“We’re looking for something edgy and groundbreaking,” an executive at one of the big television streaming services told me last week.
“We want to shock people,” she said, as if that’s something hard to accomplish.
In 2021, it’s as easy as turning on the Turner Classic Movies channel.
For instance, there’s a great old movie called The Women that occasionally appears on TCM. It’s from the 1930s, but it’s still pretty hip. There are no men in the movie: The whole story unfolds in what intersectional academics might call “women’s spaces,” and it tells the story of the colliding lives and relationships of three women, complete with divorces, betrayals, and showdowns in the ladies’ room.
But the most shocking moment, for a contemporary viewer, takes place in the scene in which the mother of the main character, a widow of many years, extols the joys of living and sleeping alone.
“When I’m in bed,” she says gleefully, “I can just stretch out like a swastika.”
It’s a movie from 1939, based on a play by Clare Boothe Luce from 1936. So if you back-time it and assume it took Luce, say, a year and change to write and produce the play, it’s possible that she wrote those words in 1934, before the swastika was, as we might say these days, co-opted.
Back then, the word sounded different. And anyone who has ever stretched out in bed knows, it’s sort of a perfect description of how it feels to have a big bed all to yourself. But you’d be wise to think of another way to put it.
When you watch it now — and it’s a great movie, directed by George Cukor and totally worth watching — the swastika line jumps out and slaps you in the face. Things stop in your head for a moment, and you make some mental adjustments and maybe check the date of the movie and try to restart your attention. All of that all takes a few moments, so you probably miss a good line or two.
Back then, of course, a lot of things sounded different. In The Honeymooners, a brilliant and seminal television comedy from the 1950s, bus driver Ralph Kramden could threaten to send his wife, Alice, to the moon. “One of these days, Alice, one of these days,” he’d say, threatening her with a clenched fist. The audience howled.
Today, audiences would be scandalized. It’s possible I have committed a crime just by describing it.
In the late 1960s sitcom Bewitched, it also seemed reasonable for the character of Darrin Stephens, perhaps the least sympathetic character ever to appear on-screen, to tell his sorceress wife, Samantha, a person born with enormous gifts and immense power, that despite being able to wash the dishes or vacuum the house with the twitch of her nose, she must do it laboriously and thanklessly by hand, like a common drudge. He demanded, for the sake of his fragile male ego and witchcraft-less mediocrity, that she take her talent and magic and just pretend she didn’t have them.
It was a dysfunctional and abusive relationship. She should have turned him into a mouse, though let’s not start victim-blaming.
Movies and television from the past are a minefield of weirdly oppressive husbands and psychotic gay people and casually racist images of domestic help and all sorts of assumptions and depictions and words like swastika that bring us up short, arrest our attention, and force us to make a choice: either OK, fine, from the past, different time, or just nope, click, something else. Either choice makes sense to me.
But I’m also glad all of this stuff is still on. I wouldn’t want someone else to make those choices for me. I’m OK with bumping up against certain jarring lines and moments from the past rather than have everything altered and tailored for today’s sensibilities.
I’d rather lose a few moments of The Women to the brain cycles required to process swastika than have someone go into the soundtrack and replace it with “stretch out like a yoga instructor” or “stretch out like a falling cat!”
On the other hand, if you’re a network executive looking for shocking, edgy fare, your best bet is to rerun old movies and sitcoms. And if you really want to make some noise, you could go for truly out-there transgressive content, such as Looney Tunes or Dr. Seuss. These days, shocking the audience is remarkably affordable.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
