Analytics wrote:3-Did the villains seem at all believable, or were they one-dimensional caricatures? From the trailer, I just can't imagine why an angry mob would get their torches and pitchforks and demand that David recant his testimony.
I haven't seen the movie but I can explain this scene.
DCP hilariously manufactures imagined criticisms of the witnesses such as false memory that critics would never make and then responds to it. The problem with the Book of Mormon witnesses is that they had a massive incentive for something really sketchy to be true, and they were out to confirm it as a team. DCP ought to consider Dr. Stephen Greer's material, where he takes a dozen "witnesses" at a time into the mountains to make contact with aliens, and it ain't a cheap outing, by the way.
The witness is received after the trial of faith: after a big sacrifice to confirm that thing you want to believe in so desperately, and while surrounded by others also desperate to believe. These were the witnesses of the gold plates. Witnesses based on a theology that integrates 'witnessing' itself into confirmation and establishes believing before the fact as the goal, rather than objectively evaluating anything in a way credible to outsiders.
Nobody takes these kinds of "witnesses" seriously. And DCP's own movie understands this with crystal clarity.
As both Stem and Shades have reported, the movie seems to -- as I suspected after watching the last trailer -- undermine its own theology of witnesses. This scene is the most extreme example so far. Nobody is going to believe David Whitmer saw an angel and golden plates. In the narrative, however, the best they can do is establish the credibility of Whitmer by the testimony of an angry mob leader who
against his own incentives and intentions, is forced to vouch for Witmer's character and let him go.
This undermines the theology of witnesses in two ways. The movie demonstrates that credible witnesses are actually either neutral parties, such as the reporter, or better, enemies with opposing incentives. A compliment from your enemy means more than a compliment from your friend. So the narrative has multiple parties
who don't know each other, who are either
neutral or opposed to the witnesses, vindicating both Joseph Smith and the witnesses, thus showing what witness credibility is all about. That's undermining move #1. (Dr. Moore also adds to this with his observation that they create tension between the witnesses and Smith to show witness credibility)
The second undermining, for me, is more interesting. A long time ago I read (or thumbed through) a commentary on the New Testament that styled itself as 'postmodern' commentary. The portions I read were pretty creative, one-upping Jesus, 'the master of the one-liner' with observations that out-Jesus Jesus. Jesus said to the Pharisees, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" and the scribes and Pharisees are shown to be without integrity -- a bunch of hypocrites. However, immediately upon considering the words of Jesus, the Pharisees saw their error and course-corrected, thus in actuality, proving to be men of serious integrity. The woman wasn't saved by Jesus' words, but by the honesty of the Pharisees.
Back to the movie, the leader of the mob who let David go, in the narrative at least, is established as an honest man of principle -- you need that in order to feel like David hadn't just escaped, but that he'd been vindicated by truth. In other words, by convincing their hypothetical audience that Whitmer was credible, by showing a sworn enemy perceiving the objective truth of it and letting him go, the narrative is really telling you that Joseph should have reduced the equation, and simply shown the plates to outsiders or even enemies, such as that mob leader, in the first place -- somebody who the hypothetical audience would take seriously.
We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don't have maybe what they're supposed to have. They get rid of some of the people who have been there for 25 years and they work great and then you throw them out and they're replaced by criminals.
Unless you live in that little town in Oregon, I'm guessing that will be the twelfth of Never?
