Tuesday, January 31, 2006
The Complaint Department
As the person responsible for selecting movies and music for my library’s collection, it is also my responsibility to respond to the occasional complaint that arises about said collection. I would like to say that these complaints are rare, but they are distressingly common and becoming more so. Last year I received 16 complaints, which might not seem like much, but that works out to more than one a month (see, I’m wicked smart at math too). The first year I had the job, which was 1999, I think, we had two. Less than one month into 2006, I have already received two.
I have theories as to why this is the case, which are backed with pure scientifically tested speculation and supposition. The numbers have increased every year since the current administration took office. That chill wind from the right you’ve wondered about? Not your imagination. Obviously there’s also the small matter of 9/11 which left a lot of people feeling helpless in a world gone mad. What possible connection could this have to complaints at the library? Well, maybe there’s nothing a person can do to keep terrorists from crashing into buildings, but dammit, they can sure as hell keep boobies out of the library.
And boobies do seem to be many people’s primary concern. Just as Janet Jackson’s suspiciously decorated bared breast brought network television to its knees last year, nothing seems to get some people so het up as the acknowledgment that underneath all of our clothes….we’re naked!! In seven years of responding to over seventy complaints, I can only think of two that were related to violence, and a small handful specifically unhappy about language. Most are unhappy about the naked. Notice, I don’t say ‘the sex’. The mere presence of a naked body, even in the most non-sexual of situations, is enough to cause much hysteria.
My favorite example of this are two separate complaints I received about Bernardo Bertolucci’s film 1900. The film is about Italy during the early 1900s as seen through the eyes of two boys, one a peasant the other from a land owning family. This particular period of Italian history is somewhat busy, what with the fascism and the communism and the wars and all that. There is a scene early in the film (early being a relative term in a four plus hour long movie) when the two boys, around the age of 8 or so, become acquainted. They hunt frogs. They wrestle. They swim in a pond. They compare equipment and engage in a pissing contest.
Now, anyone who knows anything about little boys knows that this is exactly how they act when left to their own devices. Anyone who has ever been involved in potty training a little boy knows how entertaining they find their own plumbing. My complainers did not see two little boys engaging in innocent and totally realistic fun, however. They saw child pornography at the worst and, at the very least, something no child should ever be allowed to see.
What made these complaints fascinating to me is that both spent a lot space describing in minute detail everything awful about the naked behinds of two 8 year old boys. Neither, however, made any notice of the massive amounts of violence in the film. Before we get to the offending scene, hundreds of extras die horrible deaths in various creative ways including one person getting pitch forked to death, which was a means of dying I had not yet had the privilege of experiencing, even on CSI. If I learned anything from watching 1900, it’s that frankly, Italy should be proud that there are people left in Italy.
This desperate desire to prevent children from being exposed to the naked body while maintaining a rather lackadaisical attitude toward violence is a sort of odd American thing. Four hundred years has not taken us very far from our Puritan roots, it seems. What I find so bizarre about it is that, thankfully, 99.9 % of the American public will never see a person pitch forked to death in real life. Most of us will never witness or participate in the violent death of ourselves or someone else. Most of us will, however, have sex at least once and a full 100% of us are, as I mentioned before, naked underneath our clothes.
I have theories as to why this is the case, which are backed with pure scientifically tested speculation and supposition. The numbers have increased every year since the current administration took office. That chill wind from the right you’ve wondered about? Not your imagination. Obviously there’s also the small matter of 9/11 which left a lot of people feeling helpless in a world gone mad. What possible connection could this have to complaints at the library? Well, maybe there’s nothing a person can do to keep terrorists from crashing into buildings, but dammit, they can sure as hell keep boobies out of the library.
And boobies do seem to be many people’s primary concern. Just as Janet Jackson’s suspiciously decorated bared breast brought network television to its knees last year, nothing seems to get some people so het up as the acknowledgment that underneath all of our clothes….we’re naked!! In seven years of responding to over seventy complaints, I can only think of two that were related to violence, and a small handful specifically unhappy about language. Most are unhappy about the naked. Notice, I don’t say ‘the sex’. The mere presence of a naked body, even in the most non-sexual of situations, is enough to cause much hysteria.
My favorite example of this are two separate complaints I received about Bernardo Bertolucci’s film 1900. The film is about Italy during the early 1900s as seen through the eyes of two boys, one a peasant the other from a land owning family. This particular period of Italian history is somewhat busy, what with the fascism and the communism and the wars and all that. There is a scene early in the film (early being a relative term in a four plus hour long movie) when the two boys, around the age of 8 or so, become acquainted. They hunt frogs. They wrestle. They swim in a pond. They compare equipment and engage in a pissing contest.
Now, anyone who knows anything about little boys knows that this is exactly how they act when left to their own devices. Anyone who has ever been involved in potty training a little boy knows how entertaining they find their own plumbing. My complainers did not see two little boys engaging in innocent and totally realistic fun, however. They saw child pornography at the worst and, at the very least, something no child should ever be allowed to see.
What made these complaints fascinating to me is that both spent a lot space describing in minute detail everything awful about the naked behinds of two 8 year old boys. Neither, however, made any notice of the massive amounts of violence in the film. Before we get to the offending scene, hundreds of extras die horrible deaths in various creative ways including one person getting pitch forked to death, which was a means of dying I had not yet had the privilege of experiencing, even on CSI. If I learned anything from watching 1900, it’s that frankly, Italy should be proud that there are people left in Italy.
This desperate desire to prevent children from being exposed to the naked body while maintaining a rather lackadaisical attitude toward violence is a sort of odd American thing. Four hundred years has not taken us very far from our Puritan roots, it seems. What I find so bizarre about it is that, thankfully, 99.9 % of the American public will never see a person pitch forked to death in real life. Most of us will never witness or participate in the violent death of ourselves or someone else. Most of us will, however, have sex at least once and a full 100% of us are, as I mentioned before, naked underneath our clothes.
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It's a cold wind indeed, and it's called an ignorance front moving in. I would not exactly label it getting too far from the Puritan roots, but more like trying to outdo those roots, and over what? Something that is completely natural because they are too ashamed themselves, which is fine. They can be as repressed as they want to be on their dime. It's when they impose it on their children where it becomes a problem. A pity we can't prosecute them for child cruelty, but I am disgressing. I don't envy your task in a public setting. I am academic, and while I still get some complaints here and there (the latest over some science display was interesting), nothing like you guys do. At least not yet. Best.
Those are some serious repression-Hester-Prynne-crazypants complaints you've got there. Next we'll be hearing about Pampers commercials being too assy.
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