BABYLON AND TRIGGER WARNINGS - Kenneth R. Morefield
What (Some) Christians and (Some) Movie Critics Often Get Wrong about Content Advisories
This is not an essay about whether Babylon is a good movie. My answer to that question, if it matters, is “not really.” Having previously been enthused by Whiplash and La La Land, I was looking forward to Damien Chazelle’s newest film. But I found its tonal shifts to be more tedious than shocking, and the casting of Brad Pitt as a passing-his-prime Hollywood legend felt more like virtue signaling than artistic daring. It was as if someone had made The Wrestler and cast Dwayne Johnson rather than Mickey Rourke.
Neither is this an essay about whether Babylon crosses some objective threshold between decency and toxicity. Here again, my answer is “not really.” That answer, though, may come with enough qualifications and caveats as to make it less than helpful for those used to or looking for a clear, forceful binary distinction between endorsement and prohibition. If you ask the wrong question, my wife is fond of saying, you almost always get the wrong answer.
Well then, what is the right question? That’s what this essay is about.
Defining Trigger Warnings
Before I reviewed films privately or publicly, I was a professor. (I still am.) Over two decades teaching at three different postsecondary institutions, all which identified themselves as Christian, has provided me with ample time to reflect on and practice content moderation. There are important differences between the role of a critic and the role of a teacher, and I will not touch on all of them here. A key similarity is that both—especially in Christian circles—are called upon to review content not only for its artistic excellence but for its suitability to the target audience.
In an academic context, a “trigger warning” is a fairly literal label attached to content that might set into motion negative or difficult emotions. In my field, literature, trigger warnings are most frequently given when interacting with texts that have graphic descriptions of violence or human sexuality, but I have heard them given to preface discussions of material about issues as varied as fat shaming, racial or religious intolerance, profane or obscene language, alcohol and drug use, and any form of emotional cruelty.
The inability to universally characterize and catalog what content requires a trigger warning can create an academic tendency to dismiss their usefulness. This was a mistake I was prone to early in my career, and it was exacerbated by the conservative Christian community’s tendency to fall into what R.C. Sproul (among others) has called ‘the tyranny of the weaker brother.” At the first institution where I taught, students would often complain vociferously about content that most of us found relatively benign. (For example, one of my colleagues had a student who refused to take a course midterm in protest of the fact that the professor had assigned a Steinbeck story with the word “damn” in it.) In such a context, it is easy to look at claims of having been traumatized suspiciously, as a convenient evasion from the consequences of personal laziness or academic timidity. At other times, triggering claims no doubt served as convenient substitutes for complaints about other problems which students suspected (often correctly) would fall on deaf ears. Those with limited power may sometimes seek to expand the circumstances in which they perceive themselves to have at least some recourses. Rejecting the practice of trigger warnings outright can end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The disingenuous complainer may be shut down, but those who are sincerely triggered learn in such environments to not voice their distress, that their emotional and spiritual well being is less valued than their intellectual and social assimilation. Surely there is a way to honor and nurture the more sensitive members of the community who are willing to challenge their own assumptions and comfort levels but sometimes find themselves stretched beyond their nascent capacity to process difficult emotions.
The difference between trigger warnings and content advisories crystalized for me when I began reviewing films professionally. The first two sites I wrote for required every review to come with a content advisory – and very little specific instruction about what material should be noted in it. (Once I took a brief bathroom break during a PG-13 movie and failed to catalog a scene in which a female character stripped to her bra and panties—oh, the letters to the editor!) Watching films is an immersive experience, and it simply cannot be done with a stopwatch to time total seconds of nudity and a clicker to tally all the f-bombs in a Tarantino movie. Besides, I wondered, was the person who was sincerely grieved by casual cursing go to The Hateful Eight in the first place? Was someone inexperienced in processing nudity in art really going to see Eyes Wide Shut because I insisted that its depiction of human sexuality, however graphic, was deeply moral?
Such comical examples of the seeming needlessness of trigger warnings were numerous enough that they were easy to chronicle. As I became more experienced (and more mature), I became aware of what struck me as a bigger problem with all the chronicling of breasts and buttocks and swear words: it flooded the space where more legitimate trigger warnings might be heard. What about content that was PG or even G rated but might nevertheless trigger memories or emotions that were deeply traumatic? Where were they being addressed? Where could they be addressed? The first work as a student that I remember being triggered by was Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist. When it comes to graphic content, Tyler’s no Anne Rice. Heck, she’s not even a Judy Blume, really. But the plot’s similarity to some biographical incidents in my life was enough to send me to my professor’s office for a frank discussion. To this day, I am grateful that he listened compassionately, spoke respectfully, and created a context where I could benefit from discussing the work rather than simply avoiding it.
Truth #1 – Triggers are Personal
Which brings me, finally, back to Babylon. When a dear friend and colleague called me last month to process his reaction to the film, I was surprised and not surprised to hear him opine that it may be the rare film he wished he had never seen. I was surprised because I knew him to not be a prude nor an alarmist. But I was not surprised because if I have learned anything about triggers in five decades of living and two decades of teaching it is that triggers are deeply personal. What shocks the sensibilities or what a community is likely to find morally objectionable can be generalized to a degree. What is apt to trigger someone cannot be.
When I got around to watching Babylon, I wasn’t triggered. Perhaps this was because I was forewarned (triggers are often contextual), but I don’t think so. The third act foray into a freak show dungeon sounds in description worse than what I experienced. Parts of this are about presentation. The guy eating rats wasn’t nearly as horrifying to me as the guy being tortured with them in Game of Thrones. Plus, it was mostly filtered through reaction shots of Tobey Maguire’s face as he watched what was going on. (Feel free to chase this observational rabbit hole to various essays about how Hitchcock edited Psycho to show nothing but make you feel as though you saw everything.) The freakish sexual shows or threats of imminent torture were less real than anything I saw in The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo or The Silence of the Lambs – movies where I was not nearly as confident that the cruelty wouldn’t just be alluded to but might actually be shown.
Notice, though, in the last paragraph I’m doing something that I have been trying to stop doing my entire Christian career—arguing for why something shouldn’t have triggered someone else because it didn’t trigger me. The first step towards spiritual discernment is knowing yourself, and the first step towards being a compassionate helper in that process is accepting another’s triggers at face value. Don’t judge people based on whether their tolerances and thresholds are higher or lower than your own. Doing so will, at best, make them replicas of you. Your goal should be to guide them towards self-knowledge so that they can benefit from the art that doesn’t trigger them and be equipped to know how to anticipate and process the art that most likely will.
Truth #2 – Triggers are Boundaries not Barricades
One of the most common questions I am asked about objectionable content is why not just abstain? If the potential for emotional or even spiritual harm is real, why take the risk?
My answer to that question is that I honestly believe the potential benefits of a life with exposure to great (or even mediocre) art far outnumber the potential harms. The latter are real, but too many Christians want to build a hedge around the law, for themselves and their children, never considering the opportunity cost that comes from sheltering oneself from the good as well as the bad.
Sir Philip Sidney famously opined in his “Defense of Poetry” that art was different from history or philosophy primarily in that it could “moveth to virtue.” Rather than merely describe the good, as a sermon might, art – a poem, a play, a novel, or, yes, a movie – can fundamentally change us for the better by making us desire the good in our own lives and for others. For every film that has triggered me (and there have been plenty), I can think of ten that have inspired me or enlarged my capacity for compassion and empathy. Yes, there is a scene in Ridley Scott’s Hannibal that makes me queasy to this day, but the total number of minutes I’ve been traumatized by experiencing or remembering that scene are a drop in the bucket compared to ways that Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, The Martian, The Last Duel, and The Silence of the Lambs (same writer, different director) have prompted me to see the world, especially parts of it that I might not have otherwise looked at, in a different, better way.
As horrifying and triggering as I found the abusive teacher-student relationship in Whiplash, that film led to several deeply revealing conversations with my spouse about the spiritual experience of collaboration of which the playing of music together may well be the glimpse we see through a mirror dimly. If Damien Chazelle never makes another movie, I will be grateful to him for all that he has done and count it a net blessing that his art has been a part of my life even if there is the occasional big swing that didn’t land for me.
The difference between a barrier and a boundary is that the former is meant to stop you. The latter is meant, like a trigger warning, to inform you that beyond it lies something that you should approach with caution. Whether you can ultimately benefit from what lies beyond the boundary probably depends more on how well you have been prepared through experience, teachers, and friends to navigate any difficult terrain or hard task than it does on how lengthy or precise the warning is.
Ken Morefield is a Professor of English at Campbell University. He is the editor of and a contributor to Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, Volumes I, II and III (2008, 2011, 2015, Cambridge Scholars Publishing). Find him here: https://1morefilmblog.com/
