When I was in high school, I ran into one of my teachers at a local art theater. They were showing Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart. It's about a rich French kid with a heart murmur who has sex with his mother. I was there to see the same movie, of course, so I couldn't shame him, but it was only about twelve years earlier that a teacher from the same school was nearly fired when some parents saw her buying a ticket to The Graduate.
Some years later, I knew a high school teacher who ran into a couple of her students at a porno film. They were excited to see her.
"Are you 18?" she asked them.
"No, but it's okay," they assured her.
I don't know where I'm going with this or why.
In high school, they showed us a horrible school movie. It was set in the Civil War. A horrible, scrawny, pasty, long-haired hippie plays a Confederate soldier who flees from a battle, swims naked in a river and is shot and killed by some Union soldiers. It was just horrible. Worst full frontal nude scene I've ever seen in a fiction film. Why would they put that in a movie and why would they show that movie in a school? The teacher warned us that there'd be a naked guy in it. I'm sorry I didn't opt out.
At the time, I had the idea that the filmmakers were trying to cash in on the success of "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge". I don't know why the Confederates are always the heroes/victims in these things. There are contemporary photographs of Civil War soldiers and none of them had long stringy hair.
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