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Movies and Missions

When a youth from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints decides to volunteer for an eighteen- to twenty-four month mission, said youth agrees to abstain from a lot of things that generally comprise the majority of a kid's living experience: No dating, no popular/secular music, no contact with home save emails once a week and a couple of calls, and no watching movies, especially not in the theater.

This list of Don't Commandments is designed to strip away the distractions of normal life so that the limited time as a missionary can be focused on the purpose of dedicated missionary life: Preaching the gospel. So it makes sense within the internal logic of the Church's system and it is, for the most part, an effective maneuver that does help keep missionaries honed in on their purpose.

The fascinating thing about this forced fast of films is that there's an unspoken but fairly well understood cultural expectation on the other end of the service. Young women (aged nineteen and older) serve for eighteen months, while young men (eighteen and older) serve for two years. In Hollywood terms, that's a pretty long time to be free of the cinematic zeitgeist. Summer blockbusters can launch right before a fellow leaves, then have the sequel show up about the time he gets back. But whatever cinematic conversation in between is a complete loss, and films that a pre-missionary is interested in seeing before the service are considered trite, unimportant, or uninteresting to friends who remained behind when the pre-missionary has gained the coveted status of a Returned Missionary (sometimes shorthanded to "RM").

That means that an elder (one of the menfolk who's gone out to preach) who enjoys the Marvel Cinematic Universe will leave with Doctor Strange, but when he comes back, will have to pick up Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther, and even more. And by the time he's home and ready to watch the movies, everyone else will have moved past them, as there's always more content to consume.

Having passed through this experience myself in 2002-2004 (the films were Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2), it can be frustrating. I saw the first Lord of the Rings movie, but the other two I've never seen in the theaters. I've watched them multiple times in the extended DVD and Blu-Ray, which means that I don't know what the theatrical versions were like--except my wife always whispers, "This is extended edition," so I have a sense of it.

It may be a little too far to call it a type of cultural diaspora, but it is jarring. One of the things that we Americans revel in is an entertainment standardization. The swelling successes of superhero movies is pleasing on a geek/personal level to me, but it's also a way of pop cultural conversation to push into more important means. Heck, Barack Obama called ISIL "the Joker" and invoked The Dark Knight while he was president. That sort of cultural connection is powerful and, in some ways, explains why there's almost a retox (as opposed to a detox) of cultural acclimation that an RM goes through. On one level, it's because films are fun and sharing fun things is fun, but there's also a desire, I think, on the part of family and friends who stayed behind, to incorporate the RM back into the popular discourse.

This comes to mind for two reasons: One, I recently saw a former student who just returned from his service in Chile. He's struggling to speak English all of the time (having been immersed in the other language for two years can make that code-switching difficult) and he's eager to watch movies again. The second reason is that being a parent is like a protracted mission when it comes to seeing films. I mean, there aren't any commandments forbidding the watching of films, but the concerns and logistics of children and movies is tricky. I would love to see, for example, Valerian and the Thousand Planets, but I don't feel comfortable taking my four year old son. So I end up removing myself from the cultural discourse on that front.

This may not seem like a big deal to some people, but bear in mind, I'm a teacher. Part of my effectiveness is how I communicate with students, and if my movie references are all from when they were seven or eight years old, I'm not speaking to them in a way that matters to them. Remaining savvy about films, TV shows (that one is really hard to do, as they're such time-sinks), and video games is--in my view--part of my job.

Anyway, movies: it's how we promulgate our identities as Americans. Think about it. I mean...I did.


Man, this ended really poorly. /fin

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