#1 How I Came to Love Promiscuous Movies (1998)

  All Rights Reserved © 1998 Thomas W. Day
(Author's historical note: The original title of the newsletter was "Things I Don't Understand." This is the one and only article shipped under that title.)

A few mornings ago, on a local talk radio show, a local nutball religious wacko was babbling to a local, equally wacko, talk-jock about the Disney boycott. The fundamentalist line of propaganda was about how Disney hides its "promiscuous movies" in affiliate production companies like Miramax. And how we ought to avoid those movies, and all of Disney's movies, because they were "promiscuous."
The main gist of their babble was that all of the decent people of the world ought to avoid brain-dead, pitiful excuses-for-remakes-of-literature movies like "The Lion King," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," and "Anastasia" (better known as "Anesthetic," staring Barbie and Ken as themselves) until Disney stops making those other "promiscuous movies." I'm all for avoiding bad movies; which pretty much means I don't go to movies very often. I think we all should get a life and stay away from any movie written by an MBA or a similar brain-dead Spielberg-clone.
But all the philosophical stuff aside, I want to know about these "promiscuous movies?" Back when I was working in the "entertainment industry" I never suspected that all those film cans, stacked on top of each other in storage, could be doing anything animate. If movies are promiscuous, do they also reproduce? I wouldn't like to think these two illiterates were using the word, "promiscuous," when they didn't know what it means.
My buddy, Webster, defines "promiscuous" as:

1. composed of all sorts of persons or things
2. not restricted to one class, sort, or person : INDISCRIMINATE <education... cheapened through the promiscuous distribution of diplomas --Norman Cousins>
3. not restricted to one sexual partner
4. CASUAL, IRREGULAR <promiscuous eating habits>

I'm not sure I want to restrict movies about "all sorts of persons or things." I kind of like multiple plot movies. I really like movies with lots of scenery. I like movies that depict realism. Movies, were the actors don't appear to be "casual" or realistic, generally get classified as being amateur. The more I think of it, the more I'm convinced that any movie that doesn't have some promiscuous characteristics is going to be really boring.
I know this doofus was trying to imply that movies containing sexual activity are his focus, but, if that's really true, why did he pick a word that means something a lot different? What is he really trying to ban? I'd guess Webster's definition of "promiscuous" is exactly this fundamentalist's definition. Substitute "fun," "interesting," "realistic," and non-whitebread for "promiscuous" and you'll know just what these zoned-out, simple-parts-of-the-bible-thumping, God-speaks-to-me-and-you'd-better-listen types wants to abolish. If the thumpers and the politically correctors ever get together to pass laws for the rest of us, you're going to see a promiscuous assortment of bell tower snipers sending a promiscuous collection of bullets towards a promiscuous bunch of bystanders. And we'll all be right there to watch, because live-action promiscuous violence will be the only source of entertainment available.
January 1998
Author's Note: Yep, by the second column, I changed the name. A "friend" took great joy in telling me that the list of "things I don't understand" would take far too long to, even, imagine. After suffering a two hour company meeting this morning, The above title seemed a lot more appropriate, anyway. As always, the rats are winning but I'm not even in the race.