it Was Never Sent

A short while ago there was some talk in a newspaper about film morality, I felt a strong twang to write a letter to the editor, I never did. I'm not sure if it was good or bad, but I'm going to publish it now, I reworked it and it has become quite long, but Martin Luther Kings talks were long too, I just hope I write important things that have relevance. So here you go:

The last few weeks I’ve been reading about how films are good and bad morally. People wrote in that the MPAA does this or that, or perhaps the content does it, or perhaps the message does: the lesson is what’s important. There was one guy who wrote a good letter about how the content and message are both equally important, you can’t single out the content only- which is what many LDS people like to focus on.

We believe that the Book of Mormon is a perfect book, maybe the most perfect book on the world, however, at the same time its about murder, rape, adultery, secret combinations, bloody wars, betrayals, hate, pride, greed, etc. We’re told to read this book everyday, to study it. Now it also contains some positive content, but it has huge portions of it that are predominately negative. Try to focus on Alma 47, or similar chapters, maybe Moroni 9 for a few days in a row, haven’t studies those chapters real in depth? I guess not. The Book of Mormon has a lot of good content (remember we aren’t talking about lessons and messages, those come later), but it doesn’t have perfectly white spotless content, its really very bloody. What I’ve just wrote is irrelevant, I know. The Book of Mormon is valuable to us because of its message.

Content and Message aren’t two brothers that influence you together. Content supports the message- always- and then the message influences you, or at least that’s how it should be.
In the Book of Mormon there are heroes and there are villains and there is no gray. In real life or better yet, in film, the protagonist can mess up, make a mistake, maybe steal something or tell a lie- this creates ‘bad’ content, but if that content is used to teach a good value (such as his life gets messed up as a consequence, and the message is that stealing is bad) then the ‘bad’ content is irrelevant, it was as a means to teach. In the Book of Mormon, Nephi and Alma and Moroni are already perfect, they don’t mess up, they aren’t human, the only bad example we get is from the bad guys themselves.

In film the good guy usually does what’s good. Which is why it is so frustrating when the hero saves the day, is a wonderful role model, and then sleeps with the female lead (not his wife). This not only is this bad content, but a much worse message. Being able to recognize those bad messages when they do come up is what’s important.

Lets start now on the MPAA. First, the MPAA rates content first, then maturity age limits, and also looks at themes, though how much is questionable. If the content is bad, it automatically falls in the rating chart, no matter what themes that content is being used to teach, it is very possible the Book of Mormon if rated would receive an R rating, or more mature due to its violence and graphic descriptions.

The second way the MPAA rates is maturity levels. “Is a xx year old mature enough to handle what he sees and what he hears?” The first Matrix that came out was originally PG-13, until the directors thought it need to go to a mature-er audience and resubmitted the film. There is an age when children don’t understand the concept of death, and how a dead person doesn’t “wake up.” There is also an age that doesn’t understand complex emotions and motives behind many things that happen in modern cinema.

There is an odd trend among many directors and in Hollywood to make really good films with good messages R, some of the best films ever (message wise) may be R rated, but PG-13 films are sometimes notorious for the good-guy sleeping around and doing other equally bad things, the content stays clean (nothing is shown), but the message is just as bad as if you were to see him committing the wrong. In a significant way PG-13’s are worse than R’s, if you believe that message is more powerful on the human mind than content is (which it is).

These are the beginnings of ideas from which come: disregarding the MPAA entirely, or using a different moral rating system, or why the Church does not use the MPAA as a standard and references it in manuals, and why many people choose to watch whatever rating system guilt-free.

There might be a higher law: instead of avoiding R films and watching everything else and thinking you’re ‘good’- seeking good film and avoiding bad film, which really is what the prophets have told us all along, its just taken us a while to realize the MPAA is not a judge of how morally good/bad a movie is.

If you learn nothing else: Message is everything, and content isn’t.

Link to: MPAA website