Please share your honest opinion, whatever it may be

I’m happy to report that, because of the impressively high demand for it, free access to the 2021 Interpreter Foundation dramatic film Witnesses will continue until 18 October 2024.  It’s a perfect movie for an evening before a Sabbath, or a Sabbath day, or a family night on Monday evening, or any other night of the week on which you don’t happen to be watching Six Days in August.  It’s perfect for gatherings of neighbors, ward members, business colleagues, and immediate and extended families

In order to access Witnesses, please go to the official website for Six Days in August.  Within a few seconds, a pop-up will appear that will permit you to register to watch Witnesses.  (The process is brief, and it’s painless.)  And, while you’re there on the website, you can find out where Six Days in August is playing in your vicinity.  Or, if it’s not being screened in your area, you can request it for a theater near you.

During several visits to Füssen, the Bavarian town that sits near to King Ludwig II’s famous fairly-tale castle of Neuschwanstein, my wife and I and anybody who was with us would stay at a little family-owned hotel that we liked because of its excellent breakfasts and its immaculate cleanliness.  Since I speak German, I often spent a few minutes talking with the elderly proprietor.  Once, he was nearly in tears.  Somebody — perhaps a competing hotel owner? — had recently posted several nasty online reviews of his small hotel.  These reviews smeared it, with transparent dishonesty, as a filthy dump that fed inedible food to its unfortunate guests.  He begged us to post a review of our own, telling the truth, which we happily did.

I really dislike such anonymous misbehavior — “review bombing,” as it’s sometimes (appropriately) called —  which I consider quite clearly unethical.  And yet online ratings systems, which can often have real value, too commonly lend themselves to it.  Moreover, they can provide venues for what are really covert ideological battles.

If, say, you survey the customer reviews on Amazon.com for various editions of the Book of Mormon, you will soon see that the reviews often vary wildly between five stars and one star (the lowest rating possible).  The five-star ratings assure everybody that the book is of divine origin and that it will change their lives.  Many of the one-star reviews are like this specimen, which I chose at random:

Joseph smith (Author) was a fraud and a charlatan. The book is just page after page of drivel. utter trash.

Online reviews of Latter-day Saint materials often exhibit this extreme variation, from one star to five stars with relatively little in between.

And so, without even a smidgin of surprise, I’m observing the same quite predictable response in online reviews to Six Days in August.

I’m okay — not delighted, mind you, but okay — with online reviews from people who didn’t enjoy Six Days in August.  This will happen.  Tastes vary.  I encourage everybody who has seen the film, and everybody who will see the film, to post what they think about it on social media.  I don’t ask that all of these be five-star or, depending on the system, ten-star reviews.  I do, however, hope that the reviews that are posted online will be actual reviews of the movie itself, rather than mere expressions — overt or (frequently) disguised — of contempt for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Saints, its history, and its leaders, or of personal hostility to me (much as I may deserve such hostility).

I say this because I’m noticing now with regard to Six Days in August what I also noticed back in 2021 with respect to Witnesses:  One or more persons are appearing at such sites as Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb with the pretty clear agenda of driving the film’s approval rating as low as they are able.  (Compare my blog entry from 4 June 2021:  “Honestly, We Need Your Help.”)  I even have a reasonable idea as to who is behind the effort:  The pseudonyms and the themes (particularly on IMDb) are familiar to me from years and years and years of observing what I call the “Peterson Obsession Board.”

For example, a one-star review on IMDb falsely claims of Six Days in August that “It tends to portray polygamy as something that was enthusiastically embraced by women. Nothing could be further from the historical truth.”  I already responded to this dishonest assertion when it appeared — most likely posted by the very same individual — over on the Peterson Obsession Board.  Here is what I wrote in a blog entry from 30 September entitled “Shameless”:

A review of Six Days in August has appeared online that was written by my anonymous Mini-Stalker, who has been posting criticisms of me for many years now — especially of things (this is his particular specialty) that he’s invented about me.  To my completely disoriented surprise, he didn’t like the movie.  Color me astonished.

That’s fine, of course.  There are even people who dislike the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.  Leo Tolstoy detested Shakespeare.  My Mini-Stalker hates me. De gustibus non disputandum est.

But I do appreciate accuracy.

Among other things, Mini-Stalker comments on a scene in which Joseph Smith explains the principle of eternal marriage to Hyrum Smith and Brigham Young and their wives.  By that time, both Hyrum and Brigham were widowers who had married again after the deaths of their first spouses.  Hyrum had married Jerusha Barden in 1826, and they had six children together.  But Jerusha had died in 1837.   Later that year, he married the English-born Mary Fielding.  Brigham had married Miriam Angeline Works, but she died of tuberculosis in 1832 at the age of twenty-six.  She left two children behind.  In 1834, Brigham married Mary Ann Angell.

In the scene to which Mini-Stalker alludes, Hyrum was in the room with Mary and Brigham was there with Mary Ann.

The subject was eternal marriage, not polygamy as such — although, plainly, postmortem plural marriage is entailed by the idea that spouses can be sealed together for eternity and that (as Joseph says in the film) such sealings can be performed vicariously, on the same principle as baptisms for the dead.  Hyrum, in particular, is shown as being moved by the idea that he hasn’t lost Jerusha forever.  (I won’t spoil things by describing Brigham and Mary Ann’s reaction.)

Mini-Stalker accuses me of dishonesty because I represent the two women, Mary and Mary Ann — and, by extension, early Latter-day Saint women more generally — as being “happy,” “ecstatic,” “excited,” and “utterly joyful” at the idea of polygamy.  Two or three of his followers then join in, denouncing me for my dishonesty in misrepresenting those women as being “enthusiastic” about it.  Perhaps, one suggests, I feared excommunication if I didn’t depict them as absolutely giddy with delight at the prospect of sharing their husbands with other women.

However, as I say, Mini-Stalker is grossly misrepresenting the scene, where the emphasis is on the continuation of marriage relationships beyond the grave, not on polygamy in this life — which isn’t so much as mentioned by either Joseph or Hyrum or Brigham or Mary or Mary Ann.

And he certainly knows that the film doesn’t actually suggest that Latter-day Saint women were enthusiastic, happy, excited, joyful, and ecstatic about plural marriage, because he himself cites a scene — in order, of course, to mock and criticize it — in which Emma tearfully expresses her pain and sorrow to Joseph about the agonizing test of her faith that plural marriage poses.

It’s always ironic to be accused of dishonesty by (of all people) my Mini-Stalker.  Perhaps, in this case, even more so than usual.

Anyway, I invite any who have actually seen Six Days in August to post their honest reactions to it online, and to go to places like IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes to rate the film and, if they wish, to express their views about it.  We’re hoping, of course, that people like the movie and say so.  (We hope that such favorable verdicts will influence still others to see the movie.)  At a minimum, though, I’m hoping that online ratings of the film won’t be dominated by people who simply despise me and hate the Church.  It’s a matter of simple, minimal fairness.

Incidentally, did anybody see Brigham and Mary Ann at the football game today?