Why?

This article and this quote:

Q: What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary?

Maurice Sendak: I would tell them to go to hell. That’s a question I will not tolerate.

My new author hero.

Then a commenter (on whichever blog linked it; I can’t remember) said, “Thank you for not contributing to the pussification of America.”

So…I took my kids.

3-almost-4-year-old XY TD was interested until his popcorn ran out and then it might as well have been church with better seats, for all the attention he paid. Besides, he is unscareable.

6-year-old XX TD seemed more engaged with the movie…until she lost one of her quarters. Oh the weeping. Over which I was unmoved because I TOLD her to put it in her pocket or she’d lose it. Ta da! Mama’s right again.

Me? I cried in spots. It’s a mom’s movie. Yeah, I’ve been that torn, that tired, that struggling, that scattered, that out of control.  So has my kid.

I got it.

I mean, I got what I could between trying to corral my own little Max and telling the Drama Princess to suck it up.

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But not here. I’m not late to the party, as I’ve been stewing about this for a while, but the LA Times article gave me something else to throw in the stew pot.

Richard Dutcher, the regrettably monikered “father of Mormon film,” has released his latest film, Falling, in a limited number of venues. As of last year, he also released the moniker and the church. In a statement made last year, he said he was “leaving Mormon moviemaking to the Mormons.” Which is sad because as far as I can gather, his work was seen by some as “so very supportive of both our community and its faith.”

(Psst: Mr. Dutcher. Call me!)

On LDS Review, which refused to review the film, one commenter opined:

Dutcher said he was done with “Mormon cinema” so this appears to be his breakout and break away from that genre.

A partial quote from the LA Times article:

Despite its provocative handling of LDS faith, Dutcher insists Falling is, in effect, a Mormon movie insofar as its themes and imagery will be most meaningful to Latter-day Saints (never mind that, by default, they are embargoed from seeing an R-rated film). But then, doesn’t that still make him a Mormon filmmaker?

“At the beginning, I was proud to say, ‘Yeah, I’m a Mormon filmmaker’ because then, I was defining what a Mormon filmmaker was,” Dutcher said. “It quickly got completely out of my control. Now, no one wants to call themselves a Mormon filmmaker because you’re associating yourself with a genre that’s fallen into disrepute. It’s like having porn on your résumé.”

Fallen into disrepute because of what, boys and girls? Ding ding ding! That’s right. Mediocrity in the name of being safe and inoffensive. William Morris has asked this question: …can the believing LDS community produce great art? but I don’t know if he has received a satisfactory answer yet.

It wasn’t a month ago I was reading the distress call about the death of Mormon film (sorry, can’t remember the blog) for the exact reason Dutcher stated: It’s fallen into disrepute.

So is “Mormon”/“LDS” its own genre? I had thought I’d wrapped it all up nicely in pretty paper and bow with “LDS fiction is its own genre,” but the difference between Mormon fiction and Mormon film is that Mormon fiction isn’t seen in the wild (e.g., Barnes & Noble), but Mormon film is (e.g., God’s Army and Brigham City and Falling). Seems to me that art headed for the great beyond (i.e., not just for church members) ought to have some other genre identifier than “Mormon.”

Is this where we are? As long as it’s got “Mormon” slapped on the front of it before being sent abroad, it’s been adequately defined?

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I don’t watch many movies because I’m usually obsessed with the ones playing in my head, begging to be laid on paper.

But I’ll roll over for post-apocalyptic tales (oh, 12 Monkeys and Waterworld come to mind and that reminds me, why [other than Kevin Costner's acting] is Waterworld so reviled?). I Am Legend is the best I’ve seen yet.

My husband doesn’t like stories told in flashback (even little bits of backstory), so that bugged him, but he’s not a post-apocalypse fan AT ALL, so the fact that he liked it at all was impressive. And Will Smith? The man can act. I need to see Hancock. I don’t even know what it’s about, but Will Smith has excellent judgment as an actor and businessman, so I’ll not question him on the roles he chooses.

Over at Toward an LDS Cinema, I’ve been on Trevor’s case to see Dogma (as all 4 regular readers of this blog will know). I still think that’s a fabulous not-quite-post-apocalyptic movie (amongst other themes, leit motifs, and regular ol’ motifs).

I have my own post-apocalyptic tale in the hopper, so we’ll see how well I do at creating a world that doesn’t exist, but could.

C’mon, folks. Give me a rundown of your favorite post-apocalyptic movies and/or books. Pwetty Pweeze?

UPDATE: I’ve begun a list of post-apocalyptic tales, both book and film. Be a contributor! Comment on this post or email me and I’ll update as time allows.

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It also trashes things I believe in. Does it bother me? On some visceral level, yes, but that doesn’t make it difficult for me to listen to it and it certainly doesn’t keep me from listening. I’d miss a whole lot of good music (and that voice!) if I took umbrage at other people’s opinions and the way they state them (usually the way they state them is more off-putting than what they say).

So it started me thinking about how I read fiction, what fiction I read, and how I deal with ideas and philosophies, opinions and teachings in fiction that either I don’t hold, don’t like, or despise for any number of reasons. I surprised me. I don’t care as long as the story’s good.

At some point, I must have gotten over my instinctive outrage when, in the middle of a good story, I got plopped down into philosophical wanderings that were either not my own or insulted mine. I know it wasn’t one piece that did it. It was bits and bites of stories throughout the years that let me know that A) I wasn’t alone in the world and B) other people had different opinions from mine and C) they were no less valid and D) informed their worldview the same way my opinions inform my worldview and E) it didn’t make them wrong and didn’t make me right. The only caveat to that is that the story be engaging enough for me to swim upstream.

I can actually pinpoint the one book that started me down this path, but I have only recently thought about re-reading it as an adult with vastly different tastes than I had when I was 15 and completely repulsed by the heroine. Who, in case you would be wondering, was Scarlett O’Hara.

I also became a more discerning reader, understanding that sometimes, ideas that were neutral or positive for me did inflame others. Example (because I can’t remember the last book I read that I thought was that didactic, which only speaks to my current tolerance level): Dogma is one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s irreverent and profane (well, naturally, because Jay and Silent Bob are in it) and, most would say, blasphemous. Protests were organized over this movie (although I think protesting something you haven’t seen is disingenuous).

Don’t get me wrong; it is irreverent and profane. Deliciously, devilishly so. But it is not blasphemous. Through all the muck and mire, the four-letter words, the irreverence, Kevin Smith gave me something uplifting and positive. Trevor, over at Toward an LDS Cinema, had an intriguing post why Mormons would do well to take some lessons from Fight Club for many of the same reasons I like Dogma.

Another reason? I tired of one-dimensional characters long ago. I remember distinctly a Harlequin Presents I read when I was a teenager (I think a Janet Dailey, but don’t quote me) wherein the hero is a pastor of a church whose denomination is not specified who sets out with great determination to seduce the heroine. I was shocked and outraged all the way down to my 15-year-old good-Mormon-girl toes. When she questions him of this dichotomy, he quotes the Song of Solomon and gives her some bullshit meant to fuzz the issue of what is and what isn’t fornication and besides, it’s not really bad.

Please. Anybody with a contact high off any one of the Abrahamic religions knows that fornication’s not on the kosher side of the Chinese menu. I kept reading in spite of my outrage, but over the years, that’s morphed into a different take-home message:

People aren’t one-dimensional. I don’t know if he was attempting to justify it to himself as much as or more than to the heroine, but even now as an adult, I still don’t think it was honorable for him to twist the concept of fornication inside out to get to his goal without owning up to it eventually. It would have been more interesting for him to have owned his weakness, but it was interesting enough that an author put religion and sex together in a book. Lookit, here I am 25 years later still remembering and being influenced by that concept.

In Dogma, Kevin Smith gave me a cast of characters with depth. I mean, really, a descendant of Jesus who works in an abortion clinic? Christ’s 13th apostle who’s pissed he got written out of the New Testament because he’s black? A muse-turned-stripper because she lost her touch? George Carlin as a Catholic priest? Alanis Morissette as God? Priceless!

(‘Scuse me while I go put it on the DVD and watch it again.)

So that brings me to The Proviso, in which I will have managed to offend most everybody with the language, the sex, the politics, the religion, the money, and, most likely, the reading preferences of its characters. It’s my Dogma. I thought a lot about what a reader would bring to the table while reading this book, but at the end of the day, I had to write the story Knox, Sebastian, Giselle, Bryce, Eilis, and Justice gave me whether it offended anyone or not.

Likewise, my antagonist, Fen, is as morally ambiguous as the protagonists. One-dimensional villains don’t interest me anymore, either, and I wanted a villain who was likable, to show him on his downward spiral, wherein he owned what he did and actively engaged protagonists he knows and (in the case of two of them), loves.

This is who these people are and to mitigate them in some way would be to cheat them. Some of them believe the doctrine they’re attached to by birth and some of them don’t. They are flawed, deeply so, and they have questionable motives for what they do, but they do them and own them and take the consequences for it. I think that makes them interesting.

I finally came to the conclusion that if my storytelling is engaging enough for a reader to keep reading in spite of his umbrage or discomfort or disapproval, then I will have done my job.

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