What could be controversial about a playful song from a 1949 romantic comedy?
In the twenty-first century, everything, of course.
Below is a clip from Neptune’s Daughter, in which two playful, but persistent seduction attempts unfold.
Watch the entire clip. Two couples are involved. In the case of the first couple, the man is the amorous one. In the case of the second couple, it is the woman who is persistent.
Despite its age, the song used to get airplay during the Christmas season. But in the wake of the #MeToo movement, it was subjected to meticulous scrutiny, and many radio stations banned it in 2018.
Radio host Glenn Anderson of Cleveland’s WDOK wrote:
“I do realize that when the song was written in 1944, it was a different time, but now while reading it, it seems very manipulative and wrong…The world we live in is extra sensitive now, and people get easily offended, but in a world where #MeToo has finally given women the voice they deserve, the song has no place.”
I do agree that the world we live in is “extra sensitive” now, to the point where everything needs a trigger warning, or multiple paragraphs of skull-crushing over-analysis. But that’s about where my agreement ends.
Anderson, and others who banned the song, apparently overlooked the fact that one of the romantic pursuers in Neptune’s Daughter is a woman.
When you watch the behavior that takes place in the above movie clip, can you find some questionable words and actions? Sure you can. But it’s a slapstick musical comedy, not an earnest attempt at relationship advice.
Now observe the slapstick violence in a typical episode of The Road Runner Show, and the lengths that Wile E. Coyote is willing to go to in order to trap his prey. Felonies are literally being committed in the cartoon sequence below:
Is The Road Runner Show an endorsement of violence? Road rage? Cannibalism? Perhaps this should be banned, too.
(Oh, no, I have given the perpetually offended culture nannies yet another idea. Sorry, folks.)
The larger point here is that moviegoing audiences in 1949—not to mention journalists and paid culture critics—were far more sophisticated than their counterparts of today. They were able to discern the make-believe and altered reality of a musical from real life. (How often do people sing conversations in real life, after all?)
Today, however, at least half of us are locked into a literal, hyper-politicized interpretation of every movie, television show, song lyric, and work of art. With that mindset, it is always possible to find subtler and subtler levels of offense.
And of course, the hysteria over a 70-year-old song led to a backlash. One radio station in Kentucky defied the 2018 outrage by playing “Baby It’s Cold Outside” in a continuous, two-hour loop.
“Baby It’s Cold Outside” wouldn’t fit the culture of 2020 as an original song. In 1949, when members of the World War II generation were still in their twenties, sex was generally reserved for marriage (in theory, at least). There was comparatively little shacking up and hooking up. Marriage, moreover, was forever. (No fault divorce wasn’t a thing in 1949, either.)
Women were seen as the guardians of traditional values and premarital chastity. And most young women (and men) did have marriage—not just hooking up—on their minds in 1949. By the middle of the 1950s, a record percentage of adults were married, and the average nuclear family was raising 3.8 kids. That’s how we got all those Baby Boomers.
Cultural context changes over the decades. Take this famous scene from The Breakfast Club, in which a group of suburban teenagers smoke weed and dance in their school library. It seems a little silly—mismatched—to the youth culture of 2022.
To begin with, no one under the age of 18 is left without adult supervision for any length of time in 2022. And five kids placed together in an enclosed space in 2022 would not be talking to each other…they would be thumbing away on their cell phones.
But that scene from The Breakfast Club was considered cutting-edge, and culturally relevant in 1985. Just because it is mismatched to the circumstances of 2022 is no reason to ban it.
Such is the error of presentism—the intellectual error of judging all aspects of the past through the exacting lens of the present—including works of art.
Will they be banning The Breakfast Club next (along with The Roadrunner Show)? Like I said, let’s not give the culture nannies any ideas.
-ET