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Just as some mainstream critics are becoming attuned to spiritual issues in movies, some are also reflecting Christians' discomfort with the amount of raunch in today's movies. The August 11 cover story of Entertainment Weekly, an essay by staff writer Lisa Schwarzbaum, argues that audience permissiveness is making pop culture degenerate. "This taboo against taboos amuses us in the short run but deadens us in the long. So eager are we not to be the kind of rubes unsettled by provocateurs like Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor, so indulgent are we, in this peaceful, prosperous new century, of anything that at least doesn't bore us, that we're unnecessarily tolerant of raunch. The notion of indecency has become obsolete. … Commerce being commerce, pretty soon we may not be able to distinguish between the bestial and the best-selling." An opposing viewpoint worth noting comes from Tom Fontana, creator of the violent HBO prison drama Oz. He argues that the permissiveness that breeds raunch is the very quality that allows for the industry's recent focus on spirituality. Schwarzbaum quotes him as saying, "Just as you can have more Christian-oriented programs, you can also have something that's got more rawness to it, because there are places for both of those things. … I think, as a country, it's not like we're spiraling downward so much as it is we're being more honest with ourselves." In other words, maybe a Big Kahuna can't exist without a Scary Movie.

Steve Lansingh is editor ofthefilmforum.com, a weekly Internet magazine devoted to Christianity and the cinema.

See earlier Film Forum postings for these other movies in the box-office top ten: Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, What Lies Beneath, Coyote Ugly, X-Men, and The Perfect Storm.

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August (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44