Source code

Joseph Jon Lanthier writes, quite wonderfully:

With respect to your quaternary take on DESIGN FOR LIVING:

Not having been the one on whom you picked (at least not “in particular”) I’m perhaps better suited to respond with the “yes, but…!” approbation such a thoughtful rejoinder to our inaugural MUBI column deserves. And, certainly, your revisionist perspective of pre-Code’s infamously explicit naughtiness as instead differently-coded (i.e. differently restricted) naughtiness is usefully sobering. (An aside: In its current usage, where it helps to sell DVDs by the hot and bothered half-dozen, the term “pre-Code” is oddly indicative of both absence and presence—the latter facilitated by the former. As though the Breen Office were preceded by a lively, lissome ellipse with room enough for all the exposed thighs and extramarital affairs the early 30s had to offer.)

I’m really only surprised that you haven’t taken colloquial context into account. See, when the kids today hear the phrase “make love”—and the phrase is applied as liberally as lotion in the film—they think… well, they think of what they think when they think pre-Code. But the OED has thoughts of its own; as I’m sure you’re aware, to “make love” was mere courtship until the 1950s doused it with sin. Point being: Your astute close reading of Hecht & Lubitsch’s valedictory exchange aside, the language of naughtiness spoken by the film reads like such a distant and distorted cousin of our own that discerning what’s been censored (or what’s been purposefully left to the imagination) isn’t always evident. DESIGN FOR LIVING’s peculiar alloy of frankness and innuendo might as well be its own dialect. And researching such stuff should be obligatory (to be fair to own young myself, I did attempt to negotiate this linguistic history when writing the film up for Slant a few years back). But I’m mostly responding to your cries of “don’t they notice?”; in at least my case, what I primarily noticed at first was how knottily codified pre-Code cinema can be compared to, er, plain ol’ Code cinema. Which was more or less your original point.