It goes without saying that most of the 'entertainment' these days geared towards adults has a copious amount of language, sex, and violence. I'm not even sure why they bother posting the little warning signs anymore...it seems that without those things, adults won't consume them. But how necessary are each of those things?
L: Language. While one usually doesn't find the F word too much in prime-time entertainment, an R rated movie is guaranteed to have this word used over and over again. Most 'lesser' words are perfectly acceptable now in most adult entertainment; to use the S word never gets it past the PG-13 rating in most films, and seems to be acceptable in most prime time cable dramas. But most uses of profane language is not just offensive, but really pointless. When Rhett says "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" it comes after years of abuse by Scarlett O'Hara. Maybe after all that time, a shocking word might be appropriate. When there is genuine anger or genuine fear maybe some words are the only things that can express the sentiment of the moment...but more and more the abuse of such language just shows lazy writing. Last year my wife and I went to a play about two couples stuck in a romantic getaway cabin for a weekend together. It was a story of conflict: one couple was old and white, the other young and black. There were good elements to it, but I found the use of profanity lazy and cliched. Tension build up, Conflict, Profanity Punch Line (usually the old white man exclaiming DAMMIT), and the audience laughs. Really, that was the best way to handle this? It was as if the writer of the play couldn't find a way to properly resolve the tension, so he picked out the laziest path he could. And most of the time when I hear people use profanity today, it's because their brains aren't big enough to express what it is they really need to express.
S: Sexual Situations. This is what usually gets Christians worked up today, the use of sex and/or nudity. Somebody once told me that in many novels you can turn to a page each 1/4 of the way through and find a sex scene, and that's probably not a bad rule of thumb. When you see S listed as something a show will have this can mean any number of things, from people actually engaged in sex to a post-coital conversation afterwards to a steamy make-out session. It's hard to know what really is implied, as it can mean so many things. It's interesting the way sex is used...a skilled writer or film maker will use it where it gets both the male and female interested. A man wants more of the graphic, titillating image; the woman usually wants more of the romance and vulnerability of the people so engaged. As I get older sex doesn't seem to bug me as much when it is used properly. It is a very natural, God-given thing, and something that is familiar to almost every adult. Maybe it is often pictured more 'beautifully' than most sex actually is, but it's a very real thing. Unfortunately, in most entertainment it usually is enacted between two people who are not married, and often used in the very same way profanity was used in that play: tension, conflict, LET'S GET BUSY! Again, the resolution of conflict involves two people who don't know each other well tearing each others' clothes off. That doesn't happen for most people, does it? Maybe I'm far too sheltered.
V: Violence. If our society was as truly violent as most of our entertainment, most of us would be in the hospital most of the time or dead. Conflict may well be the seed of all drama, but rarely does conflict arise to the place that it does in most things we read or watch. For most people when we have conflict we either avoid it (that doesn't make good entertainment, admittedly), or we get through it quickly by argument and eventually ignore what happened. Rarely do we take it to the places it ends up in entertainment: getting in fist fights or engaging in Jackie Chan violence or shooting to kill the guy who has insulted us. But again, where would the drama be if the violence wasn't ramped far beyond the normal standards of human conflict?
I suppose the reason people watch or read as they do is to engage in some kind of escapism; we don't want to watch things that look like our normal life. Unfortunately, we have become a people who speak little different than the L warnings of our entertainment. S and V, though, take us to a place we never would imagine going to on our own. Perhaps it does give us an outlet for our basest desires, but should Christians desire to engage this? Suppression is not the answer; it only blows up in our face. Rather, in Christ we are called to be transformed to something different than what the world had made us to be. It means that we seek better ways to use language, it means that we better resolve our conflicts, and it means that we recognize sexuality is God-given but must be used as he would have us to do.
Truly, we can't escape such things even in the Bible...even in Holy Scripture there is a LOT of S and V. Much of contemporary 'Christian' entertainment seems to forget it; but Scripture also takes such things and redeems them to God's good purpose. The best of entertainment today can do the same thing, but sadly most of the time it only takes them down to our basest desires.
