Comparing two movies I watched recently gives so ideas about framing family values. The movies were
Summer Lovers
and
The Substitute Wife.
The movies both dealt with the controversial topic of
polyamory and The Substitute Wife also dealt with prostitution (as recently
discussed here on Kos) and Summer Lovers threw in a touch of kink. But The Substitute Wife
presented a scenario that helps jam "family values" prejudice.
Polyamory is an honest, healthy, loving relationship, often committed, between more than two people. In the case of these two particular movies, it is one man with two women but poly relationships come in a variety of mixes. For balance, two movies that show one woman with two men are
threesome and
Paint Your Wagon.
Both Summer and Wife showed "female bonding" (not to be confused with girl on girl sex) as you would expect in
a healthy relationship.
In Summer Lovers, a couple vacationing in Greece adds on
a female archaeoligist from France. The relationship
is beneficial for all parties. But it is just a healthy happy relationship, once some issues are dealt with. There is a fair amount of nudity.
Likely to appeal to liberals but not to conservatives.
In The Substitute Wife, set on an 1869 Nebraska Farm, a woman
dying of cancer realizes that her husband will need a new wife, with no delay, or her husband and four kids will not survive. She goes off in search of a new wife but there is a major shortage of women and ends up choosing a prostitute.
The new wife moves in immediately, rather than waiting for the old wife to die, because she needs to learn the skills necessary to survive on the farm and with the old wife's failing health is soon needed to pick up the slack.
The interesting framing aspect here is that that without the alternative relationship, the kids would suffer. And that happens in real life, too. Without lesbian and gay relationships and multiple partner relationships, many kids would not have enough adults to take care of them, particularly as it has gotten hard to get by on two incomes let alone one. Where the argument for Summer is "if no one is hurt, what is the problem" which is not sufficient to jam existing prejudice, Wife goes further by presenting a scenario where intolerance will cause demonstrable harm beyond the lack of fullfilment.
So how did the movies fare in IMDB user ratings (scale of 1-10)? The Substitute Wife got a weighted average of 6.3 and Summer Lovers got 5.0. These are both low ratings, as is typical for a movie that challenges deeply rooted prejudices. But IMDB's weighted average basically throws away 10 and 1 votes
as attempts to influence the ratings rather than curve fitting. In the case of these movies, the median vote
is more indicative of the results that would be attained
from curve fitting. Summer got a median vote of 6.0 and
Wife got a median vote of 8.0 which is quite good. I frequently see bimodal distributions on movies like this
as well as ratings all over the map. Summer was a broad curve around 6.5 with spikes at 1 and 10, with 17.3% of viewers giving it a 3 or less. Wife was a broad curve near the high end of the scale (truncated by the fact that the highest rating is 10 which gave a spike at 10), with only 7.3% of viewers giving it a 3 or less. Wife was most popular with women over 45 and least popular with men 18-29 and women had a 1.2 point lead over men.
Summer was most popular with women 18-29 and least popular with women 30-44 but did better than average with women 45+. Both movies probably have more impact than their ratings indicate; people tend to shoot the messenger at first but the idea continues to ferment.
These movies can be scary for people in monogamous relationships as one might be tempted to ask one's
partner if they would enjoy having an extra partner; an honest answer is likely to expose the legal fiction of "I only have eyes for you". While many people might feel more comfortable without the complexities of added partners, the desire is still likely to be there. Both movies scored at or above average with older audiences. BTW, Threesome and Paint Your Wagon received median scores of 7.
One does need to be careful with "for the children" arguments as these are often used to set aside rational thought. But in this case, it is actually undermining irrational thought.
Both movies managed to make it past the conservative MPAA ratings process, which often balks at alternative sexuality.
Summer received an R rating, Wife PG-13.
Movies with serious subject matter can actually help overcome prejudice, which depends on not empathising
with the marginalized group, by providing vicarious
exposure to groups one might not normally associate with.
The two movies described here were part of my continuing search for movies which responsibly portray various forms of sexuality.
There is a poll below that is mostly just so I can see how many people have read the diary but also to get a rough idea of peoples attitudes.