CAMARILLO, Calif. – Of all the many reasons I’m glad I’m not a deeply religious or socially conservative person, the fact I’m largely free from concern over the world’s many corrupting influences ranks right at the top of my list.
Since I don’t base my daily decisions and actions on the precepts of a centuries-old religious tome, I don’t have to waste time wondering whether watching football on Sunday is abhorrent to the Lord or whether it’s OK by God if I order a bacon cheeseburger at lunch.
It’s also this freedom that allows me to watch superhero movies without obsessing over a single throwaway joke about porn and how this one line “ruined” the entire flick.
“The movie has a myriad of issues, from poor writing to bad direction,” wrote Ben Kayser, the Managing Editor of the Christian movie-review site Movieguide, in a review of Spider-Man: Homecoming. “However, one line that was said by one of the characters stood out to me as I was writing, and I couldn’t let it go.”
When Kayser says he “couldn’t let it go,” he’s not exaggerating one bit.
The line that so troubled Kayser occurred during an exchange between “Ned,” a young friend of Peter Parker’s, who has learned of Parker’s superhero alter ego and is now engaged in helping Parker-as-Spiderman from inside the school’s computer lab. When a teacher walks into the lab and catches Ned staring at a laptop screen in order to feed Spiderman information, Ned needs to think quickly to keep her off the trail of his superhero-sidekick activities.
“I was watching porn,” Ned says.
While much of the rest of the audience laughed at the quip, Kayser evidently lost what was left of his goddamn mind.
“I was confused,” Kayser wrote. “I mean, the frequent S-bombs and 30 other obscenities and profanities already gave away the fact that the Director, Jon Watts, didn’t have children in mind when he made a popular children’s comic book into a movie. This line however about a 15-year-old flippantly joking about watching porn, and it being normal and acceptable, felt especially irresponsible and frustrating.”
So, the same sort of people who are always fretting about the average American child’s exposure to porn coming well before the age of 13 are now freaking the fuck out over a fleeting reference to porn in a PG-13 movie? Interesting.
“The last thing families and children need is for Marvel movies, which millions of children watch and enjoy, to normalize pornography among teenagers and pre-teens,” Kayser wrote, without mentioning why a Christian movie-review site would advocate taking pre-teens to see a movie that is rated PG-13.
The best part of this faux outrage over a cheap, dumb porn reference? Kayden’s little Helen Lovejoy moment over Spider-Man comes despite him clearly understanding the inevitability of teenagers getting exposed to porn and “foul language” of the sort he evidently keeps count of while watching movies.
“Ultimately, if your children are in society (as they should be), they’re going to learn inappropriate words and inevitably find out about things like pornography,” Kayser correctly observed. “While parents can’t avoid certain issues when raising children, it’s nonetheless still frustrating that the new Spider-Man movie from Sony, unlike the first two Spider-Man movies from Sony, isn’t a safe space for family entertainment.”
Here’s hoping Kayser doesn’t let his kids read the Bible, either, because if he thinks that book is a safe space for kids, he’s forgotten about more than a few passages. Hell, you can’t even make it all the way through the Book of Genesis before encountering the first rape scene.
Don’t take my word for it. Take a quick peek at Genesis 34:2: “When Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, the ruler of that area, saw her, he took her and raped her.”
Well shit, it’s a good thing Shechem didn’t also tell a joke about porn while he was at it, or this one line might have ruined the whole Bible!
Look, if Spider-Man: Homecoming weren’t rated PG-13 to begin with, maybe Kayser would have something of a point, but since it is rated PG-13, and anybody who has spent more than four seconds within the walls of a junior high school knows kids are hardly innocent by that age, all Kayser has is a self-inflicted headache of cognitive dissonance. He’s living in the (largely imaginary) past, when popular TV shows were all just like Leave It To Beaver and in the movies everything faded to a black screen before the characters in a love scene had even reached foreplay.
If you happen to be a Christian of the sort who thinks a single, passing joke about porn in a movie means your kid shouldn’t see the flick, here’s an idea: Stay home and watch Veggie Tales with your teenagers, then just sit back and see what they write about you on social media, since you’re presumably monitoring their every word there, in between obsessing over the movies they watch.
Let’s put it this way: If you think the language in Spider-Man is “inappropriate,” just wait until you feast your easily-shocked eyes on some of the colorful synonyms for “lame” your kids have mastered, just to adequately describe their Christian helicopter parents to their online peers.
Image from Spider-Man: Homecoming.
