#76506 - Movie choices

[Katya]

http://theboard.byu.edu/questions/76506/

First, props to you for sticking to your high standards. You rock!

I'm going to push back a bit and point out the double standard in this attitude. If a person doesn't want to consume media with swearing or sex or other "inappropriate" content, then she (or he) shouldn't be reading the scriptures. The scriptures contain sex (including rape, masturbation, and incest), violence (including rape, murder, cannibalism, and war), and swearing (archaic swearing is still a type of swearing). And yet even the Molliest of Mormons doesn't consider for a second that she should only be reading the "clean" books of scripture. So, why the double standard?

I would like to posit that the reason we believe it's OK to read the scriptures in spite of their content is because we believe that (1) the content is an inherent part of their message and (2) the overall message has a positive effect on the reader. I would also like to argue, then, that Mormons who consume media which might have "inappropriate" content do so for the same reasons. So, although I absolutely believe that there is such a thing as gratuitous sex/violence/language, I think that some, shall we say, "strong content" is not gratuitous, i.e., that you genuinely can't tell some stories without including that content. The question then becomes whether or not the overall message or experience of that media has a positive influence on the reader/viewer/listener.

Now, I don't particularly care where an individual reader chooses to draw the line to decide whether or not something is appropriate for them. (I'm also aware that my argument doesn't really address the question posed by the reader because I'm focusing on a different cultural phenomenon.) I do care that we automatically assume that a stricter standard based on superficial content evaluation is the same thing as high standard.

As an analogy, last night I went to a concert which had refreshments afterwards (basically a table full of cookies). Now, I try to avoid having sugar too often, because it tends to make me sick, so I looked at those cookies and thought "Is this worth it?" Going back to point (1), is the sugar in the cookies gratuitous? I would say no. The point of cookies is to be sweet; you couldn't follow that same recipe but leave out the sugar and expect the product to be edible. (On the other hand, if I made a nice salad and then dumped sugar on it, that would be gratuitous sugar.) So then we turn to point (2), is the overall experience of the cookie worth it? For me, it wasn't, although for a lot of other people, it was. And I have no problem with that. I know my own body, I'm capable of weighing the pros and cons of decisions regarding it and sometimes I'll go one way and sometimes I'll go another way. But I don't think that I have "higher" standards than the people who ate cookies last night, in the same way that I don't think I have "lower" standards for having watched two R-rated films last year.

Lastly, I should say that I'm not trying to call out Ms. O'Malley, personally (which is why I didn't put her name in the quote). I think that she was just trying to be supportive of the reader, who is finding herself in a tough situation. I'm more frustrated by the larger cultural attitudes that we buy into without really examining them.

[SmurfBlueSnuggie]

I have this problem myself in deciding what media to consume. There are some movies that I cannot stand because of the overall message or lack of intelligent purpose. Others are violent and "inappropriate," but I believe they portray important messages. My favorite WWII movie isDefiance. It is extremely graphic at some points and warrants its R rating. Because of the intensity, I have only watched it twice. It's just not something I can stand too frequently. However, I do not think the movie is "inappropriate." It is showing eastern European killing fields during the Holocaust. It's going to be gory and disturbing. When watching it for the purpose of honoring the strength of the Jewish community being portrayed, I think it is completely appropriate - in some senses, even sacred.

And I'm slightly sick, so I have lost the rest of the thought I wanted to share and cannot find it.... I'll add more later, most likely.

[Marduk]

The idea of particular "standards" in terms of swearing, sexual content (which usually just means nudity) and violence strikes me as somewhat akin to most people's perspectives of speed limits: anyone driving slower than me is a moron, and anyone driving faster than me is a maniac. That is, anyone with "lower" standards than me is wicked, anyone with "higher" standards than me is a teetotaler.

[yayfulness]

The idea of particular "standards" in terms of swearing, sexual content (which usually just means nudity) and violence strikes me as somewhat akin to most people's perspectives of speed limits: anyone driving slower than me is a moron, and anyone driving faster than me is a maniac. That is, anyone with "lower" standards than me is wicked, anyone with "higher" standards than me is a teetotaler.

I am going to quote this in a Board answer someday.

[Katya]

The idea of particular "standards" in terms of swearing, sexual content (which usually just means nudity) and violence strikes me as somewhat akin to most people's perspectives of speed limits: anyone driving slower than me is a moron, and anyone driving faster than me is a maniac. That is, anyone with "lower" standards than me is wicked, anyone with "higher" standards than me is a teetotaler.

Nice. And a good reminder to be more charitable on both ends of the spectrum.

[Yarjka]

I've walked out of a good number of clean-flix edited films. I have high aesthetic standards.

[Portia]

But being teetotal, when it comes to alcohol, actually has health benefits and I can totally respect that. Being teetotal with film (not participating?) just sounds like madness.

[No Dice]

I'm going to push back a bit and point out the double standard in this attitude.

Would it still be adhering to a double standard if one said that the only reason the scriptures ever portray sin is to demonstrate its bad outcomes, and that the same is rarely true of any modern media that also portrays sin, so scripture is inherently different from most modern media?

[Portia]

I'm going to push back a bit and point out the double standard in this attitude.

Would it still be adhering to a double standard if one said that the only reason the scriptures ever portray sin is to demonstrate its bad outcomes, and that the same is rarely true of any modern media that also portrays sin, so scripture is inherently different from most modern media?

I think the underlying assumption is false. Lot's daughters getting him drunk and raping him to conceive is not viewed as particularly bad in the context of the Bible. Whereas I can't imagine the firestorm that would create filmed.

[No Dice]

I think the underlying assumption is false.

Fair enough—the scriptures are a history, after all—although I was careful to only imagine that someone would describe the scriptures that way. My guess is that for the questioner, the reason the scriptures include descriptions of sin is to condemn them. That's obviously not the reason Pitch Perfect might portray behavior we might call sinful. (Also, can we get a version of Godwin's Law for a variety of weird Old Testament stories? Cause, like, that needs to happen.)

Anyway, while I largely agree that stricter standards aren't by definition higher ones, when the questioner says that the reason she's avoiding those movies (movies which, for the record, clearly aren't works of high art that incorporate difficult themes or content only non-gratuitously to tell an important story) is "swearing and sex jokes," I think we can safely say that she has high standards, not strict standards based on superficial content evaluations.

Now, I get it—lots of Mormons sometimes choose to consume media that has content that other Mormons might consider bad. And they do it for good reasons—because it's art, because it's important, because it teaches critical and beautiful lessons that would be diluted without the content, etc. I like to think of myself as being in that group. And it's obnoxious when other people go on about their "high" standards and snootily dismiss the idea that anyone could choose to consume different media than they and still be a good member of the Church. That's annoying.

But someone who reads the scriptures but won't watch Mean Girls is clearly not living by some double standard, even under a generous definition of the term. These are hard questions that people resolve in different ways.

[Dragon Lady]

Not getting into the media portion here, but insofar as inappropriate Bible stories go, I think they actually usually (always?) do have a purpose. A moral purpose. But outside of Jewish culture, we miss a lot of them. We can't judge ancient Jewish stories based on modern American culture. One of my favorite stories is that of Tamar. The girl who dressed as a harlot and tricked her father in law into sleeping with her in a tent on the side of the road, just so she could get pregnant. Our modern culture, especially LDS culture, are horrified by that story and generally skip over it, or are at least disgusted by it, when reading the Old Testament. Yet Matthew (who is a Jewish man, speaking to Jews, and thus never mentions women if possible, but that's another story), specifically calls her out in his genealogy of Christ, as well as two other "scandalous" women in the bible (Ruth and ... oh shoot. I forget her name. She was a harlot... Rahab, maybe?). He was basically saying, "I'm about to tell you a story of a woman with a sketchy story on the surface. But don't forget these other three women in your history that also seemed sketchy, but you accept them as honorable because of certain laws and customs in our culture. So don't judge her by the surface alone. Make sure you look past that." Except he doesn't actually say that, because simply by pointing out those women specifically in the genealogy would be enough in the ancient Jewish mind to get that point across.

Unfortunately, I have never specifically studied the story of Lot's daughters from a scholarly perspective. I would love to. One of my dreams is to write a book that explain all the Bible stories in modern terms, with the necessary culture and history lessons to make them understandable to the modern American. But alas. It's too hard to get down to the BYU library on a regular basis. Heck, it's hard to get down there on a non-regular basis.

[UffishThought]

My institute teacher has been telling us about Matthew including those women in Christ's lineage and why. Rad awesome. I don't love or trust everything he says (though I'm sure he knows a lot more than me, seeing as how he wrote Believing Christ), but those old stories make a lot more sense to me now. And his take on David (as not actually a good guy at all, really) is pretty great.

[Marduk]

To me, the idea that the gratuitous (by modern standards) violence and sexuality, particularly in the Old Testament, serves as moral lesson simply reinforces the idea that we should consume media more broadly today.

The average person today is far more educated than any ancient Jew was, at least in terms of various moral standards and ethical ideas. As such, most media we consume does indeed have morals, they are just not so heavy handed and deliberate as past experience. Instead, it uses mimesis and realism to present less didactic and more complex moralizations. The stories today require parsing and analysis to utilize to ethical purposes, but there certainly is media that allows for this. As such, anyone who buys the argument that Biblical stories can have moralizing purpose has to cede the fact that adequate realism in media today, although possessing sexual and violent content, can indeed have the same purpose, and is not amoral per se.

[Katya]

I'm going to push back a bit and point out the double standard in this attitude.

Would it still be adhering to a double standard if one said that the only reason the scriptures ever portray sin is to demonstrate its bad outcomes, and that the same is rarely true of any modern media that also portrays sin, so scripture is inherently different from most modern media?

Like Portia, I disagree with this. I absolutely agree that scriptural actions (whether or not we consider them sins) serve a rhetorical purpose, especially since the stories have survived centuries (or even millennia) of retelling. And I think it's fair to hold contemporary media to a standard of rhetorical truth, in terms of letting a character's actions have consequences instead of letting them off the hook or giving them an easy out. But I find that there is plenty of good modern media that meets that standard.

(Also "portraying sin" =/= what I termed "strong content." It's entirely possible to have one without the other.)

[Haleakalā]

(Also "portraying sin" =/= what I termed "strong content." It's entirely possible to have one without the other.)

+1