Values Dissonance/Film

Parodied in the film Demolition Man, starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes, where in 2032, everyone lives in a pacifistic and politically correct world where even profanity is a crime. Needless to say, the future utterly abhors anything that Simon Phoenix does, considering he was a psycho from 1996 where crime was rampant. One of the officers vomits at one of the crimes labeled as "Murder, Death, Kill".

It was so...how can a man be so blatantly sadistic!? It was fun for him!

- Because of rampant and virulent STD pandemics in the past, actually physically having sex is now out. "Sex" is accomplished by having each party hook up to some sort of virtual reality gizmo. When the Sandra Bullock character learns that Stallone wants to actually "exchange fluids" with her, she is completely Squicked out.
- Even shaking hands is frowned on. When Spartan gives a manly handshake to a cop who introduces himself to him, the cop walks hurriedly away saying "oh my god, germs!" And when two other characters high-five each other they don't actually make contact. They just hold their hands about five inches apart and kind of...wave them around a little.
The Western Ride with the Devil, starring Tobey Maguire, was destroyed at the box office thanks to Values Dissonance. The movie portrays an African American fighting on the side of southern guerrillas in the Kansas border skirmishes of the Civil War. Although the character had a historically factual precedent, the idea of a black soldier fighting for the Confederacy was so repugnant that the film was delayed, promotional materials were destroyed, and the release was severely limited.
Values Dissonance is one of the main themes (if not the main theme) of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.
Lost in Translation. Everything's in the title, really.
In Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, the older monk catches the younger having sex with a girl who has come for medicine, and kicks her out, warning him that lust and desire will inevitably lead him to murder. The younger monk ignores him and follows her... "inevitably", he kills her a few years later.
The Breakfast Club: A teenager brings a flare gun to school so he can commit suicide (or at least destroy a shop project he failed at). His punishment is a Saturday of detention when it goes off in his locker. In today's zero-tolerance friendly environment, he likely would have been expelled. (That, and/or sent to intensive therapy...)
- This was parodied in an episode of X-Play, where the character expresses humorous surprise that people thought he was going to kill himself. In the show's darkest of Dark Comedy moments, he cheerfuly tells the other students that his plan was to kill everyone else in the school (excepting them, now), showing how the once-shocking reveal is now less harsh than the reality of school shootings.
Heathers, a film about teens that actually do kill each other, would have a hard time getting greenlit after Columbine and in our 24/7 media age. However, even by 1980s standards, it's hard to believe a student firing a revolver at another pair of students while in the school cafeteria wouldn't be looking at an expulsion. The movie suggests he was merely suspended because they were blanks.
- Somehow, a TV series adaptation was made for Television in 2018. While many cuts were done to tone down violence (as every time they tried to premiere it a school shooting happened), the thing that got more scandalous were the casting for the Heathers: while the girls from the film were all white and stereotypically thin, in the series, the Heathers are an overweight girl (which is the leader of the clique), a biracial girl who claims to be gay (later revealed to be a Bait and Switch one) and a self-defined genderqueer. The series showrunner Jason Micallef justified it by saying "Today, all different types of people are more aspirational. People that wouldn't have necessarily been considered the most popular kids in school in 1988 could very well be — and probably most likely are — the more popular kids today."
Going way back, Birth of a Nation (and by extension, the novel it was based on, The Clansman by Thomas Dixon) features the Ku Klux Klan as the good guys, complete with a Big Damn Heroes moment towards the end of the story. This film went on to be so influential that for decades, the director had an honorary award named after him at the Oscars. The film is now rarely seen outside of film classes thanks to Values Dissonance making it unwatchable to anyone except a film student learning the state of the art in 1915.
- A year later, director D. W. Griffith made Intolerance, a film about the destructive nature of prejudice, after being informed The Birth of a Nation was racist.
  - Perhaps the best example of Values Dissonance in the whole business: Birth of a Nation was a a big hit with audiences, while Intolerance flopped so badly that it almost bankrupted Griffith's studio. The fact it was a 4-hour near-incoherent mess that cut frequently between unconnected plots set centuries apart was also a factor.
Agnes' fate at the end of Auntie Mame definitely qualifies for this trope. She finds herself impregnated and accidentally married to a sexual predator who got her drunk and led her to the altar because he thought she was a rich noblewoman. This is supposed to be a happy ending, because it means that she's not, as she gravely feared, an unwed mother. It is worth noting that in a later, musical version of the play, this part was changed. Instead of being married to the guy who knocked her up, Agnes is sent to live in a home for unwed mothers... that was founded and set up by Aunt Mame herself, specifically to help Agnes. (And to tick off the snooty rich family whose property was next door to the future site of said home.)
- As opposed to Agnes' ending from the original novel, in which she falls in love with and marries the successful headmaster of a boys' school shortly after having her baby. The sexual predator is never heard from again.
This trope is used in-story in A Bug's Life. Another ant gives a pebble to the main character; it's a highly personal moment, but the watching circus bugs think it "must be an ant thing". Later, the circus bugs present a pebble to the ant princess; her watching assistants decide it "must be a circus thing".
A lot of the Sean Connery Bond movies suffer from this, including Victim Falls For Rapist, really Disposable Women, and Slap Slap Kiss. This dissonance was increased in The Man with the Golden Gun, when Roger Moore tries to slap around women, Connery-style, and looks as uncomfortable doing it as a modern audience would watching it. They are still toned down from the massive misogyny (and racism) that exists in the books. You only have to read a few other British thrillers of the early 20th Century (something by Dennis Wheatley, say) to realize that Ian Fleming was quite liberal for his time.
- There are quite a few ethnic stereotypes as well. Even Dr. No, which was fairly advanced for its day in its portrayal of a black man, has a scene where Bond asks Quarrel (who is black) to "fetch my shoes," in a rather presumptuous and condescending manner. In Goldfinger, Goldfinger himself tells Bond that Koreans are the "cruellest people in the world" and are thus perfect for being evil minions.
In The Philadelphia Story, spoiled heiress Tracy Lord is given a major set-down by her father... who cheated on her mother and blames it on Tracy's lack of affection for him. Yes, he effectively tells Tracy her parents' divorce was her fault. And she thanks him for the smackdown in the end.
- And at the beginning of the movie, C. K. Dexter Haven (played by Cary Grant) angrily throws Tracy Lord to the ground. At the time, this was probably considered amusing. Now, not so much.
- Uncle Willie also qualifies. Nugh said.^[context?]
In the film of the musical Cabaret, Liza Minelli's character tells her gigolo friend that the best way for him to get the Virginal Jewish Girl (or any virgin, for that matter) romantically interested in him is to "pounce" (that is, force them to sleep with you). He protests that it'll get him thrown into jail, but Liza Minelli's character insists that it'll work. And it does.
In the 1968 film Yours, Mine and Ours, with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda, generally considered a G-rated, family values classic, there are several "Wait... what?" moments. Early in the film, three boys, aged about 14 to 18 get their father's potential next wife drunk by spiking her drink. In yet another scene, Ball gets angry at one of her sons, and grabs him up for an immediate and prolonged spanking.
- Fonda's character calls his children on the carpet for their little prank. He is not amused. (If I remember, the kids were trying to sabotage the budding relationship.)
1955's Picnic -- the moral of the story is, if you are a young woman, get married now, even if it's to the drifter you met the day before, otherwise you'll end up desperate and pathetic like your neighbor, Rosalind Russell.
Larry the Cable Guy has built a direct-to-Walmart film career out of embracing Redneck stereotypes to the extreme. One scene in Witless Protection shows him flashing a Security Guard badge and threatening to frame an Arab motel owner for Terrorism and send him to Guantanamo Bay, which is played for laughs.
The original Pink Panther films run into this with how Inspector Clouseau speaks of his Chinese manservant, e.g., "Cato, my little yellow friend, I'm home!" (On the other hand, Clouseau is an arrogant idiot, so this ignorance may well stem from that.)
In the classic screwball romantic comedy It Happened One Night, Clark Gable confronts Claudette Colbert's millionaire father, telling him his daughter just "needs someone to slap her around once in a while". This helps convince the father that Gable would be a good husband to her. (At the very least, it doesn't diminish his respect for Gable in the slightest.)
In Yankee Doodle Dandy, when George M. Cohan does his number, "Off the Record," in the play I'd Rather Be Right. The sight of Cohan's character, who is obviously supposed to be Franklin D. Roosevelt, gyrating around wildly comes off today as rather mocking of the President who was a paraplegic, albeit one who carefully hid his disability at that time.
The Jazz Singer features a hero who must escape the confines of his conservative Jewish father to realize his own dream of self-expression... by performing in blackface.
The Japanese film The Homeless Student invokes this with its own Aesop at the end. The neglectful father abandons his children after they're thrown out of their apartment, because he had been gambling and hadn't paid the bills. It's presented as a lighthearted "keep up the Masquerade" comedy when the main character, a teenage boy, is reduced to living in a park, but there's little that's lighthearted about his situation. He's starved, rained-on, scrabbles for change under vending machines, stoned by little children and eventually becomes so hungry he eats grass, and then cardboard. His younger sister is nearly molested. At the end of the film, he thanks his father because he realizes he was trying to teach him a lesson in living independently, and that his mother stunted his growth as a person by giving him too much attention.
Similar to the Dan Fogelberg example listed at the Music page, and also from 1981, was the movie Arthur, which played the title character's alcoholism and resultant drunken behavior for laughs; he is even seen drinking while driving at one point. The movie was rated PG, as the PG-13 rating didn't exist at that time; the MPAA's current restrictions on drug content would net it the higher rating now -- the 2011 Russell Brand-led remake got a PG-13.
This Three Stooges short features them hunting Japanese-American escapees from a relocation center. The characterizations are about as stereotypical and offensive as they come, but quite par for the course in WWII era films.
Breakfast at Tiffany's features Mickey Rooney as wacky Japanese neighbor Mr. Yunioshi, complete with yellowface, buck teeth and thick glasses that look like they were lifted directly from a WWII propaganda poster. At the time, this was acceptable comic relief.
- To be fair to the novel's author, Truman Capote objected to the casting of Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi. (It wasn't really viewed as very funny by audiences at the time, either.)
- Invoked/discussed in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. While watching the film while on a date, Bruce's girlfriend (later wife), Linda, finds the character hilarious until she sees the disgusted look on Bruce's face.
- The movie is made of this trope since the main character, the eponymous Holly, is a delusional sociopath who leaves a trail of human wreckage in her wake. The audience is then expected to believe that George Peppard's character "winning" her at the end is a happy ending. Fridge Logic dictates that after the credits roll, being in a relationship with an unreformed Holly must be a waking nightmare.
  - Another case where it was changed: in the story the film is based on, Peppard's character lets Holly go. This was considered too depressing an ending for a film.
Amazon Women on the Moon lampshaded this when parodying 1950s science fiction films:

Astronaut: "Where I come from, no woman is complete without a man."

The ending of McClintock shows that the main character turning his wife over his knee and spanking her has had a positive affect on their marriage.
There's a 2004 example of this in the movie Spanglish. Towards the end of the movie Flor decided to take her daughter Cristina out of the high standard private feeder school where she had a full ride and put her back into the black hole that is the California Public school system. Why? Basically, because she didn't think it was Hispanic enough, and because Cristina was sponsored in said school by Flor's very caucasian and very rich ex-boss. So apparently the moral of the story was that it's okay to do something with significant negative implications for your child's future so long as it alleviates your own cultural concerns and insecurities.
- Even worse, it implies that being Hispanic and being successful are mutually exclusive. The unfortunate implications can be reduced when we realize that the framing device of the film is the plot being the essay Cristina wrote for her admission letter to Harvard, so we know that she survived the public school system with honors. She even concedes that to American eyes what Flor did was a dickish thing to do, but she was ultimately right as it forced Cristina to actually work without piggybacking in other people's privilege
- In Flor's defense, said ex-boss spent most of the film treating Cristina as a daughter replacement, as the expenses of her actual daughter who was there watching how her mother treated the maid's child better than her just because said child was aesthetically closer to the mom's idea of the "perfect daughter". Flor, who embodied the Hispanic values of "Thicker Than Water" and "raise your child within your means", was the only adult realizing how actually uncomfortable and fucked up the whole situation was playing and decided to get away ASAP.
In the Shirley Temple film Bright Eyes, to cap off the final scene, a bratty girl named Joy (who had been mean to Shirley Temple throughout the film) is slapped in the face by her mother. This happens in a courtroom in front of a judge. While completely acceptable at the time, slapping a child in the face in public would not likely be seen as a positive thing today.
- It depends on who you're around, and possibly even the race. It can be seen as a thing that should be done in private for some (if done at all), while with others people do it unashamed and it's acceptable.
- The "On The Good Ship Lollipop" scene, where Shirley serenades a band of adult men about candy land aboard a passenger plane whilst wearing a short dress, wouldn't sit well with modern audiences either due to the modern stigma about men and children. Most of the comments on this video state about how perturbed they are with the portrayal, which can be attributed to the moral panic caused by child predators and fears of minors being molested or taken advantage of. To the detractors' credit though, Shirley did admit to the indiscretions of actors and producers on and off-set in her memoirs. Others however criticised the negative reception to the scene as being overly cynical and dirty-minded, as well as furthering the above mentioned stigma.
In the film version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, McMurphy's crime is sleeping with a fifteen-year-old, which is treated with the same weight as the fights he gets into... which it was, in The Seventies. The modern Pedo Hunt makes the audience lose a lot of sympathy for him right off the bat. Unless you're Swedish, since nowadays the age of consent is 15 in Sweden.
My Baby Is Black. The title of the movie and the fact that it is treated as something unbelievably horrible by the narrator says it all.
In an example that might combine this with Deliberate Values Dissonance is the older Albert Finney film Gumshoe. Finney's character acts as if he lives in a Hardboiled Detective story, and he makes a habit of calling the Scary Black Man things like a "spade" or "Mighty Joe Young". While these slurs can be partly attributed to the whole "1930s detective attitude", the film doesn't really seem to treat the protagonist as racist. On the other hand, a modern audience is likely to applaud when he gets sucker-punched by the Scary Black Man for one of these comments.
- Which, in itself, smacks of Unfortunate Implications when rude comments are responded to with physical violence.
In Casablanca, Ilsa refers to Sam, the middle-aged black pianist in Rick's club, as a "boy", a common mild racial slur at the time.
In Police Academy 5, Commandant Lassard is greeted by a Russian Commandant, who kisses him three times on the face, perfectly acceptable in most European countries. North Americans, on the other hand, are creeped out by it (including Lassard).
Gone with the Wind is full of this, of course, starting with the film's title and central premise, that the passing of an oligarchic slave-based society was something to be mourned. Then there's the racist caricature of Prissy. Another example is the Victim Falls For Rapist scene where Rhett carries Scarlett up the stairs. The book is even worse--the Klan are good guys who avenge Scarlett after she's attacked by blacks. And, of course, the utterly shocking words, never before spoken on film: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!"
In Topsy Turvy, William Gilbert has to deal with an actor who has a hissy fit over his costume which seems too "revealing," even though by modern audiences' eyes, it is demure.
The central storyline of 1971 film of On the Buses is that the bus company hire female drivers and the male drivers deliberately disrupt their work and make their lives a misery. What makes this questionable is that the male drivers are shown as likable heros and the women as harpys who deserve to get fired. The unattractive appearance of the women who do traditionally male jobs probably wouldn't happen today either. The film also shows men groping women without their permission but the women finding this humorous rather than being upset or offended by it.
Similarly the Carry On sometimes showed men groping women without their permission but the women enjoying it.
In the 1950's classic The Dam Busters, the code for a successful hit on the target is the name of the squadron commander's beloved black labrador, who was struck and killed by a motorcar right before the strike was launched. The dog's name? Nigger.
- This issue was complicated by the fact that the historical dog had that name in real life. It's sometimes, and sometimes not, dubbed on television showings into Trigger. There was a certain amount of "it's PC gone mad" controversy when news of a remake did the rounds in 2009; the producers were planning to call the dog "Nigsy" instead.
- The remake's still being talked about, and the latest news is that they intend to call him "Digger".
In the Stephen Chow film King Of Comedy (1999), one of the running gags is that one of the neighborhood's little boys runs around naked all the time. This is creepy enough to an American audience, but there's one scene where Stephen's character stops what he's doing to play with the boy. A guy who was imitating Stephen's cues while confronting a gangster looks back to see him tickle the boy's penis with a stick and again to see him flick it with his finger... and then copies both acts. Imagine trying to film that in the states.
What's New, Pussycat? is a cheeky ribald romp from the newly unfettered 1960s - its intent was to be outrageous, and it perhaps got more so with time. It features a quick flashback to a teacher-student affair ("Oh, Michael, this can't work - I'm 34 and you're 12!" - having star Peter O'Toole in schoolboy drag makes it less creepy - or maybe more so), a crazy psychiatrist who repeatedly sexually assaults a patient, and an unstable exotic dancer (named Liz Bien - get it?) who tries committing suicide a few times.
In the 1940s serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel, there's a scene where our hero picks up a machine gun and uses it to shoot people who are running away from him. This is an act that Wolverine would hesitate to commit today. This is a combination of Values Dissonance and Character Evolution (though it's a fine serial, Cap is very different from the lighthearted comic book Cap).
- I'm pretty sure that shooting people In the Back was culturally unacceptable from the moment the machine gun - or any gun - was invented.
  - Depends on the context. For one example, one of the primary purposes of cavalry for many centuries was to 'pursue fugitives', which is a polite way of saying 'to chase after infantry that is already running away from you and hit them in the back with lances, swords, and pistols'. In many places its still considered an entirely legitimate form of warfare to shoot at retreating troops; the more casualties you inflict today, the less enemy you'll be fighting tomorrow.
In Babes in Toyland, one of the songs - sung by Mary Contrary, is called "I Can't Do The Sum" and is about how math is hard for her because she's a girl.
In Miracle on 34th Street, everyone is perfectly fine with a little girl being left in the care of the dashing stranger across the hall.
- But Mrs. Walker's housekeeper assures her she's been keeping an eye on them through a pair of windows facing each other across the lightwell.
- Dialogue suggests that Susan had already spent a lot of time with Mr. Gailey in the past, so he wasn't exactly a stranger to her even though Doris had never personally met him. Not that a young girl spending a lot of time unsupervised with an adult man with little involvement of the girl's legal guardian isn't a serious case of Values Dissonance.
- The remake elevated him to the level of Doris's longtime boyfriend who presumably already had a ring in his back pocket.
In The Wild World of Batwoman, the titular heroine initiates a seance in an attempt to find the movie's villain, only to get interrupted by a stereotypical Chinese spirit, complete with "Ching-chang"-type speak. When it was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, Mike and the Bots are horribly offended and Mike actually apologizes for the scene after it ends.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 ran headlong into another example with the short "Catching Trouble", a 1936 documentary about a hunter who catches animals for zoos. The narration makes it clear that he's a man among men who bends nature to his will; Mike and the Bots, however, just see a cruel bully harassing innocent animals, and cheer for the animals to escape. And that's not even getting into his "loyal Seminole" sidekick...
Thelma and Louise the two women fleeing the crime scene because there was no evidence to suggest Harlan was raping Thelma? Not likely to happen today where rape allegations are taken much more seriously.
The Happy Ending of His Majesty O'Keefe sees the protagonist, a former Mister Danger whose machinations got dozens of people killed and nearly destroyed the island of Yap, having a Heel Realization and telling the island's natives to go their own way. Instead, they choose to keep him on as king, plus he gets the girl.
The Children's Hour comes off as being this even to the actresses in it. It's a 50s movie based off a 1930's play, so it's this twice over. Martha has a lot of Gayngst and commits suicide in the end, instead of showing any struggle about people bugging her over her sexuality.. Though this happens all the time actually.
Tomboy centers around a ten year old girl masquerading as a boy, and features multiple scenes with her shirtless or even just naked. Despite the fact she doesn't have any breasts yet, the notion of a girl over 5 years old with her shirt off in public doesn't settle with a lot of people, from country to country.
Meta-example concerning Enemy at the Gates: Western audiences found it a grim retelling of one of history's most brutal battles. Russian audiences thought it was far too light-hearted in it's treatment of the darkest chapter in their country's history.
In a fairly obscure 1950 film, luridly titled So Young, So Bad, a sixteen-year-old girl is consigned to a reform school because she's pregnant out of wedlock. There's no suggestion that terminating the pregnancy is an option: in fact, the girl is portrayed as heartless, selfish, and unloving for wanting to give her baby up for adoption. This is a holdover from the prewar years when unwed mothers in maternity homes were required to stay and nurse their newborns for three months, and were propagandized with heartrending stories supposedly from the point of view of "abandoned" (read: relinquished for adoption) babies.
In-universe example in The Dark Knight: Bruce Wayne brings a Russian ballet dancer to dinner who supports Harvey Dent cleaning up Gotham City through political means, but does not understand why Gotham supports Batman taking on the criminal element at street level.
In the 2010 The Karate Kid, Dre cheers and claps loudly at the end of his crush's violin recital, only to receive disapproving looks from said crush's parents. In China, audiences tend to remain silent during and after a performance. Dre (who was from the United States) is used to clapping and cheering at the end of a performance.
- Also Dre making Mei Ying pinky swear and her parents' offended reaction to it because in China, raising the pinky finger is equal sticking up the middle finger.
In the film version of Matilda, the abuse Agatha Trunchbull inflict on her students would’ve been tapped off, even by 1996 standards. With anti-bullying laws, smart-phones that can record video, and internet access of today; Trunchbull wouldn’t be able to get away with it since evidence is just a click away.
A Christmas Story has four that would fall under this:
- First: Ralph's punishment for swearing was having soap in his mouth. Back in the 1940s, where the film takes place, it was a common punishment with spanking being the only other harsher one. In 1983, when the film was released, it was considered a mild alternative to spanking. In the 2010s, both would be a form of child abuse.
- Second: Ralph's wish for a B.B. gun would be frown upon today in a post-Columbine world, though gun-violence in schools did happened before 1999 (but were comparatively low-key).
  - Of course both of these are less a case of values dissonance between then and now, and more a case of values dissonance between most people then and some people now. Large parts of America would not consider having soap in your mouth for a few minutes child abuse, nor would they consider wanting a BB gun to be the sign of a murder-crazed psycho.
- Third: Scut Farkus and Grover Dill would most likely be sent to juvenile detention thanks to anti-bullying laws, though Ralph would run the risk jail time himself for attacking the former but his reason would be understandable by 1940s standards.
- Fourth: The Triple Dog Dare... well, it has to tested and proven to the point, there are even medical guides on the topic, like this one.
The Ghost Breakers, Lawrence’s joke about comparing Democrats to voodoo zombies would get unwelcome stares from political tension in America today for what was taken as joke back then.
Porky's: Tommy inserts his “privates” in one of the peek holes only for Balbricker to grab it. While she’s justified on her actions against Tommy, it would’ve been grounds for Tommy’s family to file a lawsuit on sexual harassment these days.
In the 1976 version of Carrie, there are two examples of this:
- Margaret believes if Carrie is taken, she'll be damned because in her mind would be a road to Hell. However, even with that augment, someone would’ve at least called to check if Carrie was okay even by 1970s standards. Today, certain forms of employment like a doctor would make the person a mandated reporter, meaning Margaret’s actions is going to be found out anyways if caught.
  - In fact, considering teachers are mandated reporters by default, this would makes sense that Desjardin (Miss Collins) would have to take such actions if she learned what was happening in Carrie’s home.
- During the scene where Carrie is attacked at gym by bullies, Rita L. Desjardin (Miss Collins in the 1976 film) stops the attack and punishes the bullies for their actions by giving them detention with prom on the line. Today, she would’ve been viewed as a hero for taking actions, though anti-bullying laws would’ve required her to file a police report.
Thanks to the cultural entrenchment of Arranged Marriage in India, many plots in Bollywood and Indian films, specially in romantic comedy, can only work under that cultural expectation in the background. Even despite more people marrying for love and or having interfaith/intercaste marriage in movies than in real life, there are as much as many plots based in "well, let's try to make this arrangement work!"

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