Sweet Smell of Censorship: The Artistic Productivity of the Censor-Artist Relationship in Classical Hollywood Film Noir

Abstract

When the average person considers whether censorship can ever be artistically productive, their impulse will likely be to answer, no, any artistic productivity that may occur under censorship will be insignificant in comparison to what could have been accomplished without censorship restrictions. This is because we live in an era where censorship is seen as one of the greatest inhibitors of a free society, supported by such highly publicized events as the annual Banned Books week in North America that draws attention to books that have been unfairly censored in schools and libraries. It is difficult to think of any example where censorship of art produced something positive, in large part because we have rewritten the narratives of these examples to believe that they were positive despite censorship, rather than because of it. In this essay, I discuss the cycle of Films Noir in the Golden Age of Hollywood, which is regularly praised for subverting the Motion Picture Production Code that imposed censorship throughout this period in Hollywood. Such narratives suggest that the directors of these films were at constant odds with the censors, fighting to get their Code-subverting stories onto the big screen. In contrast, I argue that this cycle exists as a paragon of artistic expression that was born out of an often symbiotic censor-artist relationship, and ultimately reveals censorship to be a more influential part of today’s cinematic landscape than is commonly acknowledged.