deconversion

Recently I watched two movies.  One was a Hallmark "family" movie, the other was rated R.  What I found interesting about the R-rated movie was why it received the R rating.   Instead of the usual reasons, "language", "violence", "sexuality", the warning had a comment from a critic:  "This rating seems to be an attempt to shelter children from the fact that people are lonely and life can be hard."

Now I am going to describe the two and see if you can tell which movie was the one the ratings board felt children ought not to see.   Movie A was the story of a rodeo champion down on his luck who is trying to live his dreams through his daughter.  As the story unfolds, we see that he does not pay his bills (the gas has been shut off); he gets fired from his job; he mortgages the house to buy a new horse because his daugher's horse is laid up with an injury and can no longer compete.  He lies to his wife when she asks him how he could possibly afford a new horse; but the truth comes out when his wife finds a foreclosure notice in the mail  (so he has not been making payments here either).   So his daughter, who has dreams of college, finds herself having to drop out of high school in order to help support the family.  Unfortunately the new horse turns out to be a lemon and literally drops dead during competition; so that now her only chance is the injured horse.

Movie B is the story of a young woman and her dog.   They are headed for Alaska where she hopes to find work when her car breaks down in Oregon.  She makes one call to her brother in Indiana but he is either unable or unwilling (or both) to help her, so she hangs up.  Having very little money, she attempts to steal a couple of cans of dog food from a grocery store and gets caught.   She is hauled off to jail, leaving her dog tied up outside and when she returns several hours later, the dog is gone and nobody is able or willing to tell her what happened to it.  Then her car gets towed.   Now she is forced to sleep out in the woods while she searches for her dog.  

Which story turned out happily?  Which story was the one judged unsuitable for children?   If you guessed Movie A for the happy ending, you are right.  If you guessed Movie B as the one not suitable for children, you are right.

And yet Movie A, the wholesome family movie, has a subtle message running through it.  Actions don't matter, there are no lasting consequences, it will all turn out right in the end.  The injured horse pulls together to win the championship and everyone lives happily ever after.  In Movie B, we last see the young woman boarding a boxcar for Alaska with little more than the clothes on her back.  For the price of two cans of dog food--dog food that we learn she had the money for but chose not to pay--she ends up losing everything.   There are no happy endings here.  Only more trouble down the road.  The message here is that actions do have consequences and that it doesn't always come out right no matter what.  This is the movie that children should not see.

I don't know about anyone else, but something seems wrong to me.   Despite the fact that the father in "Every Second Counts" has repeatedly proven himself to be untrustworthy and unreliable and willing to sacrifice other people's happiness and well-being (not to mention the roof over their heads or his daughter's future!) we are asked to believe that now everything will be all right from here on out.   The bank will hold off on foreclosing, the daughter will still be eligible for her scholarship, and so on and so forth.  Meanwhile, in "Wendy and Lucy," Wendy, the homeless woman, gets inappropriate advice at best and the cold shoulder at worse, and when she makes a misttep, there are only hands reaching out to take what little she has left.   I just wonder, how many "Wendys" are out there, ignorant of how the way the world really works, because they were seduced by the lie that God/the universe is a friendly place and that no matter where you go or what you do, you will always be protected and everything will work out in the end.

Don't get me wrong, I am not against "inspirational" stories.  But more and more I find myself disliking  "inspirational" stories that lie about life, that perpetuate myths.  And I find it disturbing that these are the stories considered safe for children, while a "dark" story like "Wendy and Lucy" is not.