Bestiality Won an Oscar

The Oscars were last night and the Academy honored the best in film.  Awards were given for many categories but the biggest category of the night is always Best Picture.  And the film that won was The Shape of Water.

When The Shape of Water was described to me it sounded sort of sweet.  A mute woman forms a relationship with some sort of amphibious animal in a lab.  However, it is not sweet.  It is bestiality.  The woman in the movie has sex on screen with this animal or, as the director Guiillermo Del Toro calls it, monster.

The movie according to a review on Forbes Magazine "makes the love story not only acceptable, but desirable.  You want to see the unholy act of bestiality occur..."  The review basically says this act of woman-animal sex is good because it is better than the sex another character has with his, human, wife.

What on earth is this?!?  A movie about a "beautiful" interspecies sexual relationship just was declared the best movie of the year.  And we're not talking about a fairy tale like Beauty and the Beast where the monster is actually a man.

I don't need my movies to be versions of Highlights Magazine's Goofus and Galant, but I don't want them celebrating pure sin.  The movie makes you call sin beautiful.  It makes the emotions of the audience cheer for a woman to have sex with an animal.

Some have said that the sex in the movie is okay because the creature was "into it."  Since when is consent the only thing that matters in sex?  Consent is important but what on earth makes a movie celebrate bestiality?

"When I first found out that The Shape of Water involved bestiality, I asked whether the fish-man was actually into it.  Most people who had seen the movie answered that, yes, he likes it.  The film obviously want us to think that he's feeling it.  So that's good.  At the same time, zookeepers teach gorillas ASL and form intense emotional connections with them, but it's not OK for them to have sex with the gorillas, and it would be very weird to make a movie romance about it."  Kate Knibbs in The Ringer 

This isn't just weird, it is celebration of sin.  Sin is to be loathed not met with raucous applause.  So when Call Me by Your Name, another Best Picture nominee, shows a relationship between a man and a minor boy we don't celebrate it, we call it what it is... wrong.

Film is a wonderful thing.  Movies help us take a good, hard, complex look at the world around us.  Films inspire us and fill us with wonder.  Films give us both a good look at reality and an escape from it.  However, we must be careful what films cause us to cheer for.  It is one thing to have a movie featuring a divorce, it is another to cheer for the characters to divorce.  I don't need the white hat to win every time but I don't want to cheer for sin.

"Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter." Isaiah 5:20

We must mourn sin, not celebrate it.  I know that The Shape of Water isn't real.  I know it is "just a story" but Hollywood is right to celebrate film because art has power, our stories have immense power.  Are we telling stories that will cause us to love virtues like courage, bravery, compassion, honor, friendship, love, sacrifice and the like?  Or are we telling stories that call evil good and good evil?  Are our stories working to normalize something as universally appalling as bestiality?

I for one will not call what is gross lovely.  I refuse to believe that was the best film had to offer us this year.  Sure, what an artful accomplishment to make men smile where they should vomit but that is not the goal of art, that is the aim of propaganda.

Let me leave you with the words of the Apostle Paul:

"Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable... if anything is excellent or praiseworthy... think about such things" today.