Conservative Christians: Still Kind of Stupid
Last year, conservative Christians flocked to the cineplex in throngs to watch The Passion of the Christ, making that film one of the highest grossers of the year. Despite the inevitable trouble that theater ushers had to deal with from watching these hordes of seemingly complacent people come stumbling out of the film weeping, wailing, wearing sack cloth, etc., the people watching the movie genuinely enjoyed it. Conservative activists and politicians, never ones to let an opportunity slip by in an election year (and they're all election years), praised the film for its message and tone and said that Hollywood should make more movies for the flyover states.
It's happening again this year, with March of the Penguins, the second-highest grossing documentary in history behind Fahrenheit 9/11 (come on, Christians, buy some more tickets and show that Michael Moore who's boss). Penguins is being lauded as revolutionary; such "film critics" (and I use that term so, so loosely) as Michael Medved have said that Penguins is "the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing." Medved adds, in regards to the audiences he believes have given the film its stellar boxoffice performance: "This is the first movie they've enjoyed since 'The Passion of the Christ.' This is 'The 'Passion of the Penguins.' "
Caught off-guard by the conservative frenzy building around a nature documentary, the film's American distributors have said that the movie is just a story about penguins, and no deeper meaning is intended or should be inferred. In a statement probably too practical to register with the religious community, Laura Kim, a vp of Warner Independent, said: "You know what? They're just birds."
Good luck, Laura. Try making your case to Ben Hunt, the Ohio minister who has organized field trips to see the film and who encourages parishioners to extrapolate moments from the film and apply them to their religious lives. Not one to let himself be upstaged by Medved's fairly clumsy "Passion" double-reference, Hunt has stated: "Some of the circumstances they experienced seemed to parallel those of Christians." Hunt's statement seems a little biased in that it only takes into account the lifestyles of Christians living at the South Pole who annually hike through 70 miles of snow and ice to copulate and reproduce in the middle of a giant glacier, and it's agreed that they're a generally unstable group. Hunt has even provided an online workshop form for people to take to the film and write down things God tells them as he speaks to them. For Hunt, religious zealotry makes it permissible to commit what I consider to be a greater sin: talking during the movie. Additionally, Hunt advises people who view the film to not discuss it with each other afterward, but to instead to go with the group to an "off-site location" to discuss what each person was "shown" as they watched the movie. A movie about penguins.
The joke, though, may be on the conservatives in the end. After raising their young for a few months, the adult birds in Penguins swim off into the sunset, and the narration tells us that they'll more than likely never see their young again. Is this the movie Medved wants people to use as a guide to child-rearing? Abandonment and complete severance of all ties with your kid when they turn 7?
It gets better, but not for the right-wingers. It turns out that, although penguins do often mate for life, male penguin couples have also been documented, placing a rock in their next instead of an egg. Last year, the Central Park Zoo replaced one gay couple's rock with an actual egg, which they raised as their own.
It remains to be seen whether the conservative interpretations of March of the Penguins will address the issue of dude-on-dude penguin action, although given their track record, conservatives could wind up stoning the gay penguins or just ignoring them all together.
