A Morality Tale in Three Movies

Last week marked the beginning of the LEAP test, our state’s performance assessment. It is a high stakes test that the students I teach must pass to advance to the next grade. The pressure to prepare has been intense, so the administration decided that a school-wide movie would be a great way to relax and boost morale the day before testing began. Nothing heavy, just something fun. The choice was Madagascar 2.

We teachers took shifts to supervise the kids, so I wasn’t in the gym for the entire movie. Maybe if I had been there from beginning to end I may have seen more of a point, but for me it was mostly silly and often crude. The reason I even mention it is because of a disturbing trend I’m noticing in children’s movies. For years now, we’ve tolerated sexual innuendo in kids’ entertainment, but in more recent movies another line is increasingly being crossed into the realm of deviant sexuality. In this movie, for example, a male lemur dresses in drag and suggests that he is attractive to another male, a penguin romances a bobble-head doll, and a giraffe marries a hippopotamus. Their “courageous” outside-the-box relationship is greatly celebrated. Even in the most pointless and un-educational of movies, you have to wonder about a hidden agenda.

In my own classroom as each day’s testing was over we watched bits of A Series of Unfortunate Events. I wanted to lure my students into reading the books which, "dear reader," spoof a literary style of two hundred years ago. When Brooke first brought Lemony Snicket home as a fourth-grader, she was deeply shocked that I found him hilarious. To her, the plight of destitute orphans left to the care of inept adults while being pursued by an evil villain was extremely tragic. My students loved the movie, probably for the same reason that I loved reading fairy tales as a little girl. In these stories the line between good and evil is unmistakably clear, and good triumphs in spite of all odds.

On Friday night the kids and I watched TheBoy in Striped Pajamas, a riveting and disturbing story set in WWII Germany. The horrors of the Nazi regime, as seen through the eyes of two children, seem even more terrible because of their trust and innocence. It is not an easy movie to watch, but one of the most unforgettable I’ve ever seen, rich in symbolism and timeless truth. I highly recommend it.

Today begins Passion week, and I want to mark out some special time to think about all it means. But today I think of what John Eldredge says in Epic: “What if all the great stories that have ever moved you are telling you something about the true Story into which you were born?” And quoting Frederick Buechner: We live in a world “where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side….Yet…it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good…It not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still.” YES!

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