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Hollywood is one of America's leading recycling centers, where every concept gets re-used. They convert old TV serials into movies, build sequels to films that appeared to end, and when all else fails, they remake old movies.
Thus we're likely to see a remake of The Graduate
someday soon, and one famous scene should get a minor
revision. In the 1967 original, an older businessman tells
young Benjamin that he should get into plastics.
In
the remake, that advice should be filters.
There's a hot market for filtration these days. For
instance, you can take your tape of Titanic
to
Sunrise Family Video in American Fork, Utah, and for $5,
the shop will delete Kate Winslow's bare breasts from your
copy.
One customer, of the 50 or so who had asked for the alteration, said she was thrilled by this service, since the regular version of the movie -- the biggest money-maker of all time -- had been too racy for her five children.
The story I read provided no further details about her reasons for wanting the Winslet bosom deleted, but elsewhere I have read adults explain that there are two reasons they like to hide such spectacles from their children:
1) Children are sometimes inspired to ask questions that are embarrassing for parents to answer, and
2) Observing nudity during their formative years might bend the young twigs in the wrong direction, thereby leading to a life of desire and degradation, perhaps even to a penitentiary or the White House.
Both reasons are specious, but for different causes.
It is the duty of children to ask embarrassing questions, and they'll find them no matter where you go. Long before there was such a thing as a home VCR, Martha and I took her little sister, then 7 years old, to the zoo when we were visiting her family in Portland, Ore.
All was well until we entered the primate house where two simians were energetically attempting to produce more simians.
Look at the monkeys,
Patty shouted. What are
they doing? Are they playing leapfrog?
You don't want to respond with a flat-out lie, but on the other hand, there appeared to be a limit on how much biologic knowledge Patty should acquire from a trip to the zoo with us.
Well, yes, they're playing with each other,
I
muttered, hoping Martha would come to the rescue.
That's right, they're playing a special monkey
game,
Martha confirmed, adding that we really had to go
see the elephants before the zoo closed.
Our own children could come up with similarly embarrassing questions on Sunday drives through the majestic scenery of our Centennial State -- questions inspired by bulls and cows in roadside pastures, shuttered houses of prostitution in old mining towns, or male humans urinating along the barrow ditches.
In short, I like answering embarrassing questions about as much as any other parent does -- that is, not at all -- but such questions cannot be prevented, even if you tossed the TV set into the trash so as to avoid exposing your children to Kate Winslet's bosom and the latest lascivious leak from the special prosecutor's office.
The second frequent reason for filtration -- exposure to televised or other nudity leads to crime and social breakdown -- is also invalid.
I'm pretty much a homebody, but friends and family who visit other countries invariably return astonished by the nudity they see on foreign TV. If such exposure causes social problems, then those countries should be in a lot worse shape than ours.
But it doesn't work that way.
For instance, the United States has an annual divorce rate of 21 per 1,000 married women. In Denmark, where television is quite impure by American standards, the divorce rate is 11 per 1,000.
Much the same holds if you want to compare crime rates,
literacy rates, or other measures of social well-being --
countries with televised flesh are at least as
moral,
and generally even better, than the United
States.
Thus filtration does not produce a healthier society, any more than it prevents children from asking embarrassing questions.
So why do people want it? Beats me, but they're busy
asking for filtration. Videos, TV programs, Internet,
billboards, store windows, magazine racks -- always we're
getting asked What if children saw this?
The sensible answer might be So what if they do?
But the smart answer would be to invest in companies that
make filters -- even if the filters don't do any good, a
lot of people are apparently willing to buy them.
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