Hollywood’s censorship not mechanism for repressing but for revealing

Let’s take a Hollywood product, say, Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window (1944). (Maybe now Fritz Lang belongs to high culture rather than mass culture, but anyway . . .) 

Edward G. Robinson is a mild-mannered professor who, leaving his peaceful club one night, gets caught up in a web of love and murder. We think we are watching a thriller. At length, he takes refuge in his club again, falls asleep from exhaustion, and wakes up: it was all a dream. 

The movie has done the interpretation for us, by way of Lang’s capitulation to the cheap Hollywood insistence on happy endings. But in reality – which is to say in the true appearance – Edward G. Robinson ‘is not a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor dreaming that he is a murderer, but a murderer dreaming, in his everyday life, that he is a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor’. 

Hollywood’s censorship is therefore not some puritanical, uptight middle-class  for repressing the obscene, nasty, antisocial, violent underside of life: it is, rather, the technique for revealing it.