Thursday, January 21, 2010

Catholics Vs. The Mentally Handicapped


Perhaps no single religious organization has played such an important role in censoring art and prosecuting new and interesting ideas as the Catholic Church. The examples are numerous and well-documented. The Church, in particular, has always been inextricably linked with the censorship of Hollywood movies, going back to the days of the Hays Code (so afraid, people were back then, of Cecil B. DeMille's period dramas). In fact, a lot of people don't know that the original text of the Code was authored by the priest and writer Daniel A. Lord. When that was replaced by the MPAA rating system in the late 1960s, Jack Valenti devised a system by which a lot of those strictures would stay in place, and you can still tell today from the obvious problem the MPAA has with grownup depictions of sex, as opposed to finding wanton displays of violence generally less offensive.

This is all common knowledge. Did you also know that the Catholic Church actually has people in their employ whose sole job is to evaluate movies based on how appropriate they would be to the average Catholic audience? The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has an "Office For Film and Broadcasting" that classifies movies according to these ratings:

A-I: General Patronage
A-II: Adults and Adolescents
A-III: Adults
L: Limited Adult Audience
O: Morally Offensive

It's sometimes fun to read their capsule reviews. I mean, they're readable, which is something you can't say about Peter Travers. At least half of their movies end up being rated "O," I've noticed. Their considerations don't always match up with the MPAA, as you will see from their review of The Invention Of Lying, which (most people don't know this) contains a pretty devastating takedown of organized religion:
Venomous supposed comedy, set in a world where lying is unknown and every word spoken is accepted as truth, and where God does not exist until a failed documentary screenwriter (Ricky Gervais) discovers the ability to deceive and, to comfort his dying mother (Fionnula Flanagan), invents the fable of an afterlife, going on to fabricate the story of a "man in the sky" who rewards good deeds and punishes evil, all of which is eagerly accepted by the credulous masses who flock to hear his message. Along with his co-writer and co-director Matthew Robinson, Gervais launches an all-out, sneering assault on the foundations of religious faith such as has seldom if ever been seen in a mainstream film, despicably belittling core Judeo-Christian beliefs and mocking both the person and the teaching of Jesus Christ. Pervasive blasphemy, some sexual humor and references, and a few rough and crude terms. O -- morally offensive. (PG-13)
Most of the reviews are in a similar, hilarious vein. But check out this writeup of Kevin Smith's Mallrats, and see if you find anything odd (my boldness):
Sophomoric sleaze about two college-age retards (Jeremy London and Jason Lee) running amok in a suburban mall after being rejected by their girlfriends (Claire Forlani and Shannen Doherty). Writer-director Kevin Smith plumbs the gutter for laughs but finds only mindless tedium. Sexual situations, nudity, drug abuse, toilet humor and constant gross language. (O) (R) ( 1995 )
The USCCB, which is the official voice of the American Catholic Church, is calling people retards? Any normal standards and practices committee would have nixed that pejorative in a heartbeat, and would probably have had words to say with the writer in question. Such is the intellectual state of American Catholics today.

NOTE: I wonder if this review was colored by the controversy surrounding Smith's Dogma in 1999? Still, that's just harsh, USCCB, to make fun of Jason Lee like that.

NOTE II: Although I saw Mallrats again recently and they're probably right...

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