are there any movies featuring revenge in ancient times that is ok?
My guess is that it was a loophole so they didn’t prohibit biblical stories that featured revenge. Possibly also established works like Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. They just didn’t want people writing new unwholesome scripts.
I can just see the meeting.
“We shouldn’t allow any stories about revenge.”
“Wait, are you actually saying that we can’t have Hamlet?”
“No, of course not! That’s Shakespeare, of course Shakespeare is OK!”
“But it’s pretty clearly a revenge story, and you just said you didn’t want any of that.”
“Well, OK, Shakespeare’s in, but no modern revenge. Happy now?”
“Hm, all right, I guess I can live with that.”
The Hays Code explains it:
So, like, in some film, in olden times, the barbarian chieftain kills the hero’s family. So, it’s ok if the hero ends up overthrowing and killing the barbarian chieftain, (preferably in some sword duel) because there’s no law on the barbarian frontier.
But if in a modern picture, somebody’s family gets killed, he’s not justified in taking revenge on the murderer himself, because we’re a civilized country that has police and courts and doesn’t allow people to get away with murdering other people’s families. The proper remedy in that case would be for the criminal to be arrested and the hero testify against him in court or something, so that the villain gets thrown in prison or gets the electric chair.
Here, for the benefit of those who don’t know what the Hays Code was, is the text of it:
http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hays-code.html
Note that what it says is that “revenge in modern times shall not be justified.” It doesn’t say that revenge never happens in modern times but that it must not be justified. To the makers of the Hays Code, justifying revenge meant that the person who committed revenge wasn’t punished for it by the end of the film. What the code makers were asserting was that it would be morally bad for audiences to see people committing certain immoral acts (among them, revenge) who weren’t punished for it within the film, when the film takes place in modern times. They conceded that in older times people did sometimes get away with it and it had to be shown in some films.
Note that the period when the Hays Code was in effect was less than four decades, so it’s been gone for longer than it was in effect.
It takes some mental gymnastics to designate imprisoning a criminal as anything other than revenge.
Not really. If the point is “to make them pay for what they did”, then yes, I suppose you could call that revenge. But if the point is to protect society from them, or to discourage others from committing such a crime, then that’s not really revenge at all.
The definition of “revenge” being used in the Hays Code is “anyone other than the government punishing someone for harm done to someone else.” (Yes, I’m sure that you can come up with your own definition. I’m not defending the definition, just explaining it. You know, if you have a different definition, that’s getting into Great Debates territory. Perhaps a thread should be started there.)