Silent Yawn: When the Outrageous meets the Boring

Over at The Curvature Cara has a story about a middle-school biology teacher who apparently got a wild hair and decided to show the old anti-abortion standard The Silent Scream to his class one day after a test. No notice to parents; students just told to look away if it bothered them. This led to a predictable outcry, and lots of bureaucratic dodging of responsibility, but the most interesting aspect of the whole post (at least to me) came from Cara when she visited You-Tube to view the film herself:

Has anyone out there ever actually seen The Silent Scream? I found it on YouTube once and tried to watch it. It’s only a half hour long, and I assumed that it would be either so ridiculous as to be amusing or so infuriating as to pop a vein in my forehead. Instead, it was just really fucking boring. I’ll admit that I have the attention span of a flea, but I couldn’t make it past more than 10 minutes of the 30 minute film. Yeah, it was outrageous. Yeah, it was ridiculous. It was also not even remotely engaging, so I’m kind of confused about why the antis would want to use the damn thing. But I didn’t get as far as to see the truly graphic stuff. I sure as hell don’t remember watching the dismembering of a fetus, or even the actual “silent scream” scene. If these did appear within the first 10 minutes of the film and I somehow don’t remember, it truly must deserve an award for Excellence in The Field of Boring.

I guess one generation's controversy might just become the next generation's ho-hum.

But please, if Reefer Madness is equally bad, don't tell me.

Comments

tom said…

> But please, if Reefer Madness is equally bad, don't tell me.

The original is pretty lame, but the 2005 musical remake is a lot of fun.

February 14, 2008 at 8:51 PM

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