Christians with traditional values get criticized often for being “uptight” and close-minded about the movies and music popular with modern teenagers. We are told to relax and not be so “rigid,” to keep in mind that there was a time when the older generation condemned movies and popular music that we now consider innocent and wholesome.
There is some truth to that notion. It may be hard to believe, but Glenn Miller’s music was once called “syncopated savagery” by famed newspaperman William Allen White. Some of the John Wayne movies that are now thought to be wholesome Americana were on the “morally objectionable” list of the old Legion of Decency. They were. I remember: My mother would not let me go with my friends to see Operation Pacific because of the Legion of Decency rating. The film was said to “reflect the acceptability of divorce.” Times change. It was once scandalous for women to show their ankles.
But that does not mean we should be learn to live with whatever Hollywood decides to send our way. Just because some Christians in the past may have overreacted to certain aspects of pop culture does not mean that we should not take a stand against the impact of modern films and music on our society. Not every moral standard that Hollywood challenges is in the same category as women showing their ankles. There are films that undermine important moral and cultural values, including films that are packaged as family fare. The currently popular What a Girl Wants is a good example.
The reviews tell us the film is “good, clean family fun,” “sweet, funny and very family-friendly,” “a nearly perfect teen/family movie,” and that “women, young and old,” left the theater with stars in their eyes.” A neighbor told me the same thing. She took her grandchildren to see the movie and thought it “very sweet.”
Well, I haven’t seen the movie, and don’t intend to. But I think I can make some judgements based on a story in the New York Post (April 19th). The piece was entitled “Who Needs Dad? Unwed moms are all the rage and no one’s complaining.” The reporter’s conclusion? “Illegitimacy has become legit in Hollywood. In the current comedy What Every Girl Wants, which is rated PG and targets preteen girls, the film’s 17-year-old heroine is born out of wedlock.”
The film is based on a 1958 movie, The Reluctant Debutante,” starring Sandra Dee in the title role and Rex Harrison as her father. In that version, the parents divorce when she is young girl. In the modern film, the girl’s parents never marry, because of the objections of the father’s upper class British family. The Post story tells us that director Dennie Gordon “updated the story to reflect today’s changing family situations” and that she was pleased when there was “zero fuss” from Warner Bros. and the Motion Picture Association of American ratings board.
The Post interviewed sociologist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead to get her reaction. Whitehead was the woman who wrote the much-discussed opinion piece “Dan Quayle Was Right” for the Atlantic Monthly, dealing with Quayle’s comments about “Murphy Brown” bearing a child out of wedlock. Says Whitehead, “There was a big debate” back then about the Murphy Brown show but it seems as if “we got it out of our system. Far from turning back the clock to pre-Murphy Brown days,” illegitimacy “has become acceptable.” “Unwed parents exist as something taken in stride.” To reinforce the point, the Post notes that such popular network series as The Gilmore Girls and Frasier feature lead unmarried female characters raising children, and that when Jennifer Aniston’s character in this season’s Friends had a baby out of wedlock there was very little complaint from viewers. Let’s face it: Dan Quayle was right, but “Murphy Brown” carried the day.
Then again, could it be that we are letting nostalgia get the best of us? Was Hollywood’s message really all that different in the past. The Post shows us that it was, observing that in 1951’s A Place in the Sun, Shelly Winters unwed factory worker meets with a tragic end and that Natalie Wood’s wide-eyed Macy’s salesgirl in 1963’s Love With the Proper Stranger goes through great anguish when she becomes pregnant after a fling with a jazz musician played by Steve McQueen.
In To Each His Own (1946), single mother Josephine Norris, played by Olivia de Haviland, gives up her baby boy to another family and poses as his aunt, devoting her life to loving him from afar, while in Susan Slade (1961) Dorothy McGuire pretends to be the mother of her daughter’s (Connie Stevens) illegitimate child, until the truth comes out causing a tragedy for the family. In contrast, says Whitehead, in films nowadays the message is “Oh, yeah, raising a baby on your own is a piece of cake.”
Maybe the director of What Every Girl Wants really believes that she treated illegitimacy as she did to “reflect today’s changing family situations.” Maybe. But she ignores the role Hollywood played in bringing about those changes. What happened seems clear: By the late 1960s, Hollywood producers, screenwriters and actors felt the clash between the counterculture lifestyles they were living and the traditional values that were imbedded in the movies and television programs they were creating, the Father Knows Best view of the world. And they were not going to change their lifestyles.
So the old understanding of sexual propriety and the stigma attached to unwed mothers had to go. This is not a case of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Hollywood did not cater to the country’s new values; Hollywood shaped them. And the impact has been powerful. The fact that “solid citizens” can now take their children and grandchildren to see a film like What Every Girl Wants — and find it “cute” and “sweet” speaks volumes. Hollywood has transformed the moral landscape. We now either feel there is no shame attached to children being born out of wedlock; or are so intimidated by the smart people’s attitude toward this matter that we dare not speak out in disapproval.
We aren’t “uptight” when we protest the images being shoved on the country by Hollywood. Unwed mothers are not the modern version of women showing their ankles in public. There is much more at stake. In real life, illegitimate children fare much worse than they do when born to “Murphy Brown” or the Jennifer Aniston character on Friends. Hollywood-style happy endings are not the norm for them.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at jkfitz42@aol.com.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
