[Part 6 in a brief series about movie content and ratings. Links to earlier posts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5]

“You know, if the Bible (or Book of Mormon) was a movie, it would be rated R…”

A commonly heard phrase…notwithstanding they HAVE made movies based on the Bible and the Book of Mormon and most of them were not rated R.

As an objective analysis of content (as compared to just an attempt to rationalize watching the latest violent action movies) it is true that the Bible and the Book of Mormon both contain violent and sexual content.

Does that necessarily make them the equivalent of ‘R-rated’?  Well, it depends…

Movies and books are separate mediums.  Movie ratings are determined not just on pure content, but how that content is presented.  There have been many World War II movies, for example—many of which cover exactly the same battle, even—but which have vastly different movie ratings.  War (in real life) may be “R-rated” (or worse), but that doesn’t mean a presentation of war in a movie needs to be equivalently R-rated.  (Obviously not, since plenty of non-R-rated war movies exist)  Battle scenes can be portrayed in graphic or non-graphic fashion, both of which can get the point across with varying amounts of blood.

Books are even more abstract than movies.  Seeing words on a page can be a fundamentally different experience than seeing fixed images on a screen—those differences may be one primary reason there is no equivalent ‘rating’ system for books, as for movies.  What if the ‘rating’ can differ, depending on the reader?

Take this phrase from Alma 43:

“And the work of death commenced on both sides, but it was more dreadful on the part of the Lamanites, for their nakedness was exposed to the heavy blows of the Nephites…which brought death almost at every stroke.”

Or from Genesis:

“And [Adam and Eve] were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed…”

Were the section from Alma dramatized in a future movie based on the Book of Mormon, it certainly has the potential to be very R-rated—especially in, say, Mel Gibson’s hands.   But would it *have* to be?  Not at all—the Church has already produced several short films and segments featuring battles between the Nephites and Lamanites that did not reach anything near “R-rated” levels of violence.

In addition to “The Passion of the Christ”, the scourging and crucifixion of Christ has been portrayed in any number of other movies and videos, some of which were R-rated, but many of which were not.  They did not need to be to get the primary point across. 

(Likewise, the LDS temple endowment video--wisely--portrays Adam and Eve without any actual nudity.  You can imagine that filming things differently for the sake of ‘realism’ would be counter-productive in the end…)

Basically, filmmakers have—especially today in the age of CGI--a variety of methods at their disposal to portray equivalent content in different ways, with differing levels of realism and detail.

The printed page takes this distinction to another level.  When you read a section of the Bible, Book of Mormon (or any book) that features violence or sex, what mental picture gets conjured in your mind?  Are those mental pictures PG or R-rated?  Can they realistically be either?

I submit they can—just as filmmakers can imagine the same scene in different levels of explicitness, our minds can do the same.  Therefore, it is arguable that ‘ratings’ may not apply to books to the same extent that they apply to movies—and that the Book of Mormon or any literary work may not be able to be described as inherently R-rated, because reading the text allows several layers of abstraction between the words and whatever quality of images they create in the mind.

Movies do not have this flexibility—while filmmakers have options as to how to film the scene in the first place, once it is filmed, we (the viewer) have fewer options in how to interpret it.  Being a visual medium, movies move images directly from the screen into the mind without a go-between layer.  It is very difficult for anyone to actively ‘reinterpret’ images from the movie screen into less-explicit mental images in the brain.  (This lack of dynamic interpretation is one of many reasons many people inherently prefer books to movies to begin with…)

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean all books are therefore content-neutral.  Oftentimes the level of detail described in the book influences the level of ‘mental freedom’ the reader has in creating images of their own—the more detailed and explicit the description in the text, the more the words lend themselves to specific and explicit interpretations in the mind.

While the Alma section mentioning the “work of death” is a little vague in the details, a more explicit section of the BOM (such as Ammon cutting off the arms of Lamanites while defending Lamoni’s flocks, for example) may be judged to be inherently more violent simply because it’s a little more specific in the details.  Some books dwell in great detail on violent or sexual acts, while others leave things to the imagination—thus it could be said some books can approximate the experience of seeing a movie more than others, for better or worse.

It’s arguable, then, that reading the words, “…and the warrior swung and cut off his opponent’s head with his axe”, or “…she walked into the room and took off her clothes” is still inherently different than actually seeing images of the naked woman, or the severed head, onscreen.  Arguably safer, to an extent, because words are inherently more abstract in interpretation.

What does this mean?  Only that referencing the violent and sexual content of some sections of scripture--often in an attempt to undercut the moral philosophy of rating and editing movie content--oversimplifies the inherent difference between images and words.  And that there may be good reasons for judging content in movies differently than content in books...

Next: Wrap up...