Naked people! Oh my gosh!

I was both amused and annoyed by this juvenile rant by a teenage prude at the Mormon blog Millennial Star. Camila B hates -- and she does mean hates -- the movie Black Swan. (Spoiler alert: she summarizes the entire plot.) Because old movies were good and clean and full of beautiful messages and morality. But today's movies, of which Black Swan is apparently the exemplar, are mostly full of sin and corruption.

Black Swan is immoral because a character masturbates "touches herself inappropriately," takes drugs, hallucinates a sexual encounter, self-harms, etc. Camila finds all this "uncomfortable" and "disturbing." That's not what she wants from a movie. She wants to "feel refreshed and glad to have watched something that has inspired me for once." Fair enough; I sometimes like to watch refreshing and inspiring movies too. I'm just not sure why she went to see Black Swan then, since a) it's a tragedy, b) it was made by a director (Darren Aronofsky) who was previously best known for making one of the most relentlessly downbeat movies of all time (Requiem for a Dream). Making people feel "disturbed and uncomfortable" was kind of the point of the film, after all.

Anyway, since Camila believes that movies made 50 or 60 years ago were so moral and had such "beautiful messages," let's take a look at the morality of a couple of the great films she mentions, Casablanca and Gone with the Wind. How do they square with Mormon morality? (Spoiler alert: since they've been out for 69 and 72 years, respectively, I assume you've had time to see them.)

Casablanca is indeed a highly moral film. It's about moral dilemmas and finally extols the nobility of personal sacrifice for the sake of high ideals. Even so, one can scarcely describe it as highly compatible with Mormon morality. To save time, let's skip over things like Rick's alcoholism, or Captain Renault extorting sex from refugees and arresting innocent people to cover for his friend ("Round up the usual suspects"), and cut to the chase.

She's married to someone else

Casablanca, that most romantic of films, romanticizes adultery. Rick and Ilsa had an affair. That's what the story is about: will they or won't they resume their affair? In the end, it is Rick, not the married Ilsa, who decides to break off the relationship. Ilsa is quite willing to abandon her husband to the Nazis for the sake of her adulterous love. In the end, though, Rick sends Ilsa and her husband on their way, not because of some notion of the sacredness of marriage vows, but because he concludes that fighting Nazism is more important than love (or, more abstractly, because he concludes that love without honor won't last long). Again, that's a highly moral choice, but it's not a Mormon one. Mormon morals would demand that Rick and Ilsa not commit adultery simply because adultery is always wrong and "thou shalt not commit it."

They're both married to someone else

And Gone with the Wind? I'm not really sure where the notion of this film having some sort of deep morality comes from. Setting aside its romanticizing of slavery, purveying of racial stereotypes, and condoning of marital rape ("This is one night you're not turning me out"), the film's heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, is arguably a psychopath. She cares only for herself, and she wreaks havoc and ruins lives all around her through her selfish schemes. All that makes for a very interesting character study and a sweeping romance, but it hardly seems compatible with Mormon morality. Indeed, much of the film is taken up with Scarlett's quest to seduce Ashley Wilkes, even after they're both married to other people.

So why do Mormons like Camila B extol the "morality" and "messages" of movies like Casablanca, which actually challenges Mormon morality, and Gone with the Wind, with its amoral heroine, while decrying movies like Black Swan, which usually are actually no more morally unconventional? Because the characters in Casablanca and Gone with the Wind keep their clothes on. And that's pretty much it.

That's how Mormons are trained to watch movies and judge their morality: by what they show. Not by what they say about what they show, but literally by what they show. Depiction equals "glorification." Thus, Casablanca is "moral" despite (or rather because of) the way it glosses over things like alcoholism and the sexual exploitation of refugees and despite its rather positive take on adultery, simply because it vaguely implies sexual situations rather than depicting them explicitly. Black Swan, on the other hand, is "immoral" because it explicitly depicts drug use, self-harm, and sexual situations, even though it depicts them negatively as tragic symptoms of mental illness.

That's what I meant when I called Camila B's piece a "juvenile rant." It has nothing to do with how old anyone is; there are many good young critics on the internet, some no doubt younger than Camila. And in this case, with the "preaching to the choir" venue in which it was posted, other than one mild dissent, the adults in the comments all agree with her. (Although one of them does manage to call up a vague sense that there's something wrong with the morality of Gone with the Wind.)

No, what I mean by "juvenile" is watching movies and seeing no further than Swear words! Oh my gosh! Drug use! Oh my gosh! Naked people! Oh my gosh! What I mean is the childish view that if a movie includes those, it is immoral; if it doesn't include them, it is moral. If that's how anyone wants to look at movies, that's fine, it's only their loss. I just wish they'd choose the movies they watch more carefully and then, no matter what their age, leave the reviews of the grownup movies to the grownups.

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