the restrictions of the code

Film Mick LaSalle of GreenCine Daily offers a monumental essay into the lasting effects of the MPAA on filmmaking, and essentially explains why relationships in Hollywood films still persist in generally failing to represent real life:

"The irony of the Motion Picture Production Code is that this supposed vehicle for moral enforcement effectively curtailed the American cinema's moral questioning in whole areas of our national life – politics, religion, sexuality. We can never fully measure the Code's effects on social behavior, though women who came of age during the years of the Code often speak of the despair and loneliness of being surrounded by nonstop images of submission, conformity and surrender."

It's very tempting to wonder how films might have developed artistically had the first flowering of independent artistry been allowed to flourish from its origins in the early 1930s, though it's worth adding that a number of great movies were made because of the restrictions of the code (Douglas Sirk's career?).