Follow my train of thought: yesterday was Darwin day. When I found out I visited Jack Chick's page in order to celebrate some good old-fashioned fundamentalism. "Evolution is EVIL-lution, son. The world isn't really 145 million years old, it's just 6000. We can prove it because the Bible says so. That's just what those fanatical scientists want you to believe so that you'll go to hell when you die."
I don't want to get into that again, although it's true that if Jack Chick were any more right-wing he'd probably fall off the plane. I'm more interested in Bedazzled, which I finally got round to seeing last night: a remake of an old Peter Cook / Dudley Moore flick which in itself was essentially a retelling of Faust. In this particular incarnation Brendan Fraser played the hapless loser who was granted seven wishes in exchange for his soul - Liz Hurley played the devil (she's still an incredibly wooden actress, but I'll concede that she looked wonderful).
Every time Fraser's character made a wish, there was a catch - so when he asked to be rich, powerful and married to Alison, he woke up to find that he was a Colombian drug dealer and that his wife hated him. And so on. To say any more would spoil it. Suffice to say that the film carries a message: that good and evil, to a large extent, is not merely a question of heaven and hell - it's down to free will and how you choose to live your life.
Later on that evening I logged into capalert.com, to see what they thought. Capalert, for those of you who don't know, is a right-wing Christian film review site: a broad selection of films are reviewed and rated according to their spiritual and moral content. The aim, presumably, is to ensure that parents do not allow their children to see anything unsuitable, creating a happy night's viewing for all the family. Films are broken down into categories such as 'wanton violence / crime', 'bad language' and 'offence against God'. The scores begin at 100 points, and films lose points for inappropriate material of any kind. Thus Mary Poppins received a perfect score of 100, while American Psycho got a big fat zero. Dogma, with its 'seduction, trickery and treachery of such strange teachings', got a 6.
Bedazzled, interestingly enough, also got a fairly low score, and was described as a 'teen sex flick mocking God'. This fairly strong reaction fails to take into account - as, indeed, does the entire site - the use of metaphor, imagery and analogy. An offensive character who commits evil and is later punished is still unsuitable viewing - likewise a character who says something blasphemous or unpleasant in error is also condemned to the fires of hell. The writers evidently don't understand the concepts of dramatic irony, perspective or sarcasm.
On the other hand, that's not the point of the site. From the very first page it is full of disclaimers: "The CAP Analysis scoring model makes no allowances for trumped up 'messages' to excuse....aberrant behaviour or imagery, or for camouflaging such ignominy with 'redeeming' programming. Disguising sinful behaviour in a theme or plot does not excuse the sinful behaviour of either the one who is drawing pleasure from the sinful display or the practitioners demonstrating the sinful behaviour. This is NOT a movie review service."
Capalert do not seek to discuss the themes of the movie, merely to decide whether or not it is 'appropriate' viewing. The stern warning that 'all malicious and hateful Emails will be passed to the FBI' suggests that they've probably received a few, and the other disclaimer page - a response to all the Christians who've told them 'You make the rest of us look bad' - speaks volumes.
Here's the twist, folks. Some of the interpretations of what's 'unsuitable' are genuinely funny, seemingly unintentionally. It's partly the overreaction, partly the definition of sinful material, and partly the descriptions used. The Straight Story, for example, loses points due to 'terror of runaway lawn mower down hill with the rider'. Here are some other examples.
But the crowning glory has to go to....The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps. Which is chastised for....
So much for Christian tolerance. Anybody wanna go and firebomb the video store?
(Thursday, 13th February 2003)
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