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Thursday, March 09, 2006

Hide Your Eyes

"May I speak to the lady of the house?

"This is she."

"Thank you."

And the line went dead.

This hardly bothered me. I was happy enough not to have to trot out my weary "I'm on the `do not call list'" line and it was nice that the 8:30 AM call was unrelated to the recent hospitalization of a close relative.

It did make me wonder, though, why the man didn't want to talk to this Lady of the House. As it turns out, he had no idea how right he was.

The polite hanger-upper called back last night, also around 8:30, asking for the house's Lady. I told him he was speaking to her and asked what he wanted since he had hung up on me the day before.

The man apologized for that and launched into a little monologue about he represented a non-profit organization interested in family-friendly entertainment that hopes to influence Hollywood to generate safer, less risque, less racy, less "objectionable" fare.

He went on to say that he would read some paragraphs to me and asked if I would not interrupt him because his connection was such that he might not be able to hear me and he wanted to be sure I didn't think he was just talking over me, and that he would ask me some questions after each paragraph.

All right.

As it turns out I only got through the first paragraph. The rant was purely about how Hollywood doesn't make any effort to generate family-friendly movies and how his group was in no way advocating censorship, but they wanted to see a change. They wanted quality, "wholesome" movies and television that everyone could watch together without being offended by language or "anti-family" attitudes or sex or violence. Did I agree that Hollywood avoids making family-friendly movies?

Here was my invitation. I stepped in and said that he was talking to the wrong girl. As far as I am concerned, I genuinely am against censorship and overall policy that pretends not to be censorship but in fact is just as repressive only sneakily so. I think parents should be aware of what is available for their children to watch and should take steps to curate the movies and TV available to the family.

Moreover, and this was the end of me, it seemed to me that Hollywood was hardly shying away from "family friendly" movies, given the recent release of Cheaper by the Dozen, Yours, Mine and Ours, Curious George, Nanny McPhee (not a Hollywood product but still. . .), the upcoming Shaggy Dog, Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (again not Hollywood-generated but Hollywood distributed)... and when I said that I thought he was mistaken, he thanked me and hung up.

This conversation bothered me. I genuinely do think that parents need to be invested not just in censoring what their kids watch but in teaching them about culture. I don't think it is strictly a matter of deciding that the world needs to be "family friendly" and churning out a bunch of bland G-rated pap. Children, I think, can be taught to understand that fiction is just that, and that imaginary worlds do not exist to be imitated.

I went to a gallery recently with Felix where I was looking at a piece by Suzanne McClelland, which is based on "The Princess and the Pea" and got into a conversation about how other examples McClelland's work had been written up as being "controversial" and not "safe" for children because she often uses "foul language" in her images.

This is an ancient argument, but I don't really understand the worry, except as it exists in the lazy, literal mind of someone who doesn't give children enough credit. It is one thing to shield a child from sex and violence and horror, another thing entirely to protect it from language, and even the obvious opportunity to teach that there are some words that are not acceptable in public, but which serve to express things in art. This is a hard concept but not an impossible one, somewhat similar to the "indoor/outdoor voice" duality, it seems to me.

I have dreams of teaching Felix about movies. I can't wait to show him Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood (I bet I've talked about that here before). I'm even looking forward to introducing him to the world of moral ambiguity that is The Maltese Falcon. And I resent that any group would want to suggest that I don't know what I'm doing. I do. It is a privilege and a pleasure and I'd rather struggle to find good stuff than fend off endless amounts of crap.

posted by Elise at 2:53 PM

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3 Comments:

chiquita said...

It seems to me that in this case "family friendly" may be just code for "anti-gay." Did you sense an undertone, or am I just paranoid?

3/13/2006 11:17 AM

button said...

Right on. I agree with everything you said! Goodness knows I wouldn't have expressed myself so well on the phone though - those people make me nervous.

3/13/2006 4:54 PM

Elise said...

I think "family friendly" in this case was code for generally conservative, generally Christian. To the extent that they are anti-gay, they are also anti- a lot of other things including swearing, generalized "disrespect," sex, violence... These issues are all extremely old. Even just reaching back into movie history, the Catholic church did a good job at establishing a censor in the form of the Production Code, so this isn't really new. It just annoys me that they are asking that parents be absolved of responsibility for what their children consume.

3/13/2006 8:28 PM

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