Certainly hearing other people’s stories can open us to the empathic experience of imaginatively entering their world and inhabiting their viewpoint; an experience that can increase and deepen our compassion.

There are, however, some kinds of traumas, those I’ve lived myself, that I cannot watch dramatized. There is no way to be truthful to the trauma and the distortion is disturbing. Further, even the most inaccurate portrayal forces me to remember and partly relive what I want most to forget.

I wonder if war veterans can sit through graphic war movies?

Those who have been brutalized by life perhaps have less need to be brutalized by art. I’ve never felt the need to apologize for my polyanna film preferences. I go to the movies to laugh, to fantasize, to escape, to dream.

I agree with Jack that the real life hard work of visiting the desperately poor, the sick, the lonely, the imprisoned . . . will do more to increase our compassion than a film will, however “sophisticated” the cinematic offering might be. Reading is the next best choice. Film ranks somewhere much further down the list.

Re: the R thing, I personally think there should be many different ratings. The main rating I would like to see is “insipid garbage,” in which I would place the majority of R and PG-13 and probably PG and come to think of it G movies. Then you could have different other types of ratings “super sexy, not great for people with sexual dysfunction or addictions”, “too violent, not great for people in the NRA.” There is more to us than simply our age, and the current rating system misses that entirely.

I let my wife screen the critics usually in hopes of minimizing the insipidness scale and avoiding gratuitous sex and violence. the only time the “actual” rating comes up is when we’re inviting Mormon friends to join us. I haven’t watched Schindler’s List yet because I can’t imagine that Spielberg could offer other than over-sentimentalized, exploitive schlock to a horrifying chapter in human history, and the clips, reviews, and descriptions have done nothing to suggest otherwise. My skin crawls when that film is used to argue against the Mormon R prohibition.

The two movies that really affected me growing up were Deliverance and The Deer Hunter. I admired both films, but have no desire to see either again. I don’t regret seeing either movie, but the rape scene in Deliverance and the russian roulette scenes in Deer Hunter upset me. Each movie showed me depths of depravity I think I knew existed in theory, but had never imagined so vividly.

Also JNS I agree that you don’t have to show everything but part of the reason Boys Don’t Cry was so effective was because it did show a lot. I’m still undecided as to is necessity but I felt pain.

That said, I was a huge fan of Kevin Smith before I joined the church, I even had the Mallrats poster to prove it, and still like him as a person, I just can’t watch his films and feel comfortable about it.

As for Dogma, I loved the platypus disclaimer, but beyond that, it just wasn’t for me.