Incidentally, Happy 30th Birthday Marc Obohna Bohn!

Whitney’s documentary is a good stimulus for discussion, but I found it just incredibly (and I mean that in the precise sense of unbelievability) subjective, to the extent that many aspects of the Church are simply unrecognizable when filtered through Whitney’s perceptions. One usually expects that at least the visuals for a program like this will transmit unedited information, but Whitney did some of her most intrusive editing on that aspect of the program, with strange, dark and atypical depictions of Joseph Smith and Moroni and other aspects of the Church which few Mormons would recognize. I think the worst of these Whitney obfuscations was when she creates a visual to go along with the lengthy narrative of a church discipline hearing. She shows what looks like an attic level room with a high ceiling under a peaked roof, with stairs coming up behind a wooden railing where sit several tall straight-back wooden chairs and a vast empty wood floor with a single wooden chair facing the other three, a little bit of light coming in a window but overall dark and shadowed. But for a high intensity lamp, it looks like a military interrogation room at Guantanamo Bay.

In response to questions in an interview, Whitney said this totally fictional depiction of an LDS meetinghouse high council room showed her own feelings about the excommunication narrative. Clearly, she was more interested in making the viewer feel like Helen Whitney felt (who clearly identified with the female professional scholar who was narrating her own experience) than having objective information so viewers could make up their own minds. Thus, we learn as much or more about Whitney’s own estrangement and emotional distance from the idea of objectively real spiritual entities as we do about the objective entity called the Mormons. Since her worldview and attitudes are distinctly at odds with much of Mormonism, she filters and censors the Mormon experience rather drastically. A more accurate title would be “What Helen Whitney feels about the Mormons.”

Dave – As Prince described it, it is a 5 hour version that Whitney initially produced that was then pared down to the 4 hour feature that appeared on PBS. Prince, as a contributor to the documentary, was able to get the extended version that never aired. Like I said, I’ve only seen the first act, but he characterizes the whole as being more “artistic” in addition to having extra footage. He also seemed to insinuate, although I could be wrong on this, that Whitney didn’t make all the editorial decisions in deciding what was cut for the final version.