On the Benefits of "Bashing" Johnny Lingo

The news coverage of Sunstone this year has been pretty good, so I won't bother posting summaries of a lot of the talks. But I thought it might be worthwhile to weigh in on the controversy over Holly Welker's presentation on the LDS film 'Johnny Lingo'. Peggy Fletcher Stack's well-intentioned summary of this presentation in the Salt Lake Tribune, titled "Writer blasts beloved LDS film 'Lingo'," has generated an enormous number of negative comments. Many of them are too awful to repeat here, but basically people are incredulous that a so-called scholar would spend such effort attacking an old and relatively harmless fairy tale. In the words of one commenter, "This is what egghead crowd worries about?"

I think that this incredulous feeling results from a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of scholarship like Welker's-- a misunderstanding that is aggravated by the somewhat narrow emphasis of the Tribune summary. The point of Welker's presentation was not to justify her haughty, elitist disdain for a popular film, as some seem to assume. The point was not really about the film at all. The film was a teaching tool in making a larger point: that there are implicit messages in our words and actions and artistic expressions that may alter the way we see the world.

For example, the movie isn't called "Mahanna". It's called "Johnny Lingo". By glazing over Mahanna's reactions and the details of her transformation, and focusing instead on the strictly male transactions that make this transformation possible, the story becomes a tale of the noble masculine hero Johnny Lingo acting in the role of savior rather than a tale of Mahanna discovering her value as a human being. This minimizes female agency and treats her as an object to be acted upon rather than as a subject to act for herself.

Similarly, when at the end of the movie Mr. Harris evaluates Mahanna's transformation, what he fixates on is her physical appearance. His comment is something like, "I don't understand. Mahanna is so beautiful!" Johnny Lingo also says, "everyone who looks at her can see her gift to me." It is thus implied that it's her physical appearance that makes her an eight-cow woman. Holly makes a good point that the climax of the movie largely reinforces the idea that a woman's value is as an object to be looked at and visually appreciated rather than to be valued on the merits of her wit, intelligence, agency, or humanity.

The respondent, Ellen Decoo, made some excellent points as well. She pointed out that the viewer can see that Mahanna is beautiful even early in the movie, despite the make-up artists' efforts to give her facial blemishes and to make her look sullen and ugly. She wondered how the message of the movie would be changed if Mahanna had been ugly all along and had continued to be ugly even after she discovered her self-worth. I think Ellen has a good point. What does this movie have to offer the girls who are ugly beyond make-overability?

My take-away from the session was not that Johnny Lingo is a terrible movie (though it's not one I plan to own, in any case). Rather, it's that we need to pay attention to the subtexts of our words, actions, and the stories we tell. We need to be more careful with the implicit messages we send and the ways we treat and value people. In other words, Holly's point was a moral one. Johnny Lingo was held up as a negative example: an illustration of which mistakes not to make when creating Mormon art.

Lest we think that we in the twenty-first century are above valuing people in financial terms and treating them as objects to be bought and sold, Ellen pointed out that we still do this to a degree when we buy a woman a huge diamond or feel her value must be reflected in the size of the wedding's price tag. In short, the lessons Holly has to teach about our implicit messages are still quite relevant. It would behoove the morally serious among us to give Holly's complaints about the film-- and the lessons they have to teach us-- real consideration.