Your Commitment To Sparkle Motion

I don't think that you have a clue what it's like to communicate with these kids. We are losing them to apathy... to this prescribed nonsense. They are slipping away. -- Karen Pommeroy, Donnie Darko One of my favourite films has stirred up some trouble. According to a recent article in AgapePress ("Reliable News from a Christian Source"), a Los Angeles pastor and his wife are suing a school "for showing an obscene, sexually explicit, R-rated movie in their daughter's ninth-grade English class last February." In other words, for screening Donnie Darko. Notes the article (original spelling errors intact): According to Pastor Brian Lewis and his wife Tara, Animo Venice Charter Public High School, a school serving the city of Venice, California, and the Los Angeles Westside, violated their parental rights when school officials failed to inform the parents that the school would be showing his daughter Alexis and fellow students the R-rated movie, Donnie Darko. The Motion Picture Association of America gave Donnie Darko the restricted rating "for language, some drug use, and violence." But the Lewises say the movie is filled with all kinds of offensive subject matter, including "gross obscenities, various types of deviant sexual activity, and misogynistic fantasy." The Internet Movie Database describes Donnie Darko as the story of "a troubled teenager who is plagued by visions of a large bunny rabbit that manipulates him to commit a series of crimes." Tara Lewis says the film's disturbing and obscene content has negatively affected her daughter both spiritually and emotionally. "My daughter likes to write. She generally writes poems and things of that sort," Tara explains. "And right after she saw the movie, I started seeing poems with profanity, sexual content -- things that I have never seen her write before, never even found in some of her poems," the distraught mother says. She has no doubt Donny Darko was the source of this new and disturbing bent in her daughter's writing, she says, "because this movie was pretty graphic." Brian Lewis is likewise convinced that his daughter's mind was invaded by the film's explicit content; he even goes so far as to say that Animo Venice High School officials are responsible for the "emotional kidnapping and psychological rape" of his daughter's "Christian innocence," which is why he says he and his wife plan to sue the school for showing Donnie Darko to their daughter without giving them prior notice. The California pastor notes that he has rejected an offer from the school's insurance company to settle his complaint out of court. Far from being prepared to settle, he says he and Tara would like to bring others into his fight with the school over its decision to allow the inappropriate film to be shown to kids without giving parents advance warning and an opportunity to opt their children out. "We would love to launch a class-action suit," Brian says, "because it was shown to approximately 148 fifteen-year-olds. And the thing is that they violated the law when they showed it without parental consent. You know, these movies are restricted for a reason, and these guidelines are put there for a reason. You can't just show anything to a teenager." A few assorted thoughts on this: 1) This is some of the worst reporting I've ever read. I'm hardly a fan of the mainstream U.S. media, but this makes even its pathetic claptrap look good. The writer of the article, Jim Brown, apparently made no attempt to get the school's side of the story for this piece, which is atrocious by both Christian and journalistic standards. Brown obviously didn't watch the film before writing his story either, or he would have known that there is no "deviant sexual activity" in the movie, except perhaps a frank discussion of the mating habits of Smurfs. That is unless he considers teenagers having sex to be deviance. 2) If these parents, Brian and Tara Lewis, have in fact watched Donnie Darko, they have missed one of its most important themes. The film concerns itself with clueless parents who do not know how to communicate with their children. In other words, it concerns itself with them. 3) If the Lewises are worried about "gross obscenities, various types of deviant sexual activity, and misogynistic fantasy," I hope they haven't left their daughter alone with a copy of the Christian Bible. 4) Many Christians believe that people don't like them because they are Christians. In fact, many people don't like Christians because many Christians are assholes. This is a perfect example of that. It may indeed have been a mistake for a school to show an R-rated film to a group of 15-year olds. But bringing a class action lawsuit against the school six months after the fact is the act of a bully. And most people find great satisfaction in seeing a bully fall on his ass.