It might be objected that the constant sexual appraisal to which these young women and men subject one another is not only an effect of relaxed modesty norms but also of the social distortion introduced by their culture's intense pressure to marry young. This seems to be the thesis of the film, which opens with a video montage of church leaders admonishing young men to marry. The marriage mandate hangs like a foggy marine layer over every moment and every interaction of the weekend. Each new face and figure presents itself as a candidate not for a weekend of fun in the sun, but for an eternity of marriage. No wonder the scrutiny is so intense!
The social and personal magnitude of marriage shadows the four subjects' self-understanding. Each one frames his or her personal history in terms of near misses (or painful collisions) with marriage. Bryan grieves deeply over the recent death of his father: the last time he saw his father alive, his dad handed him a $20 bill and told him to go take out a girl. Bryan experiences his unmarried state as a personal failure and a deep disappointment to his dead father.
Walking the problem back another step, then, one must ask why we pressure these young people so strongly to marry so soon? The film offers a brief thumbnail of the Mormon plan of salvation to explain the importance placed on marriage as the only path to exaltation. But a more immediate, more persuasive answer to the question is available: it's sex, stupid. Long-term celibacy is really, really hard for autonomous adults, grown-ups in their twenties and thirties who actually do have the emotional maturity and life experience for a healthy sex life. Celibacy is not impossible for individuals, but it's not realistic as a decades-long default in a generic Mormon life script. Ryan ruefully admits that at 34 he's "ready to donate my wiener to science."
While it doesn't seem to be an explicit aim of the filmmakers, the tangled web of causality connecting chastity, early marriage, and stigmatization of singles is the film's most fertile exploration. If we're serious as a community about requiring chastity before marriage for men and women, we will always have early marriages. Conversely, if our community norms allow the age of marriage to drift up in line with national averages, fewer young adults will remain chaste. It's a thorny social dilemma: the film alludes to the perils of too-early marriage in the several older-and-wiser divorced voices that are featured, but it also illustrates the social and sexual dysfunction that can result from groups of young people remaining single into their thirties.
One of the smartest and most interesting sub-themes of the film is the relationship between sexual and spiritual maturity. The filmmakers often turn for incisive critical commentary to a secondary subject, a NYC-based social worker named Steven with many interesting things to say about the prolonged psychological adolescence that accompanies deferred sexual initiation for singles. Lacking the personal experience of sex with a real body, Steven argues, chaste Mormon singles turn to cartoonish, PG-13-style sexualized media to shape their expectations of sex and intimacy. As a result, these adults find their emotions, their desires, their self-concepts—the entire suite of traits bound up with sexuality in adults—developmentally delayed in a prolonged immaturity. Duck Beach turns out to be nothing more than the chance to "pay $700 to go touch a boob," Steven says.
He makes a persuasive case. Moreover, this state of psychological adolescence is compounded by a prolonged social immaturity: unmarried adult men and women are sometimes seen as less capable and less mature than their married peers, because marriage is the final rite of passage into full Mormon adulthood.
On the other hand, the film illustrates the ways in which the alienation imposed by singleness in a marriage-centric church bestows a mature critical sensibility on some singles. Bryan explains this well: "When you find yourself visibly excluded and on the fringe, you think. You step back and think, 'Why is this?' You question why." The thoughtful self-examination and cultural criticism that Bryan himself offers throughout the film are evidence for his claim here. Finding himself outside the Mormon ideal in such an obvious way motivates him to think independently, to question and seek his own perspectives and his own voice.
Despite the thorniness of the territory it explores, the film never lapses into cynicism or ridicule. And while it brandishes no agenda for fixing the difficulties it observes surrounding singleness and marriage in the church, it does offer two gentle moments of respite from the otherwise-constant sexual pressure of Duck—gestures, perhaps, toward sites of spiritual shelter for singles. The first is in worship itself. Cameras follow the subjects as they dress and primp for church meetings on Sunday; as is typical in big singles wards, Sunday worship is largely an occasion for still more sexual scrutiny and gamesmanship. But after church, the housemates work together to prepare a meal and sit down around a table. As the men and women bow their heads and close their eyes during a sincere prayer over the food, the camera glides intimately over each face. Hidden for a moment from the gaze of others, and focused prayerfully on gratitude and humility rather than status and competition, the subjects come together for a few minutes in genuine spiritual community.
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