As various blogs and news sites have noted, the grandparents of a 12-year-old girl are suing the Chicago Board of Education because a substitute teacher showed Brokeback Mountain to her class. I like the approach taken by J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader:
Cultural politics aside, this seems like an open-and-shut case. The movie is rated R — “under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian” — and according to the suit, the school principal permitted the viewing without consulting the child’s guardians.
It might not have been such an open-and-shut case if the family had lived in Canada, though — and if the girl had been just a couple years older. In British Columbia and Ontario, at least, Brokeback Mountain is rated 14-A — which means anyone under that age would need to see it with a guardian (unlike the American PG-13, the 14-A is not purely advisory), but anyone above that age could see it on his or her own. Thus, the BC Teachers Federation posted a “Brokeback Mountain lesson plan” for Grades 10 to 12 last year — and any debate here over whether the film was appropriate for the classroom would rest pretty much entirely on “cultural politics”.
Personally, I would have no objection to showing this film to a room full of senior high school students, but only if we were going to truly engage the film as a film — as a work of art open to multiple interpretations — and not exploit it for propaganda.
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