Reality Check

My cousin Carol and I have sons about the same age. Needless to say, they were both excited about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies which came out in the early Nineties when they were 9 or 10.

Carol and I were discussing the films after they had seen them. I remarked that they were all right movies for kids our boys' ages, but that I didn't see where one of the characters had to say 'damn' repeatedly at one point. "There are younger kids watching these things," I remarked.

She replied, "Oh, don't be such a dad. They were only going for a sense of reality."

Teenage...Mutant...Ninja...Turtles. And she was concerned about reality.

I think that's one of the problems with movies these days. I'm really not against swearing on screen to make a certain point or to emphacize an emotion perhaps, but have we forgotten that movies are NOT REAL? As such, why ought they reflect any particular reality?

The defense of nudity in love scenes, for example, is that we need that reality. The fact is that that takes away from the suspension of belief which is supposed to make films engaging. Rarely does a man see a naked woman and think, 'this really has me into the point of the story.' He sees a naked woman and isn't overly interested in plot development. Bernadette Peters once said she wouldn't do a nude scene because she would no longer be seen as her character, but as Bernadette Peters with her top off. She's right.

Why can we show certain things for reality's sake but not others? My aunt used to say that if reality is what you're looking for then Ingrid Bergman should have actually been burned at the stake when she played Joan of Arc. 'But you can't actually kill someone for the sake of the show.' Of course not: but then can we have actors and actresses actually doing a likewise immoral act (for a man feeling up a woman is actually feeling her up; it's not pretend like a gunshot wound can be) for the sake of reality? Or actually swearing when it's poor taste?

It's cafeteria storytelling, my friends. Liberal storytelling: the producers and directors and actors want what they want because it's what they want. The quality of their production, and our aversion to calling things right and wrong, are all that suffer.

We're better people than that.