Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 2:41am

Now Showing: The Tudors

The following is a column posted by Brad Miner of The Catholic Thing on Monday, March 1, 2010 A.D.:

John Timothy McNicholas, Cincinnati’s archbishop from 1925 until 1950, went to a New York convention in 1933 and heard the Apostolic Delegate to the United States, Amleto Cicognani (future Vatican Secretary of State), rail against Hollywood’s “massacre” of American moral innocence and call for the “purification of cinema.” McNicholas took the message to heart and founded the Catholic Legion of Decency (CLOD). As TIME magazine reported in 1934, the organization’s mission was simple: the faithful should stay “away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality.” So popular did the Legion’s campaign become that Jews and Protestants joined the crusade, and the organization was quickly rechristened the National Legion of Decency.

The Legion’s descriptions of films were exclusively condemnatory; calling only for protests about and boycotts of films deemed impure. And some of the films CLOD listed have been subsequently delisted by its successor, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Office for Film and Broadcasting. For instance, “Finishing School,” a Thirties production starring Billie Burke, Ginger Rogers, and the too-often ignored Frances Dee, was condemned by CLOD as portraying an “attempted seduction and an accomplished seduction. . . . Protest. . . . Protest. . .” Today, the USCCB rating of the film is A-III, in essence: It’s a quality movie. Go ahead and watch it – you’re grown-ups.

Archbishop McNicholas

Indeed, what the new recommendations do is guide, not command. In the old days, a priest or a bishop might order communicants not to attend a film; today the movies (and some TV shows) listed by USCCB (with ratings and commentary based on “consensus”) are intended to help viewers decide which shows are “likely to offend you . . . regardless of our assessment of . . . artistic qualities” – a far cry from CLOD’s peremptory dicta and a vast improvement.

The ratings assume Catholics decide for themselves what’s suitable and what isn’t. USCCB’s “A” ratings are sensible: A-I for films without objectionable content; A-II for what the Motion Picture Association of American calls PG-13; and A-III for films with “justified violence . . . ‘non-deviant’ [sex] . . . restrained nudity, and valid . . . coarse language. . . .” Sensible. And yet I wonder if some A-III ratings don’t impart acceptability to a few movies that encourage, if I may dust off a word Archbishop McNicholas might have used, concupiscence – the debasement of appetite contrary to faith and reason.

A dilemma is raised, and a good instance of the quandary – one, however, not reviewed at the USCCB site – is the current Showtime series, “The Tudors,” now in its fourth season. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays King Henry VIII as a vicious, self-serving libertine, and the episodes contain way more simulated sex and real nudity than is necessary or that USCCB would consider either non-deviant or restrained. And yet . . . “The Tudors” may be the most pro-Catholic mini-series ever made. The portraits of nearly all the Catholic characters (including Thomas More, John Fisher, and Robert Aske) are extremely sympathetic – the more so because many newly minted Protestants are shown as merciless and mendacious. Were USCCB to rate the series I suspect it would be given at least an “L,” meaning it is only for a “limited adult audience.” But again, this isn’t to say one ought to avoid “The Tudors,” since it may be among those “L” entertainments USCCB describes as “quality films that have more challenging material than an A-III in terms of nudity, sex, violence, or language, but are still worthy, if viewed in the appropriate Catholic context.” [Emphasis added.] I hope the series wouldn’t get the dreaded “O,” the new version of what CLOD called “C,” for “condemned.” I don’t consider “The Tudors” to be “morally offensive” – not anyway based on USCCB’s “O” comparison films, such as the torture-porn epic, “Saw,” or . . . Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby,” which dealt with assisted suicide.

And yet the sexuality in “The Tudors” – or in one of my favorite films, Bruce Beresford’s “Black Robe” (another A-III film) – may arguably contribute to the inexorable establishment of lust as normative in modern life, whereas I doubt that Eastwood’s depiction of assisted suicide moved the culture much in the direction of legalized euthanasia.

I don’t think sexuality should be verboten in films, but I do think movies have abetted the culture-wide degradation of sex. As Mary Eberstadt wrote in a column here in 2008:

Even believers can’t help but imbibe the signature lies of our age sometimes – including the lie that disordered sexuality, Lust in and of itself, is something we all need to feel fully alive. “I lust, therefore I am” is obviously the cogito ergo sum of our time.

True. Yet not every artistic depiction of nudity, sexuality, or even of lust induces sin. And besides, you simply can’t portray some truths in art except explicitly. This may be hard to accept in the context of contemporary movies, but change the context: consider instead one of the greatest works of art in Christendom, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes. Were a modern movie director to tackle the Biblical story of Creation and the Garden of Eden and be as explicit as Michelangelo was in painting the ceiling of the place where cardinals meet to choose our popes, I’m afraid the filmmaker’s work might be condemned.

It has never been easy to know where and how to draw the line. Yet I doubt that even Archbishop McNicholas ever thought the full-frontal nudity of Michelangelo’s Adam should be covered up.

_._

Brad Miner, a former literary editor of National Review, is senior editor of The Catholic Thing and author of The Compleat Gentleman. He wishes it to be known that he is not recommending “The Tudors,” although he is a fan.

_._

Reprinted with permission.

For the original column by Brad Miner of The Catholic Thing click here.

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Donald R. McClarey
Admin
Thursday, March 4, AD 2010 7:58am

Note how that classic film depicted Henry’s adultery. Wolsey: “He’s been to play in the muck again. He’s been with Mistress Anne Boelyn.” Those lines convey the reality of the situation so much better than any nude scene could. The current porn fixation of contemporary films is not only a moral evil, but it is a degradation of the art.

Tito Edwards
Thursday, March 4, AD 2010 8:00am

There is a place for nudity, not for sex.

And the sex scenes in The Tudors as well as most of the nude scenes (if not all), are gratuitous to say the least.

Though I enjoy viewing The Tudors, I stopped after a while. It certainly could have done very well without the sex and nudity and played on the History Channel instead of the porn site that is Showtime.

restrainedradical
Thursday, March 4, AD 2010 9:46am

An honest question: If the sex depicted doesn’t glorify the immoral, why can’t the depiction be moral?

Tito Edwards
Thursday, March 4, AD 2010 10:39am

RR,

Excellent point.

But if the sex were allowed, does it have to show full frontal nudity for BOTH sexes?

Plus the act of watching simulated sex is an occurrence of sin.

Offense Against Chastity:

CCC 2354 – Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials.

The Sixth Commandment: You Shall Not Commit Adultery. (Ex 20:14; Deut 5:18.)

Donald R. McClarey
Admin
Thursday, March 4, AD 2010 10:43am

Tito you are right. Here are other relevant sections of the Catechism.

2521 Purity requires modesty, an integral part of temperance. Modesty protects the intimate center of the person. It means refusing to unveil what should remain hidden. It is ordered to chastity to whose sensitivity it bears witness. It guides how one looks at others and behaves toward them in conformity with the dignity of persons and their solidarity.

2522 Modesty protects the mystery of persons and their love. It encourages patience and moderation in loving relationships; it requires that the conditions for the definitive giving and commitment of man and woman to one another be fulfilled. Modesty is decency. It inspires one’s choice of clothing. It keeps silence or reserve where there is evident risk of unhealthy curiosity. It is discreet.

2523 There is a modesty of the feelings as well as of the body. It protests, for example, against the voyeuristic explorations of the human body in certain advertisements, or against the solicitations of certain media that go too far in the exhibition of intimate things. Modesty inspires a way of life which makes it possible to resist the allurements of fashion and the pressures of prevailing ideologies.

2524 The forms taken by modesty vary from one culture to another. Everywhere, however, modesty exists as an intuition of the spiritual dignity proper to man. It is born with the awakening consciousness of being a subject. Teaching modesty to children and adolescents means awakening in them respect for the human person.

2525 Christian purity requires a purification of the social climate. It requires of the communications media that their presentations show concern for respect and restraint. Purity of heart brings freedom from widespread eroticism and avoids entertainment inclined to voyeurism and illusion.

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