[Part 1 in a brief series of posts about movie content and ratings from an LDS perspective]

Question: Why are LDS Church members encouraged to keep fairly high standards when selecting movies to watch?

Answer: Because many movies contain profanity, sexual images or dialogue, and violence.

Question:  Okay, but why avoid profanity, sex or violence (PSV) in the first place?

That’s the real question: what’s the specific problem with “inappropriate” or “offensive” PSV material such that Church members would want to avoid it in the first place?

Is it because PSV material is:

(A)  Generally harmless, just a waste of time that could be spent watching something more morally uplifting instead.
-or-
(B)  Not harmless at all: repeated exposure to PSV material is actually harmful to our spirit and mind, with detrimental effects on our person.

It seems obvious that most objections to PSV material, especially at the R-rated level, implicitly assume (B)—that there is genuine psychological and spiritual harm in being exposed to ‘offensive’ material, not simply that it is just “not uplifting enough”.   In theory, this is because it encourages thoughts or habits that are not in line with gospel standards--creating images and patterns in our mind that do not promote (in fact, reduce) spirituality and which corrupt our ability to be in tune with the Spirit.

I deliberately use ‘in theory’ not because I don’t believe it’s true (I do), but because from a scientific standpoint the truthfulness of the argument is unprovable.  Given the millions of complex elements that comprise the human brain, and the millions of other environmental factors that get mixed together with genetics over time, no one can ever prove that, say, watching violent movies--or playing violent video games--leads directly to violent behavior.  (After all, maybe violent people are just inherently drawn to violent movies or video games in the first place…)  Still, there’s usually enough anecdotal evidence to make you wonder…

(Note the irony, though, of movie studios insisting that violent or sexual content in movies doesn’t influence human behavior, while spending millions of dollars on thirty-second advertisements for the purpose of…influencing human behavior.)

Attempting to prove or disprove the assumption of harm is beyond the scope of this post.  So, for the time being, let’s take this assumption at face value: that exposure to PSV is “harmful” to human spirituality in some (non-specific) way.

With this proposition in mind, let’s discuss the dual issue of context vs content in movies.

Content is the words and images contained within a particular movie: dialogue--which can be profane, vulgar and sexual--along with action, which can include violence, sexuality, nudity, and drug use.

Context is the environment in which those words and images occur—who is doing (or saying) it, where and when are they doing it, and why.  What is happening before or after those words and images occur, within the film.

There are many who will put one above the other: some say context is irrelevant, and some say content is irrelevant if it is within a ‘moral’ context.

In reality, both content and context matter—I don’t believe either one can be embraced or discarded in lieu of the other.

The Value of Context: 

Some years back, I had a conversation with a coworker about a movie he and his family had recently rented.

“It wasn’t really an appropriate movie,” he explained.  “It had a pregnant teenager in it.”

<pause>

I waited, expecting him to continue, but that was the end of his statement.

He may have been more sensitive to the issue, given he had teenager daughters himself, but it is worth asking:  Don’t we need more information than just *having* a pregnant teen in the movie?  What’s the ‘context’?

While I have not seen the movie in question (nope, not “Juno”—although that likely would have received the same comment), I do know that most movies with pregnant teenagers do not generally glorify teen pregnancy—in fact, it’s generally shown to be a huge burden and hardly something any average teenage girl should ‘aspire’ to.

If, presumably, the moral concern is the sexual activity that caused the pregnancy in the first place, then showing the consequences of risky sexual activity may actually prove to be a fundamentally moral lesson in the end: a discouragement of sexual behavior rather than an encouragement.  In this case, concerns about the content--in the sense of 'showing a pregnant teenager'--can be alleviated (or modified) based on the context of the event.  (Movies with casual sexual activity with NO risk of pregnancy or STDs may rank higher on the ‘problematic’ scale…)

Many movie depictions of drug use fall into this category as well.  A lot of movies show casual drug use, and the ‘highs’ it brings, but a great many of those movies also show the ‘lows’--the costs and the addictions--as well.  The context in which drug use is portrayed says a lot about how to judge drug use ‘content’ in terms of a moral plus or minus.  Many 'drug' movies are quite effective in encouraging people to stay away from drugs.

(Another example: One Christian-based web site which reports on inappropriate behavior in movies solemnly reported a while back that “Jurassic Park” contained “an adult male grabbing the rear-end of a young female”.  Don’t remember that part?  That’s where Dr. Grant grabs Lex—the young girl—and brings her up into the vent before the velociraptor jumps and tries to grab her.  If it didn’t occur to you at the time that you were witnessing a scene of ‘child molestation’, then, yes, context matters…)

The Value of Content:

However…context can’t always trump content.  Context, in fact, arguably only matters if the content itself is harmless.

Back to the original question: what's the "objection" to "objectionable" material?  Remember, the primary objection behind PSV material is not that it’s "not uplifting enough", but that, in theory, it is fundamentally damaging on a psychological and/or spiritual level.  If this sort of psychological influence—however small--from hearing vulgar or course language, or seeing naked and/or mutilated human bodies exists, then, presumably, we would expect that impact to exist independent of context.   And that presents circumstances where context is essentially meaningless.

Consider three sample movies:

#1 Contains 200 instances of the F-word.
#2 Contains 200 instances of someone’s head getting chopped off with a sword.
#3 Contains 200 instances of total male or female nudity

Suppose in the first case, each and every time profanity is spoken, another character comes up, slaps the speaker across the face, and says, “Don’t say that…”  You could argue in context that presents a message that profanity is improper, but in the end, exposure to 200 F-words followed by 200 slaps is still exposure to 200 F-words.  If hearing profanity has some sort of negative impact, that impact logically would still apply.

Suppose at the end of movie #2, the (surviving) characters discover that peace is better than war and violence doesn’t actually solve problems.  Violent movies can have anti-violence messages—a great many do, in fact—but that doesn’t change the fact that viewers just witnessed 200 human heads getting chopped off.  If witnessing human on human violence has some sort of psychological impact, then that also would still apply even followed by a ‘peace-good-war-bad’ ending.

(Ditto to constant exposure to naked bodies in movie #3—even if the movie ends with some kind of a message about modesty and that liberal sexuality is “bad”…)

Context only matters if the content is harmless. *IF* (and this is the assumption) seeing violent or sexual images, or hearing profanity has some kind of detrimental impact on the mind and spirit, then it would presumably still do so regardless of context.  And that means that “context” cannot be used on its own to defend many forms of “bad” content because the presumed problem with PSV material is completely independent of context in the first place. 

Movie reviewers such as Roger Ebert have often described R/NC-17 sex scenes in movies as being “graphic, but not pornographic”.  It seems clear that this distinction has to do with differences in context only: where the content is fundamentally the same, but one has a legitimate artistic place in the movie, while the other is just there for titillation.

However, this semantic distinction becomes meaningless if the content itself is not harmless—a sex scene that has a place in the story or has no purpose whatsoever, is still a sex scene.  If seeing naked bodies, especially involved in sexual acts, has discernable psychological effects on the mind—arousing sexual thoughts and responses in the viewer, for example--then that needs to be considered *before* analysis of the context can even begin.  If that psychological impact exists, context no longer matters.

Case Study:

This issue came to the fore among the LDS community with the release of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” in 2004—which set box-office records primarily by bringing people who wouldn’t normally see movies (let alone R-rated ones) into theaters.

A number of faithful Latter-Day Saints defended their choice to see the movie at the time, including BYU professor of religion Robert Millet (“It’s not Freddy Krueger, it’s Jesus Christ”), and author Orson Scott Card .  Note the inherent implication in their defenses, that the effects of the violence of the movie are essentially alleviated by the spiritual power of its message.  Basically, context trumps content.

Can you *do* that?  Do depictions of highly violent acts such as scourging and crucifixion against actor Jim Caviezel in a movie become less violent if his character bears the name of Jesus Christ (but would still apply if his character had a different name--say a remake of Spartacus?)  This seems to presume violence has no inherent psychological impact at all—and I don’t think that case has been made.  If true, doesn't that imply NO movie with only violent content can be dismissed as 'inappropriate', at least if it has a moral message somewhere inside?

(Note that Brother Card, somewhat counter-intuitively, shares an experience watching a porn movie when he was younger and explains how those images stayed in his mind for a long time, particularly in the temple.  His point: sexual material is the real reason we should avoid ‘bad’ movies, without providing any argument why violent images in movies wouldn’t stay in the mind in *exactly* the same way regardless of context…)

Without rehashing the “Passion” debate again four years after the fact, the question remains: what is the ‘objection’ with “objectionable” material in movies in the first place?   Is it just a waste of time, or is there genuine psychological and spiritual effects that cannot be realistically measured or controlled for?  If the latter, how does that affect judging the content of movies based on context?  Is the “V” in PSV fundamentally different than the other two, such that analysis of psychological effects doesn’t apply?  Can/Should we be more lenient towards violence in movies as compared to sexual content?  (Or perhaps the opposite?)  How do we balance judgments of content versus context?

Next: The good and the bad of the current US movie rating system