Eight year old children are generally curious; and I was no different. My dad was watching a movie on his computer one day when I, naturally, peeped in to watch. If I knew what I was about to see would haunt me for weeks to come, I would have left just as quickly as I had come in.
A man was in an interrogation room with 3 other men in suits standing around him. They have a conversation and suddenly, the man's mouth literally seals shut. The men in suits seize the helpless man. They rip open his shirt as he is kicking and squirming, unable to scream. One of the suited men pull out an electronic device with long tentacles. They released the device, (or should I say creature, as it bore an uncanny resemblance to a shrimp in its movement and behavior) over the struggling man's bare stomach. The thing crawled forward and then, to my horror, went inside his body through his belly button, just as the man awoke from what appeared to be a dream.
8 year old me was utterly petrified, as I quietly slipped out of the room. What I saw shook me to the core, haunting me for days; for weeks.
Fast forward to five years later. I was 13 when I first saw The Matrix. The scene where the Agents implant Neo with a probe through his navel in the interrogation room brought back so many memories. I was amused by the memory of how much this scene had affected me as a child. Now, I watched, unshaken, enjoying the movie for what it was.
Fast forward again. Tenth grade. I was 15. Every year, our convent-run school arranges a two day retreat for Catholic students from classes 5 to 12. This year was no different. Personally, I hate retreats (why? The list of reasons are a blog post for another day). I only turned up because it was mandatory. This year, they just gave me another reason to dislike it even more.
We walked into the hall and saw a projector screen set up in front. It was pretty common for the priests and brothers leading the retreat to show us clips, short films and devotional music videos. I was definitely not expecting what they were going to show us that day.
As part of a "prayer", they played a compilation video of the most gruesome and gut-wrenching scenes from the movie The Passion Of The Christ. And when I say gruesome, I mean raw, unadulterated, R-rated violence and gore. They played it repeatedly (5 times, to be precise, as we recited the Mercy Rosary) in a school hall with children as young as 9 & 10 watching right in the front row.
By the age of 15, I had seen my fair share of R-rated movies, and was not one to be easily put off by violence or sights of blood. But this movie (or rather, these scenes) were unwatchable. I found myself looking away more than once. If it was this hard for me to watch, I can only imagine what the young children in the front must have been going through.
Movies are given ratings for a reason. As evidenced by my little Matrix incident, age matters a lot. It's when you're young, that such scenes affect you the most. R-ratings are given to movies to protect children from things they shouldn't be seeing at their age. These people (the priests and brothers) completely ignored that when they showed the video at a school retreat. They made 10 year olds sit through severely uncomfortable and nightmarish scenes, all in the name of prayer.
What they did was unnecessary, and I was not in a position to protest. This was not prayer. It had nothing to do with spirituality. By forcing children to watch something this harrowing, they were implementing religion in young minds through fear. Their lack of concern shocked me, perhaps, more than what I saw on screen.
This incident is something I'll never forget, because, to some small extent, I understood what it felt like to watch something horrendous you can never entirely get over. All that shock, fear and confusion... it doesn't go away easily. At such a young age, it cuts deep.
Movies are given ratings for a reason. And using such a violent movie to scare children into praying? Bad move, brothers. Bad move.
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