Watch Devil’s Playground Movie Online
Lundi, août 16th, 2010 |
Watch Devil’s Playground Movie Online.
Movie Title: Devil’s Playground Devil’s Playground is available for streaming or downloading. |
First of all the Amish women wear white prayer veilings/ coverings. They are not bonnets. Bonnets are black and/or dark blue and worn over the prayer veiling.
This movie moved me to tears. I am a Mennonite who grew up among the Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonites in Lancaster County Pennsylvania. Many visitors do not understand our way of life. People complain that the Amish are not well educated, well just last week I had an 8 year old Amish girl wait on me at her father’s store. She tallied the five items that I bought on a battery operated cash register and cheerfully gave me the correct change counting it out into my hand. This is in such contrast to the urban young man I met about a month ago at McDonalds who although he gave me the incorrect change, argued with me for about three minutes until he finally, finally saw that he had made a mistake and then still had a major attitude because I pointed out that he had given me the incorrect change.
Many people do not understand us of Anabaptist origins. They romanticize the Amish, they act like they are somehow holier than thou, etc. etc. The Amish themselves realize how human they are.
We are descendants of the most radical wing of the Reformation. Only once you are an adult and are able to choose for yourself are you expected to “join church” and take that baptismal vow. The Amish take that promise perhaps too strongly. My own parents suggested that “you join our church because you are living with us now, but when you move away from home feel free to join another church.”
Perhaps the most moving part of the movie to me is when Faron takes out the Ausbund, the oldest Protestant hymnbook in continuous use and talks about the people from the 16th century being able to die for their faith. In spite of talking like a street hoodlum, Faron respects the deep conviction that our Anabaptist foreparents had in being willing to die for their faith. He says “those people were willing to die for their faith, man I don’t know if I could do that.”
I am somewhat passionate in my defense of the Amish faith. The movie represents that ALL young people go through this phase. However, not all are as rebellious as these young people. Many remain at home and eventually join the church of their parents without being too wild. Some gatherings are hymnsings and not wild beer, drug induced orgies. The filmmaker of course would not have been able to interview such young people, because they would not allow themselves to be interviewed.
This film is to be commended for its documentation of young Amish persons who are going through a rite of passage. The human spirit remains bouyant and almost 90% rejoin the church of their parents. Remaining in the Amish community has been likened by some in choosing to join a religious order. There is safety, contentment and acceptance for you if you follow the Ordnung.
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If all you know about the Amish comes from seeing the movie “Witness” or passing the occasional buggy by the side of the road, many of the images in Lucy Walker’s understated documentary will be jarring. Girls in 19th century dresses chug beer from plastic cups, a small-time Amish crank dealer hides his stash inside a matchbox, and teenagers dance at a raucous party that, apart from the white bonnets dotting the crowd, could be happening anywhere. The great achievement of Walker’s film is to show how this is all less incongruous than it seems.
When Amish teenagers turn sixteen they are encouraged to leave their communities and experience the pleasures and conveniences of life in the outside “English” world. This period is called Rumspringa (literally “running around”) and is intended to ensure that the Amish who come back into the fold will have made a conscious choice to do so. The appeal to free will is well-intentioned, but ultimately disingenuous. When given their first taste of adult freedom, Amish teenagers do what any other teenagers do: they drink too much, have sex, and spend a lot of time driving around in cars. For most teenagers this is just a phase. For the Amish it’s the preliminary to the most important decision of their life: whether or not to join the Amish church. The subjects of Walker’s documentary are no better prepared for the trials of adolescence than any other group of sixteen year olds, and it comes as no surprise that most of them, after a few tumultuous years, seem ready to return to a way of life that represents family, security, and a rock-solid sense of identity.
Rumspringa, an Amish elder says at one point, is really a vaccination. You get just enough of a taste of the outside world so that when you give it up you won’t wonder what you’re missing. His candor is winning, as is the level-headedness of most of the Amish elders Walker interviews. Her main subjects are the kids, but they are in many ways like deeply religious small-town kids anywhere: confused and self-obsessed, but basically decent, and given to projecting a theological dimension onto the normal pains of growing up. Beneath the strange clothing is a familiar conflict between piety and hell-raising.
It’s in the interviews with Amish adults that the most intriguing aspects of Amish society are revealed. Despite the horse-and-buggy trappings, the Amish are not opposed to technology per se, just technology that they consider disruptive to their way of life. So cars and televisions are out, but a solar-powered battery charger is fine. (You can imagine a hippie commune reaching a similar conclusion after much earnest debate.) Their attitude towards sex, while hardly permissive, is surprisingly laid-back and pragmatic: a little premarital fooling around can be overlooked as long as it leads to an Amish marriage and Amish children. The adults interviewed for this film come across as relaxed and candid, and have none of the prickly self-righteousness you find in other religious conservatives. Their condemnations of the outside world are rote, without any real heat. It appears that in choosing never to engage the modern world, either as participants or evangelicals, they feel little need to either judge it or defend themselves. In their inwardness, the Amish seem more like Hasidic Jews than Christian fundamentalists.
But Hassids still drive cars. Despite their conviction, you still come away wondering how long the Amish way of life can last. In one telling interview, a preacher bemoans the way work has changed. Fifty years ago, he says, Amish children would have stayed home and helped out on the farm. Now they go to work in a factory, get some money, and the next thing you know, they want to buy a car. Now here’s a battle that started back when everyone drove a horse and buggy. For family ties and religious values to overwhelm teenage rebellion is the easy part. The hard part comes when an agrarian way of life squares off against factory jobs and pocket money.
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