Friday, February 19, 2016

Did Anything Happen?

On the DVD of the film "Žižek!" Slavoj Žižek talks about a scene in "Casablanca" where Rick argues with Ilsa. There is a 3.5 second fade out where the scene shows an airport tower. Then their conversation continues with Rick smoking a cigarette. Did they have sex or not? According to Žižek and Lacan their clues that could lead to affirmative and negative responses. In cinema the cigarette could be seen as a post-coital symbol, but their conversation seems to continue without a break? Was this done to appease censors?

This reminds me of when I saw "The World According to Garp" on network television in the 1980's. I had seen it in a cinema. In the uncut version that was shown in cinemas when Garp meets Helen Holm he wants to go to place that is known as a location where people go to have sex. She asks him if he has a condom. He replies that he does not have one. She tells him, "No glove, no love." At the time that the movie was shown on TV censors did not allow condoms to be mentioned on the air. They talk about going to the place to have, but the part where she says no to the sex because of the absence of a condom was edited out. In the uncensored version they did not have sex, but in the censored version they appear to have had sex. I say this, because they talk about wanting to have sex, and there is no indication that they did not do this. They cut that out.because they did not want condoms to be mentioned. This seems ironic to me.

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