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August 16, 2005
The Wal-Mart Code
Edward Jay Epstein's talking about sex in his most recent Slate column. More precisely, he's talking about the lack of sex and nudity in recent Hollywood films. Epstein starts by tracing the early history of sex in the cinema. Many films made before the 1932 Hays Code featured sexually-charged images, including De Mille's biblical epics. I've often taught the Marlene Dietrich film, Blonde Venus, to illustrate Hollywood's lively early days. He then illustrates, quite effectively, how a combination of factors have prevented studios from explicitly showing sexual images. These factors include the Hollywood rating system, FCC-imposed network TV restrictions against nudity, and perhaps most importantly, Wal-Mart's status as the studio's major customer for DVD purchases (Wal-Mart paid studios over $5 billion last year).
Epstein's argument won't be unfamiliar to film students and scholars who have read Kevin Sandler's work on the ratings system, and how it restricts what movies the studios make, and I think this argument is generally sound. And while Wal-Mart's restritions on movie content may be relatively trivial compared to some of their other practices (Epstein's comments on Wal-Mart's "deceny policy" are worth checking out), I think it does illustrate to some extent how Wal-Mart's buying power can be harmful. Ultimately, Epstein concludes that independent productions are more likely to take the "risk" of dealing with sexual topics, and given the lower budgets for most independent films, I don't think there's much of an argument there.
That being said, I think Epstein overstates his case to some extent. Certainly one of this year's most successful films has been the Vince Vaughan-Owen Wilson comedy, Wedding Crashers, which has made well over $100 million, and the summer also has seen the Deuce Bigelow sequel and The 40-Year Old Virgin. It does seem significant that all three of these films feature male leads who are essentially children in adult bodies (Steve Carrell's 40-year old virgin; Rob Schneider's Bigelow; the wedding crashers), rather than the high school or college students of the American Pie films, for example. And by redirecting sexual images and behavior through comedy, it strikes me as a means for avoiding studio censorship (and I don't mean censorship here in the narrow, legal sense). In other words, Hollywood hasn't left the sex business entirely, but it has reworked it to imply that Vaughan, Wilson, and Schnieder are engaging in "risky" business by making "hard" R-rated films.
Posted by chuck at August 16, 2005 9:52 AM
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