Last week I wrote of how my wife and daughter talked me into watching a movie on our DVD player – and about how I walked out of the movie, which is easy to do when you’re sitting in the living room.
This past weekend, my wife and I went to the cinema (it’s more fun to walk out on a movie in the cinema), to see … brace yourselves … the movie “Hangover”. Now you may ask, why would you go to see a movie that’s obviously a vulgar comedy about men behaving badly? The answer is that I’m not so much of a prude that I think all R-rated movies which are superficially vulgar are necessarily worthless. And I don’t think foul language alone makes for a bad movie, nor do I think depictions of sin make for a bad movie, unless the sin is somehow endorsed or not integral to the dramatic point of the picture.
That having been said, I don’t want this post to sound like I’m bashing this movie because it was vulgar, crude, and beyond redemption. On the contrary, I’m going to bash this movie for a far more serious and frightening reason.
In fact, in many ways the film has a certain Neanderthal charm to it. That having been said, there’s much more gratuitous profanity and gross-out humor than the film warrants. In that way, it reminded me of “Something about Mary”, a silly comedy of a few years back that was a clever farce about mistaken identity overlaid with unnecessary adolescent body-function jokes. And we could rightly fault “Hangover” for its endorsement of the “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” mentality, for its depiction of women as either frigid witches or prostitutes, for its glib treatment of drug use, and for all that stuff. But I was expecting all that.
What is seriously disturbing about this movie was two things. First, there are scenes with a baby that cross the line into child abuse. And secondly, the movie ends with – there is no other way to describe it – hard core pornography. Pictures are flashed on the screen just before the closing credits that document the heretofore forgotten experiences of the guys in Vegas. And the pictures include a sexual act – right there, before the hundred or more people in the theater, we saw something that even “Playboy” would not have depicted – genital exposure and contact in a sex act that no more than twenty years ago would have been something visible only in shady “adult” bookstores, something that if enacted at the strip clubs on the “east side” of St. Louis would have led to a raid and arrests.
My wife and I left with a sick feeling. Surely, we’ve grown accustomed to vulgarity in movies – but this is crossing a line that is very disturbing. This movie was rated “R”, meaning anyone of any age would have been allowed in with his or her parent. Not very long ago this movie would have been rated “X”.
This is all part of making evil mainstream. It used to be that guys who indulged in pornography were seen as creeps and perverts. There was shame associated with this sin. Guys would have to frequent shady places to pursue this shady thing. Then home VCRs and especially the internet meant that men didn’t have to sneak into the seedy part of town, they could invite this infection into their very homes. And now ordinary people in a theater are subjected to pornography in a mainstream movie that my 17-year old son could see, or that my 14-year old daughter could have seen, had we been stupid enough to take her with us. This is not just Janet Jackson’s breast. This is the end of all decency.
The things that this movie makes mainstream – child abuse, casual drug use and drug references that go beyond alcohol or pot and that include the kinds of drugs only seriously disturbed people are into, and the display of hard core pornographic images as a matter of course in an R-rated comedy – none of these things have been even commented upon in the quick Google search I did on “Hangover” before writing this post.
This is the end of decency – of sanity – and of culture.
Reading this makes me think that Pres. Obama was right, though not in the way he meant, when he said that we aren’t a Christian nation. We aren’t. Or we certainly don’t act like it.
In my mind the tv and movie industry is pretty much comparable to the fast food industry, or even how the tobacco industry used to be. They don’t really care what long-term harmful affects they might be wreaking on society. They don’t care that they are polluting minds and souls. They just want to keep making money. And so they keep putting out products like this and slipping in scenes that in a healthier, more sane world would have met with loud condemnation. Instead there is hardly a peep of protest. What boundaries will be crossed next? Where will they go to keep shocking us and keep pushing back the line of what is considered to be publicly acceptable?
Ironically many in the tv/movie industry sneer at big business but they themselves are big business (and are as corrupt or more corrupt as those they sneer at) and are becoming an increasing ugly business. But there is hope. It wasn’t too long ago a person was labeled a health nut for simply avoiding fast food (just like now if you object to graphic language or sex or violence in movies you risk being labeled a prude). That has changed. People have seen the obesity, the health problems, that have come from years of fast food feasting – and now it’s considered chic to be a health nut. So as a consequence the fast food industry itself has been forced to make changes, to do away with some of the more harmful ingredients and also to offer healthier choices on the menu. That’s what needs to happen with entertainment. Appeals to morality, protesting, none of that will work as long as they keep making money off of these harmful (and unnecessary) ingredients that they keep packing into their products. It will only change when they see that it will affect their bottom line. It will only change when Christians start acting like Christians again.
Thanks for the warning… what is scary is that I have close relatives who were telling me how darn funny it was… and I thought they were a little more on the common-sense/sophisticated/decent side.
Sigh…
Rachel