Rated R for Retarded

Part 1: The Confusions of a Young Cinephile

I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I love my church, but there are many parts of Mormon culture that I really dislike and/or don't understand.

I've already written about Mormons and facial hair, as well as Mormons reinterpreting scripture in regards to wealth. The next topic I'd like to write about is one that's been bothering me for many years: R-rated movies.

I am not exactly sure how this R-rated movie thing all got started in the church. When I was a child I remember that R-rated movies were "bad" but not necessarily outright forbidden by the culture. I of course don't know exactly what the trends were in the Mormon church in the eighties and early nineties since I was just an oblivious kid, but I do remember my parents watching R-rated movies from time to time. They watched these movies in the theater, out on dates. The only reason I know this is because I'd always ask my mother about the movies she went to go see when she got back home, and she'd usually oblige me and tell me about them.

For the longest time I thought this was a very creepy photograph, but it's actually just an illustration of some kind.

I thought that everything changed in 1990 or so, when the church re-issued a pamphlet entitled For the Strength of Youth (the cover is pictured above). In 1990 I was eleven years old and I was issued a copy of the pamphlet and told to study it, which I did. Throughout the nineties we studied this pamphlet in church, taking our cues from it. It was written by the First Presidency, so we turned to it for answers. Wait until you're sixteen before dating. Avoid immoral music and dancing. Boys shouldn't get their ears pierced. Nobody should get tattoos.

I was too young to even watch R-rated movies for most of the nineties, but I always assumed the injunction against R-rated movies was in the pamphlet because everyone cited the pamphlet as their source for this commandment and I believed them. Even when they didn't cite the pamphlet, it was just an established fact that R-rated movies were never acceptable and it was a sin to watch them. It was one of the things we were always told by youth leaders, and it was always mentioned in talks, firesides, mutual activities and youth conferences. In fact, one of the staples of General Conference stories was the one about some valiant boy or girl who would inevitably walk out when their friends / slumber party / group date decided to rent / attend / view an R-rated movie. When I was a deacon I remember hearing horror stories about how they tried to make one of the members of the Priests Quorum (a senior in high school) watch an R-rated movie in Social Studies (probably Glory) and how awesome he was because he stood up for his beliefs and refused to watch it. He had to go to the library and read a book about it instead, or something. This story was mirrored (and still is) in many articles in The New Era.

Then my troubles began. I started to get obsessed with movies and cinema in high school. I made it a personal goal to watch the American Film Institute's Top 100 movies (I imagine this list created a lot of budding film geeks in the late nineties). I'd seen some R-rated movies with my father as a teenager. We occasionally snuck out to catch a "boy's only" action flick like True Lies or Die Hard. Even I knew that those kinds of R-rated movies were fairly indefensible. I mean, yeah, they were awesome, but I couldn't really call them "uplifting". They were mindless fun and I knew it. But then I started watching these other films. Most of the films on the AFI list were either made before ratings existed or rated PG, but there are a few R's in there. My parents knew that I was renting these movies and they didn't object to me watching them.

I watched them and started to feel more and more confused. What was I to make of:



One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?


Taxi Driver?


Platoon?


The Deer Hunter?


The Godfather?


The Godfather part II?


The Shawshank Redemption?


Unforgiven?


Blade Runner?


Was I supposed to find these films dirty and offensive or something? I didn't. I loved them. I saw in them something that was lacking in many of the contemporary films I had watched in my youth. These weren't Encino Man or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. These were movies that had something to say, movies that made me feel something inside. I remembered them and thought about them for days, weeks afterward. They made me think about life and death, love, God, the nature of pain and war, family, loyalty, masculinity, religion, patriotism, sanity, eternity, and what it means to be human. In essence, they got me to ponder upon those three questions we always refer to in the church:

Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?

But these movies were all R-rated, which means that by watching them, I thought I must be committing a sin. My viewing of the Shawshank Redemption had somehow caused Christ to suffer, but I could watch The Truth About Cats and Dogs and get off scot-free because it was PG-13..? The funny part is that the only thing I remember about The Truth About Cats and Dogs is a scene in which Jeneane Garofalo has an extended phone sex conversation with her love interest while they both masturbate. But hey, at least they didn't say "fuck" more than two times, right?

Toward the end of high school I had decided that there was either something wrong with the doctrine of the church on R-rated movies, or I was just going to have to sin and watch them (repent later) because I really liked movies. I liked them so much that I'd rather give them up completely than have to live the rest of my life only watching The Waterboy,




Dr. Dolittle, 



Armageddon, 



Patch Adams, 



Rush Hour,


and a pantheon of other PG-13 shit-fests. (All those movies were released when I was seventeen. Here's some more non-R-rated fare from 1998: Deep Impact, Godzilla, You've Got Mail, The Rugrats Movie, Stepmom, The Mask of Zorro, Antz, The X-Files, City of Angels, Lost In Space, Parent Trap, Ever After, What Dreams May Come, Meet Joe Black... I could go on like this, but you get the idea.)


While I was on my mission the church published a revised edition of For the Strength of Youth, and it is the version used to this day. I remember reading through the new pamphlet and being surprised that no mention was made of R-rated movies. Basically, it just says that you shouldn't expose yourself to vulgar or pornographic media. Did this mean that the youth of the 21st century could just use their good judgment on what was and wasn't allowed when it came to R-rated movies? This kind of shocked me, to be honest.

I wanted to track down an original For the Strength of Youth pamphlet form 1990 so I could compare the wording on movies in both of them and see what exactly had changed. I got a hold of one from 1990, and this is what it said: 

Don't attend or participate in any form of entertainment, including concerts, movies, and videocassettes, that is vulgar, immoral, inappropriate, suggestive, or pornographic in any way. 

Wait, what? So all those years I thought they specifically banned R-rated movies, but they didn't. And I was too dumb to actually look in the pamphlet itself to confirm this. But what about all those Conference talks and admonitions to the youth and stuff? I was confused, so I just went with what felt right.

When I went off to college the trashing of anything R-rated continued in full force. BYU has a policy in its Honor Code that no students are allowed to view or own R-rated films. The kids who lived in the dorms had it even worse; they weren't allowed to watch PG-13 movies either! This meant that they could be kicked out of school for watching The Fellowship of the Ring,

Rated PG-13

 
but not for watching Jaws,

Rated PG

or Gremlins,

Rated PG

 or Poltergeist.

Rated PG, and this was one of the less disturbing images

Because yes, OBVIOUSLY The Lord of the Rings, a film based on a well-beloved classic that's even been quoted in an Ensign message by a member of the Quorum of the Twelve-- yes, THAT'S the morally degrading film out of this bunch. It's rated PG-13, after all. But if I ever tried arguing this point with anyone around here, all I got was, "The Honor Code is inspired and was written by General Authorities, therefore the ruling against PG-13 movies in the dorms and R-rated movies in general is divinely decreed." 


Well I didn't believe this, because when I watched The Lord of the Rings I could feel the Spirit. It was spiritually moving and beautiful. So yes, you can ban the movie all you want but don't say that it's because God wanted it that way or because the movie is somehow morally objectionable.

Thus it was in college that I started to look for the official stance the church takes on R-rated movies. I searched all the conference talks, the back issues, the archives of The Ensign on lds.org and also paid careful attention to everything said in General Conference.

Stay tuned for:
Part 2: The History of "R"