Post
by sauvin » Thu Mar 30, 2017 7:33 am
I sometimes click on the "view content advisory" for a movie on the IMDB site, and am dismayed by some of the things that people warn about. Often enough, there'll be long, solid walls of text like "a man and a woman kiss, they hold hands, they kiss, we see the outline of her butt through her dress as she bends over" - an exhaustive itemisation of what could be infractions only of policy in a middle school that absolutely prohibits personal contact or "immodesty". What's almost worse is when a critically acclaimed movie with high user rating advises that it's not suitable for underaged persons because "breats and public hair are visable".
I'm also sometimes depressed by news stories like the recent one about a fifteen year old girl who may have absconded with her school teacher who's in his early 50's. The bits and pieces of the news that I've run across suggest that they'd had a relationship for at least a little while before their disappearance together, but the media are treating it as a straight up kidnapping. It may well yet turn out to be exactly that, but in the absence of enough evidence to support such a conclusion, I find the media's treatment of the matter rather one-sided: Older man? Underaged woman? Yup, he's a predator, no questions asked, and she's a victim no matter what these two people might say when they're eventually brought before a board.
Would Hakan's paedophilia hinder the film? In Europe, I think, TA & JAL could manage it without tilting the movie too far away from its present moral ambiguity, but maybe not without tilting it away from the essential love story. Remember LMI? That few seconds of railroad station photo booth photo strip showing an unchanged Abby and a twelve year old Thomas together pretty firmly cast her as some kind of dark seductress and Owen as Victim Number Umpteen in what's been dubbed "the Thomas cycle". More than one WTI board member has flatly stated that this suggestion alone killed LMI for them, and I don't remember that everybody who said this was American.
With the United States busily trying to stamp out sex in the mass media and trying to make certain Junior doesn't find out about what "that" is for until after he's turned 21 at the same time as busily trying to sell things like Viagra to anybody with a spare dollar or two, I'd definitely say that the northernmost parts of the New World are hopelessly confused. Factor into this confusion an apparently widely held and growing conviction that all men over the age of (oh, say) 16 are possessed of unrestrainable sexual lupinity, I'd definitely speculate that including Hakan's paedophilia would push one of Stephen King's "big red horror buttons" for the American public much harder than it'd be willing to accept. Homosexual paedophilia may well be the worst of the sexual Big Red Buttons between American men, who generally (1) would cheerfully personally murder child molesters and (2) admit that "yeah, I know we're supposed to be tolerant and understanding of men who don't like women, and I agree with that in principle, but, well, see, my boat just doesn't float that way..."
Fais tomber les barrières entre nous qui sommes tous des frères