So, I get this email from a reporter from a national magazine, wanting to find someone with academic credentials, who knows Mormon culture, knows the Halestorm films, can talk intelligibly about Mormon theology. So I figured, okay, that sort of sounds like me, but before the interview, I figured I'd better at least see The Home Teachers, the only one of the Halestorm films I hadn't seen.

Rented it, brought it home, my daughter and I watched it in stupefied horror. I'm getting convinced there are really only two critical possibilities with the Halestorm films. Either they're just inept, aggressively unfunny and then, at the end, sentimental attempts at farce, or they're the most brutal, savage satires on Mormonism imaginable. They're utterly inhuman, but, man, they may be on to something.

Eric Snider has pointed out that, if comedy is based on truth, then the Halestorm films aren't funny, because there's no way an actual human being would ever behave the way the characters behave in these films. No truth=no comedy. To take The Home Teachers for example. It's about two home teachers, one, named Nelson (Jeff Birk), very gung-ho about getting his numbers, the other, Greg (Michael Birkeland), a real slacker, mostly interested in getting the home teaching thang over with so he can get back to his football game.

Okay, on their first visit, Greg pretends to go to the bathroom so he can listen to the game on the radio. He accidentally topples a lawn gnome into the toilet, then flushes, flooding the bathroom. The toilet doesn't just flood, it sprays him in the face like a broken water main. He sprints around trying to find something to mop up the mess with, opens a closet, finds nothing but a wedding dress. So he mops up this filthy toilet water with the wedding dress. Eventually, the water drips onto, and ruins, the family's dinner, and Greg falls through the ceiling onto the kitchen table. At which point, the home teachers say their goodbyes, leaving this poor woman, the hometeachee, weeping in her yard, holding her wedding dress.

None of this is remotely plausible, and none of it is remotely amusing. Absolutely nobody on earth is going to destroy someone else's home and not stick around to help clean it up, or use a wedding dress to mop up filth. It's a horrifying little sequence, frankly. Toilets don't behave that way, and neither do human beings.

But maybe that's the point. Maybe the point is that Mormonism involves this horrific, soul sucking ideology that drives people mad, so mad that they forget what it means to be a human being, so insane that they utterly abandon even the rudiments of friendship or kindness, or compassion. Maybe this moment, instead of just being an inept piece of bad filmmaking, is instead an utterly ferocious satire on some kind of fundamental inhumanity within Mormonism itself.

Or maybe, just maybe, both things are possible. Maybe Kurt Hale and Dave Hunter are really bad filmmakers, but like many workers in the pop culture vineyard, their vino has more veritas than they realize. Maybe what their films suggest is that underneath the veneer of active Mormon happiness is a terrible, sad, loneliness, an aching need for some kind of humanity not found in the ideology itself.

So what else in the films might suggest this interpretation:

a) In The RM, the main premise is that a guy comes home from his mission and his family has moved without telling him. This is, once again, an utterly inhuman sort of behavior. Nobody, but nobody, would ever actually do that. But maybe that's the point.

b) in The RM, the main character discovers that his girlfriend, who he thinks has waited for him and who he thinks of essentially as his fianc�e, has dumped him, and is engaged to someone else, and doesn't feel remotely bad about any of it. And when he tells his mom, she gives him that absent "that's too bad, dear," I give my children when they were three and showed me a little owie. Do we really treat courtship and marriage that cavalierly? Are we that unfeeling? Maybe so, and maybe that's the point.

c) In The Home Teachers, Nelson finally admits that his wife has left him because while she was in labor for their first child, he went on splits with the missionaries, because he's put it in his planner for that night. And so she gave birth alone. I can barely bring myself to imagine a more inhuman act. Now, the movie doesn't say that's okay, thank heavens. But it does say that it happens. (it also says she forgives him and comes home, which I doubt).

d) I've said enough about the bizarre dynamic of Singles Ward, in which making fun of the culture is equated with attacking the Church, in a film that does very little else except make fun of the culture.

e) in The Home Teachers, these two guys drive hours out of their way in order to home teach a family who are out of town attending a funeral. They show no interest in grieving with the family--they couldn't make clearer the fact that they want to get their numbers. Inhuman barely begins to sum up that little episode.

I find myself wondering how much of his passive-aggressive, cover-it-up-with-a-happy-ending Mormonism-as-inhuman-ideology emerges in all the other LDS films. I think it's there. In Charly, her conversion and marriage, in addition to being unmotivated and unconvincing, end up looking utterly bleak next to her pre-conversion life in Manhattan. The Best Two Years isn't a bad little film, but I detest its blame-the-girlfriend subtheme: the number one problem faced by the male missionaries in that film are the faithless little tramps back home. I served a European mission, and I can attest that the number one problem we faced is nothing more complicated than the fact that when absolutely nobody you talk to has any interest whatsoever in what you have to say, it makes for a real tough mission, (Second were the nasty little Nazis that kept getting promoted to mission leader status).

So, this reporter was going to talk to me about Halestorm film, and I was about to go on a rant; I was loaded for bear. And it turns out the reporter had seen all the Halestorm films, and thought they were great. Her whole point was that people tend to think of Mormons as a branch of right wing Evangelicals, maybe a little blander, a little less charismatic than Pentacostals, but with a wacky history. But evangelicals don't make films making fun of evangelical culture, and we've got these popular films making fun of our culture, and isn't that neat. And so maybe we're not evangelicals at all; maybe it's more complicated.

So I agreed, and we had a nice chat about humor in Mormonism, which it seems to me there's a lot of. And so I'm settling down a little, and deciding that the Halestorm films really aren't as savage as I think, and maybe they're just bad films, no big deal and 'nuff said.

Still, there's something weird going on. I mean, three farces with no sex at all? Isn't that sort of inhuman too, the utter unwillingness to deal with sexuality in our films? But it's late, and I need my Prozac.

Eric Samuelsen