Are you suggesting that having a small number of good movies with a wholly positive message would be somehow worse than having the huge number of movies that we have now which range from really awful to a small few that are fairly good?

That aside, I'm not suggesting that we don't display human realities. I'm saying that we shouldn't be positively spinning them. I look at what you wrote about summer of 42 and it makes my point completely. You say that there are subtexts such as "first love, the cost of war..." and that "there is no celebratory mood afterwards." Then clearly the movie has put a positive spin on statutory rape (the age of consent in MA, where this film takes place, is 16).

So it was a tender moment. Would it have been less tender if Hermie had been 16? If the filmmakers had chosen to make Hermie 16, it would have been completely legal and this part of our discussion wouldn't be happening, but somehow the filmmakers decided on 15 knowing full well that nowhere in the United States is the age of consent under 16 (there are "close in age" exceptions where the age difference is less than a set number of rules, but MA doesn't have such an exception). In other words, they chose to create a scenario where Dorothy broke the law, but it was done so in such a way so that the audience would be sympathetic towards her. They could have instead created the exact same scenario with the exact same sympathies and no laws being broken, but instead they chose their little protest against statutory rape laws.

Certainly, many films portray illegal acts. Most of them don't attempt to make those illegal acts look like positive things, but even when they do (such as in Bonnie and Clyde), there is no doubt that the acts are illegal. Nobody leaves a film thinking that robbing banks, killing people, assault, etc. are anything other than bad things to do. Even in the most sympathetic portrayals of bad guys, we still know that they are bad guys. The other people may be just as bad, but that doesn't justify the criminal. With sexual activity (especially with teenagers), however, people don't have that same feeling. The message presented by the film industry is that underage teens having sex is positive and beautiful and nobody leaves thinking about the laws that are broken, or the damage done to these children. I'm sure you didn't miss my mention of the Bridges of Madison county in my prior post. I'm not limiting my contents to simply teen sex, but in films, sexual content is often portrayed as this fantasy where nobody gets hurt, where there is no lasting damage, where everything is acceptable and yet that isn't even close to the reality.

One final thought. Rewrite summer of '42, only assume that Hermie is actually Hermione, a 15 year old girl, and that Dorothy is actually Donnie, a 30 year old man whose wife is a WAC, stationed in Europe during the war (he's at home because he isn't fit for service due to his flat feet). He gets the same telegraph and then he and a virginal girl half his age have sex. Not quite the same moment and not likely as well received.

-- Jeff

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"Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." --Ronald Reagan