The Movie Thread

[Maddox]

The audience knows. The audience experiences in their minds what's happening onscreen. It's meant to demoralize and scandalize the audience and, as Christians, our thoughts can be sinful.

Some subversive films have their characters in dream sequences doing things that "aren't really happening," but it's all happening for the audience. For example, in American Beauty (1999), Kevin Spacey's character has an infatuation with his under age daughter's best friend, Angela, played by Mena Suvara,

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And during one of Spacey's fantasies, he pretty much has sex with her in a bath tub covered in red rose petals, but not quite. There's a repetitive clip of Spacey's hand going under the surface of the water between Suvara's legs.

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And towards the end of the film, outside of any dream sequence or fantasy, Spacey's character removes the underage girl's top without touching (he undoes the buttons), and is about to go further, then stops, so he doesn't actually commit statutory rape, but for the audience it's meant to titilate, demoralize and scandalize them.

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It was never said in the film that she was underage...and since we don't know where this took place, you can't be sure if she was underage or not as each state has its own law.

She could've been 19 and most people still would've had an issue with this because the media keeps pushing the belief that May-December relationships are "wrong."

Ironic, isn't it that all of this sexual perversion is shown in our media (like the gay couple in this film) but a man lusting over a much younger woman is taboo.

At any rate, I don't believe there was manipulation going on here like you think there was. I believe the scene with the younger woman was simply meant to be provocative and act as a catalyst for the Kevin Spacey character to make a change in his life.

What I don't understand is why you say it's included to demoralize the audience. How?

My biggest issue with the film is the manipulation of the viewer (through the father character) to question their own feelings of possibly being gay because the character acts straight but is disgusted by other gays. This is a classic ploy by the Left to claim those who harbor a hatred of this type of relationship is only because they are secretly gay themselves.

 

[Eagle3]

I thought that was innocent. It was one of those situations in a situation comedy. He had no interest whatsoever in any kind of thing with her, and she couldn't possibly know it was her son.

Agreed. I too thought it was quite innocent and in one scene, Doc Brown actually explained this: He called it the Florence Nightingale effect. This is when the nurse falls in love with her patient.

The mother, too, explains this in the beginning of the movie when she describes how she fell in love with the father: that he seemed so helpless, like a lost puppy, and her heart just went out to him (when the father was knocked down by the grandfather's car and was brought into the house where he was nursed by the mom).