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,
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Moral confusion and ambiguity is the most common technique of demoralization in Hollywood/Western films and it's used in American Beauty (1999), where every character is a basket case, except for the two open sexual deviants are perfectly happy and contented in every way. While realism has been popular for a long time in favor of moral archetypes, morally ambiguous protagonists and other characters in the story create confusion in the mind of the audience and that's the primary vector of demoralization in this story.
We live in a world where a feminism-inspired nonsense taboo about older men and younger women exists and, even though I agree with you that this taboo is wrong, it is the moral status quo now, so transgressing it is demoralizing. We are also to believe that sexual deviants should be celebrated and, as you noticed, the only stable couple, and pretty much the only well-adjusted people in the entire film, are the two jogging neighbors who swing by in order to demonstrate just how happy they are to be the perfect citizens, one a tax attorney and the other an anesthesiologist, bringing smiles and gifts, and also inspiring Lester (Kevin Spacey) to get into shape.
As you also noticed, they made the Nazi an unhappy and cruel, closeted sexual deviant, whose mental stress from trying to maintain a failed normal relationship with his wife and son leads him to eventually make a completely unexplained pass at Lester, and then murder him in unrequited frustration, a senseless killing that occurs immediately after Lester makes his only correct moral choice in deciding not to deflower Angela, which is a nihilistic plot twist emphasized by weirdo Ricky bizarrely ogling Lester's spilt brains like he does everything else in the film.
Carolyn (Annette Benning) has an affair with the real estate king, Buddy Kane, and the daughter Jane is involved with the Nazi's son, Ricky, who is a drug dealer and a little bit off his rocker as well, obsessing over dead birds and "theoretically" agreeing to off Jane's dad at the opening of the movie while in bed with his girl. Everyone at school recognizes that Ricky is a weirdo and to be avoided, but he is presented in the film as a morally superior agent who gets the girl due to his unexplained confidence and rejection of social mores. Considering Ricky's family consists of an unpredictably violent and abusive father, as well as a conveniently catatonic mother in order to hammer in the point that all the normies are bad, but the deviants are good, his confidence does not fit the circumstances at all.
To top this off, Lester is a married man lusting after his daughter's best friend in high school. Lester's sexual fantasy with Angela (Mena Suvari), and his partial disrobing of her in preparation for coitus, that the audience experienced vicariously, is demoralizing because Lester is married and Angela is likely under age, to be otherwise would be the exception, so I'm going with the rule.
All of these demoralizing plot elements are hidden behind other, more uplifting plot elements, like Lester wanting to improve himself because he was suddenly awoken by an attraction to Angela. It's good that Lester decides to get jacked, demand respect from his wife and that he sticks up for himself at work, but then he extorts $60K from his company when they were about to fire him, so we're demoralized by this contrast, falling into the moral trap of being dismissive of someone for stealing a loaf of bread to feed their starving children.
Lester gets high and loosens up, but his dealer is his neighbor, a minor who is having sex with his daughter, and who risks both jail and retribution from his father for dealing, which Lester enables, albeit without knowing the full consequences at the time, but the audience does know.
Came across this great BlackPilled movie review from 2018, and you might find his take on American Beauty[/URL] to be interesting. He's got a lot of great film reviews that explain various tricks of the trade that Hollywood uses to deceive and harm its audience.
Yes Blackpilled has very accurate analysis of Hollywood as demoralization, I recommend any of his video analyzing films. American Beauty is for sure highly subversive. His video on The Pawnbroker and how it was used to get rid of the moral film codes in American was very enlightening:
