What Huxley Called “The Feelies”

“[T]he court delineated between the transmission of culture and the provision of entertainment, and relegate movies to the fulfillment of the latter. This is most ironic, because the film that led to this case, Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, had demonstrated the power and potential of film as an intellectual and artistic medium. Now, however, movies were lowbrow entertainment not just by cultural category but by legal definition as well . . . Film producers yielded the artistic freedom the First Amendment guaranteed to other creative arts like theater, literature, painting and even still photography. Unlike these other art forms, moves would be evaluated along the lines of consumer goods. The major film companies accepted this role as providers of commercial amusement and not creators of artistic works. The industry could fend off state or federal regulation by presenting its product as harmless entertainment that did not affect people’s behavior in any important ways” (William Romanowski, Pop Culture Wars, pp. 140-141).