Prejudicial Restraint

Illustration by Glen Nelson

by Glen Nelson

If you had asked me even six months ago to respond to the ways The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints appears in American pop culture, I would have sighed and pointed to McKay Coppins’ June 2022 essay in The Atlantic, “Under the Banner of Hulu,” in which he writes, among many insightful responses from a believer, “…they are there to serve as a stereotype, to exoticize a people and flatten their faith tradition.” At the time, there seemed to be no end to the stereotyped depictions of the faith and its people—the cheap jokes, and the mocking generalizations and unveiled attacks—on film, television, and in literature. However, I am noticing some curious exceptions in entertainment media more recently that point to a different, evolving approach, and moreover, I think the resulting artworks are stronger and more effective because of it. 

Below are three examples of high-profile projects that replace what an audience might have expected to be a stereotyped Mormon depiction or reference with something more nuanced. One example is a well-known play that removed its LDS characters when it was rewritten as a screenplay. A second is a language-sensitive joke about the name of the Church in a tv series. And the third is a novel that is very LDS in content but demures from saying so. I do not suggest that these works reflect a new trend or a wholesale reversal of long-standing prejudice, but their restraint is notable, nonetheless.

The Whale

The first example is the 2022 film, The Whale, directed by Darren Aronofsky with a screenplay by Samuel D. Hunter, adapted from his 2012 stage play of the same title. After its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in early September and its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival a week later, the film was released shortly before Christmas 2022 to a lot of insider buzz and was nominated for many awards from various organizations, including three Academy Awards—one for Brendan Fraser, its star. The actor has already won Best Actor awards for the role from the Hollywood Critics Association Awards, Critics Choice Awards, among others, and Hong Chau has won The New York Circle Critics Online award for Best Supporting Actress. She is also nominated for an Oscar.

In the film, Charlie is a man eating himself to death. He makes a late-life attempt to reconcile with his teenage daughter, Ellie, to undo the damage caused when he fell in love with a younger, male college student and divorced his wife, Mary—she gained full custody of their young daughter. Set in the present in Northern Idaho, the only other characters in the film are a friend named Liz, who is also a nurse, a pizza delivery man, Dan, and Thomas, a Christian missionary.

Redemption and guilt are the major themes of the film. Charlie’s deceased lover, Alan, committed suicide following a cascade of religious guilt, which triggered Charlie to his situation as a nearly 600-pound man, a prisoner in his small apartment and large body. Liz is Alan’s sister and Charlie’s only friend. She is the adopted daughter of a pastor of the New Life Church, which is also the church that Thomas represents as a missionary. Thomas wants to save Charlie. Liz wants to protect Charlie from himself and the missionary. Mary wants to safeguard Ellie. Ellie doesn’t entirely know what she wants, and Charlie wants to atone for it all.

I hope you do not infer from the plot summary above that the film is anti-faith or that the screenwriter is some kind of hatchet man. The opposite is true. Samuel D. Hunter is one of the few living playwrights whose plays I will drop everything to see. He is a MacArthur Foundation (“genius”) fellow (2014), he has had 17 plays produced although he is only 42 years old. All of his plays are set in Idaho, where he was born and raised, and many of them contain nuanced explorations of the role of religion in contemporary American life. In many ways, I feel that he is speaking directly to me in his work. The experience of seeing his latest play last Spring, A Case for the Existence of God (2022) was one of the most profound theatrical nights of my life, and I saw a tremendous revival of his A Bright New Boise (2010) just last week at the Signature Theater in New York, where he is playwright in residence. It absolutely knocked me out.

The thing about his screen adaptation of The Whale that so interests me is the reassignment of religion. In the play, Mormonism is everywhere, and in the film it is nowhere. In the play, Alan is LDS, a returned missionary. And his sister Liz was also raised in the faith, their father is a bishop. Thomas is “Elder Thomas” an LDS missionary from the Midwest who leaves his mission in Oregon because he assaulted his slacker companion and felt he was having insufficient spiritual impact. He flees to Idaho, goes to church and swipes a missionary name tag. He remains a believer even if he preaches solo, without a companion. He wants to bring the light of Christ to Charlie, whom he meets and physically rescues by accident. One of the mysteries of the play, which is different from the film, is the catalyst for Alan’s decline. His father had convinced him to come back to church just one more time, but his sermon on Jonah and the whale has the opposite effect of saving him; instead, Alan stops eating, wastes away, and dies. The reason Charlie entertains Elder Thomas (in the play) is because he wants to discover what happened that day in church. Charlie himself is well versed in the gospel. He has read The Book of Mormon multiple times, and he has informed opinions about it and the Church. That is to say that the playwright, whether I fully agree with him or not, is writing from a base of knowledge.

The redemption that Charlie seeks with his daughter in The Whale (the play) comes after she digs into Elder Thomas’ past, finds out his real name, takes a photograph of him breaking missionary rules, sends it to the mission, and ultimately to his parents. They, instead of rejecting the boy, reach out to him with love. Elder Thomas says to her in their final exchange, “I thought my parents were going to disown me, and you know what they said? They said they loved me and cared about me, and they wanted me to come home. How awful is that?” This saving act, even though Elder Thomas condemns Charlie and confesses in a cathartic outburst that he is revolted by him, cements in Charlie’s mind the hope that parents and children can forgive each other, and the play ends, as does the movie, probably with Charlie’s death but with transcendence. 

What to make of the shift, the replacement of Mormonism in Samuel D. Hunter’s screenplay adaptation? There could be hundreds of reasons and an equal number of sources for the decisions to reconsider it. I do not have access to any information regarding them. To my mind, the film is stronger for it because the villain of the works (play and film) is homophobia propagated by Christian faiths and its lethal consequences. Removing the specifics of a particular faith—numerous congregations have some variation of “New Life” in their name— gives the audience the latitude to examine a more general, even universal religious response to sexual orientation. It encourages self-examination: How do I judge people, rather than How do Mormons judge? The other changes in the adaptation likewise invite the viewer to experience the world as Charlie does, even if it is uncomfortable. Finally, the addition of the pizza delivery boy is marvelous and haunting, and the appearance of his zoom-class students and their eventual discovery of what their teacher looks like is devastating beyond description.

So Help Me Todd

A second example of shifting depictions of the Church in entertainment media comes from television. I like tv; I still have a cable subscription, much to my adult children’s chagrin. My ears prick up whenever a reference to my faith tradition appears on tv, even though I assume that what will come next will be a demeaning or mocking joke at my expense. I have been conditioned to this sad expectation after years and years of endless Mormon “jokes.” I sometimes imagine these innumerable video clips strung together and playing on an endless loop. If viewed that way, I don’t think anybody anywhere who despises hate speech would find them funny. 

It was only a brief bit of dialogue, but I found myself surprised at an entirely different kind of Mormon joke on tv recently—different because it didn’t use the word “Mormon,” at all.

Nobody would say that the new legal drama on television, So Help Me Todd, is high art, but I’ve liked the CBS series ever since it premiered September 29, 2022. The network claims it as a hit and notes it is the highest rated series premiere on network television this season, and it now averages 6.3 million viewers per episode. The series has already been renewed for a second season. In it, a bumbling but effective young private investigator is forced to work for his mother, a high-powered attorney. Together they solve mysteries and gradually come to tolerate, even to love each other, despite their considerable emotional baggage. It was created by Scott Prendergast, and it has the good fortune of starring two very good leading actors, Marcia Gay Harden and Skylar Astin, who portray characters with complex family chemistry to burn. I don’t know much about Prendergast. He was born (1970) and raised in Portland, Oregon, where So Help Me Todd is set. He went to school at Columbia University and now lives with his family in Los Angeles. The IMDB lists a smattering of writing and acting projects for him, including the film, Kabluey (2007), which he wrote and directed. This new TV series appears to be his biggest success to date.

In episode 10, “The Devil You Know,” mom Margaret and son Todd are going to surprise a suspect and interview him outside his house. Here is the full exchange: 

Todd: Let’s just say we’re Jehovah Witnesses or church of ladder day saints or something.

Margaret: Ok, what? Did you just say “ladder day, ladder day saints?” It’s Latter-day, with a T. Latter. 

Todd: No it’s not…

Margaret: Yes it is. 

Todd: …It’s a celebration of the ladder they use to climb up….

Interrupted, the characters get to their destination and the detective story continues. There is no earlier nor further reference to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and to the best of my knowledge, it’s never mentioned in any other episode, either.

Still, I snapped to attention on my couch at the scene. Wait. What was that? Did I just hear a tv character correcting another on the proper usage of the name of the Church? How random! And why not just say “Mormon” in the first place? I also had a weird flashback to the original Broadway production of Angels in America (1993) when the same actress, Marcia Gay Harden, played an LDS housewife addicted to Valium. So here was Harden, also a producer of So Help Me Todd, delivering these corrective lines about the Church. (End credits of the episode list staff writers Nicole French and Stefanie Woodburn.)

This is a relatively inconsequential example of shifting views to the Church. It certainly had nothing to do with the plot of the tv episode. And yet there was something subtly corrective going on. The maternal figure who constantly reinforces her intellectual superiority over her son’s street smarts is tapping into the Church’s newfound sensitivity to its own name. But the son is hip enough to know that the usage of “Mormon” is out of date, and instead he properly uses “Latter-day” even if he’s not quite right about its specifics or what it means. But that is also on brand for their characters, too. I found its matter-of-factness interesting, even reassuring. It was still a joke, but hey, I can take a joke.

Corinne

The third example of a newfound response to the Church in entertainment is quite different from the previous two, in some ways, but it is particularly interesting because it comes from inside the Church culture itself. It is a novel published July 12, 2022, titled Corrine. The book received some mildly favorable notices (Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Glamour) but largely faded quickly, despite the fact that it was written by a New York Times bestselling author, had a front cover blurb by Jodi Picoult, “It’s a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, and you’ll whip through pages to hope for the impossible,” and was published by one of the largest English-language imprints in the world, St. Martin’s Press. It would have escaped my attention, too, except that a friend pointed out to me an August 6, 2022 Reddit post by Dread_Pirate_Jack suggesting that Rebecca Morrow—the book jacket reads, “Rebecca Morrow is a pseudonym for a New York Times bestselling author”—is, in fact, Stephenie Meyer. The short post went viral, and it currently has 12,300 conspiracy theory-like comments and has spawned podcast episodes and YouTube videos making their cases for and against the theory.

I am probably going to disappoint readers for failing to state here whether I think the novel is written by any specific LDS author, but I want to explore the LDS content of the novel itself, nonetheless, despite the author’s placement of the story in another unnamed religion, and note why I think the choices or non-identification are important. Very briefly, the plot follows a teenager Corrine, who despite her conservative religious background, falls in love with Enoch Miller and has sex with him. He confesses to the church. She is cast out, moves away, and only returns years later having gained an education. Meanwhile, Enoch has married and divorced, and when Corrine comes back to her community to care for her mother, they circle each other until they inevitably, sensually, begin their forbidden relationship again. 

The Library of Congress category description of the novel lists: “Erotic fiction/ Romance fiction/ Novels.” It is indeed erotic, although compared to the novels of Colleen Hoover, who currently has five of the top ten bestselling novels on the Times’ Combined Print and E-Book Fiction list, Corrine is tame—that said, I don’t recommend it to readers who avoid graphic sex in books and movies. I’m usually one of them.

So, when I got my copy of Corrine, I decided to take a pencil as I read to underline ideas, phrases, and descriptions that seemed to me drawn directly from LDS culture. Well, I needed a big pencil. These knowing references are everywhere in Corrine. Hundreds of them. Any single one of them isn’t a smoking gun—I suppose other cultures jokingly love Jell-O, too—but taken together, they are absolutely from someone intimately conversant with Mountain West LDS doctrine and culture. The book jacket mentions the characters’ “fundamentalist church,” but that vocabulary never appears in the novel itself. Although the setting is certainly in a conservative community and a strict church, it is not an LDS church. It is also fascinating that as years pass, the characters frequently acknowledge the loosening of the church’s conservativeness. The author adds some details and exaggerations that are not part of LDS life. However, the overflowing of allusions to elders and brothers and sisters and missionaries and their figures of speech, board games they play, food they eat, references to commandments, behaviors, and attitudes—all of it—adds up to a very LDS-ish allusion-heavy experience. 

I think that anyone who was raised in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a spidey sense about entertainment portrayals of the faith that are close but not exactly right. Corrine is quite LDS, and whenever I was tempted to think the text suggested otherwise, I reconsidered my doubts and imagined that the author was simply helping a reader understand that religious strictness can come from anywhere. It is certainly not specific to LDS doctrine. The author does not want to comment on LDS life, per se, and certainly is not out to embarrass the Church and its beliefs and people. That is my take on it. Further, it feels significant as an evolution regarding representation in media because it feels like a statement of artistic independence coming from within the culture, and that is interesting to me, too.

There is a passage in Chapter 38 (of 95 chapters) that struck me as significant and telling. In the plot, Corrine has returned home, and she and Enoch are navigating how to treat each other now that time has passed and their lives have been forever altered by their earlier physical relationship.

“I know you think of what we did as a sin and a mistake,” she said. “And maybe we’ll do other things that’ll feel like sin to you. But I’m not a sin. I’m not a temptation. I’m a person. And if you love me, you’ll treat me that way. You’ll treat me like a blessing.”

Corrine’s voice was breaking…

“Like I’m more precious than rubies. Like I do you good, not harm.” (page 161)

I feel uncomfortable advocating for the book because I’m not the audience for it, its frank sexual content is problematic, it’s not the kind of work I find appealing, and in many ways, and for most people, its sole element of interest now is its mysterious authorship, which is less fascinating to me. But regarding the author’s choice to leave the Church out of the story while retaining the culture it sometimes represents, I felt as I read Corrine that here was an author wrestling with the limits of what can be written and published when you are a believing Christian and you think of immorality as wrong but live in a world that finds compelling narrative tension and literary integrity in documenting that chasm of moral conflict. That is, there is more to life than spiritual uplift. Can its depiction be valuable, nonetheless? Can a sympathetic description of forbidden love, for example, be worthy of reading…and writing? I am aware that I am opening a discussion that is much bigger than representation by invoking the challenges of LDS creative artists’ struggle with sensitive content. It is a topic that deserves articles and books of their own.

So above are three recent examples of not-Mormon-ness in current film, theater, television, and fiction, although all of them might have otherwise laid it on thick with Mormon references. In a way, I might have more readily expected it. More than that, the changes in the writing had positive benefits for the overall success of the works. They became stronger because of it. In The Whale, the screenplay’s replacement of Mormon characters and references made the film more universal and self-reflective than the play. In So Help Me Todd, the two characters showed a surprising awareness of an evolving identity of the Church which reinforced their characters views of themselves and others, and in Corrine, the unknown author, steeped in LDS culture from what I imagine is his or her own experience, both expands what can be written by and about the Church and shields the faith from readers who would likely respond to overt mention of the Church with hostility.

There’s an old saying, “Two’s a coincidence; three’s a trend.” In this case, I would not say these three media examples constitute a trend, but for a culture that sometimes feels embattled, it is a curiosity worth noting.