Hard to tell whether you're addressing this specifically to me, but I'll answer anyway, because I think you were:
I'm not saying the film advocates or excuses Guy's actions. And I do agree that that can matter. For instance, I was just watching Lost in Translation again to remind myself of whether it's OK for the teenagers in this house, minus the one scene in the strip club. I'm not comfortable with a 16- and 13-year-old seeing that scene, but if it were less explicit, I'd probably be OK with it thematically, because the point of the scene really is that Bob and Charlotte (Bill Murray and Scarlett Johanssen) are massively uncomfortable with being there, and they can't get out of there fast enough. They're just not the type for a place like that, their relationship isn't the type, and it's part of the characterization in the storyline that they're fish out of water in that place. There's another scene not long after that where [spoiler alert] Bob gets hit on by a lounge singer at the hotel, and -- it appears out of drunkenness and exhaustion, or maybe just tired habit -- he wakes up after having slept with her. There's nothing explicit about it, and the purpose of the scene within the story is not to advocate casual sex with mediocre lounge singers, but again, to contrast with the better nature of both main characters, to convey a sense of real dismay, hurt, and betrayal on Charlotte's part, and (I think, in a more complex way) to put the audience into the character's heads in a real moment of writing genius: If you like Charlotte, you're crushed for her when she finds out, and you're furious with Bob for "cheating" on her even though they don't have a sexual dimension to their relationship in any official way, or rather, they can't have that because of their life situations. And as soon as you feel the hurt for this "cheating," you remember "Hey, Bob has a wife back home. That's who he actually cheated on, officially." So at the same time it gives you this huge sympathy for Charlotte, it also puts you into Bob's head, because part of the point is that Bob is so often distant from his wife (the film makes a point of showing this) that it's almost like a separate life that he semi-forgets about when he's off on actor-and-celebrity business, in the same way the viewer almost forgets about her when the scene with the lounge singer comes up.
[spoiler over]
Anyhow...yeah, it matters what the film is saying about the specific action, not just the fact of depicting it. Sure. And in Bad Words, the surface storyline isn't advocating this kind of bad behavior.
But here's a bit of a caveat: Whether films that depict it and ask people to laugh at it are in fact sort of side-door advocating it is a different question, and a legitimate one. Cf. the "anti-violence" message of something like Natural Born Killers, which purported to be against violence but then depicted the violence in such an explicit and stylized way that many viewers thought all the blood-spatter was awfully cool. Or, look at the way a lot of TV real-life crime "documentary" work is done on shows like NBC's Dateline et al.: Dramatic music laid behind the story of a real-life murder, hip-hop behind a story of rape and murder by a gang, etc. Are they advocating it? They would tell you no, of course. But the way it's depicted seems kind of cool. Feels an awful lot like having it both ways.
And so: Is the film Bad Words advocating the idea that kids should say "f--k" and see bare breasts in a sexual context all the time? They would tell you no, of course. But then, they made a child actor do it, for laughs. So they're actually trying to have it both ways. This kind of thing strikes me as not only wrong in a moral and ethical sense, but really weaselish.
Not that I'm surprised by it. We live in a mass culture where as I'm sitting here writing this, the TV is on behind me, and a booking.com commercial is rattling away with its "right booking now...booking-dot-YEAH" script that might've been written by any smirking 12-year-old in a previous era. ("It's not the actual word, Dad! Stop getting bent out of shape!") And the f-bomb is totally common on TV now all the time; the fact that it's bleeped out means absolutely nothing, because people simply hear it where it obviously is. And the sexualizing of children? Please. It's everywhere.
So I realize that's the culture in which this question comes up. If you look back at the thread -- hell, you only have to go to the last page or two -- you'll see people saying they see absolutely nothing wrong with young kids hearing and saying "f--k" all the time, no problem with 10-year-olds seeing female breasts in a sexual context, etc., because after all, they can get it all on the internet (where, of course, they can find explicit hardcore porn, torture porn, animal killings for fun, etc., so presumably anything they find on the internet is OK to depict them as participating in). It's actually amazing how irrational and self-excusing the population has become, but I'm not exactly surprised by it. For nearly everybody who's objected in that "you're an idiot" way on this thread, their logic instantly vaporizes when you simply apply it to more extreme actions. At some point they all say "Of course you can't depict a child actor involved in bestiality [or whatever]!" (although a couple have been OK with that, because "it's only a movie"), which exposes the actual rationale behind their belief, which is simply that they don't think a 10-year-old kid saying "f--k" or seeing bare adult breasts in a sexual context is all that bad. That is, they try to construct the appearance of rationality around something that actually is just a morally-and-ethically "felt" thing. Their sense of it is that it's not all that bad. Mine is that it is bad. They have no more defense for theirs than I do for mine. It's a moral choice, and it doesn't fall into the realm of "I can prove mine is better."
It's amazing how consistent these irrational pseudoarguments are from case to case, too. I had a similar objection to the scene in Moonrise Kingdom where two underage (and I mean way underage) kids are in their underwear, and the boy puts his hand on the girl's clothed breast in a clearly lingering and sexual way. (Apart from that scene, I really liked the film, btw.) I mean, it really pissed people off that I thought this was wrong. The characters were underage, and so were the actors. "But this happens in real life, you Puritan!", they screamed. Of course it does. So does actual intercourse between 12-year-olds. So does oral sex with 11-year-olds. So does child rape, and coercion, and all kinds of stuff that real life gives us. So we depict that on film, and we use actual underage actors to do it? It's not that I'm saying people can't disagree with whether it was right or wrong to do that scene, although it strikes me as very definitely wrong (and, incidentally, clearly seems to fall within the definition of child pornography in Rhode Island, the state where it was filmed). I'm saying that people get absolutely enraged when you even ask the question at all, as they have here. And they can't seem to get their thinking to run along even semirational lines. They end up defending the proposition that because "it's just a movie" and "it happens in real life," why, depicting explicit sex between underage characters is absolutely fine, even with child actors. And so forth. It's just unbelievable to me.
At any rate...I do think your point is correct, in general, and I'm not saying the storyline in Bad Words directly advocates what it depicts, although I do think it winks at it and tries to have it both ways. I think the contrast comes in this way: Had they only depicted the character as doing these things, and not required the child actor to do them, that would've been a much better choice, ethically, IMHO. One line is crossed in the depiction of the character; a much worse line is crossed in having a child actor actually do those things.
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