we all are condemned to freedom.