At 30,000 Feet, Another Busybody

After having been pretty much ejected from Belfast's Waterfront Hall on Wednesday night, I marveled at the fact that, since starting this blog, I never seem to have to look for liberties-related subjects — they find me. It's the damndest thing.

Within 24 hours, things got weirder still.

On Thursday's United Airlines flight 919 from London Heathrow to Washington Dulles, the main entertainment consisted of three movies. I Robot and Shall We Dance unfolded without incident, but about twenty minutes into Alfie, the flight crew pressed the stop button and made a grave announcement. The rest of the movie would not be shown; a passenger had complained that the film was "not suitable for children."

And that was that. For the next several hours, everyone on board — including the 419 passengers who hadn't squealed — was treated to Disney Channel fare.

In the galley, I had a friendly conversation with two flight attendants. Who had made the complaint? A woman (American, unsurprisingly) who was shocked to find her 13-year-old son subjected to a few seconds of simulated on-screen nookie. (Remember that inflight movies are edited for content, and that extra-salty language and particularly steamy scenes have all been altered or removed so as to cause the least possible offense). A fellow passenger scoffed aloud that the mother should look under her son's mattress, because she was likely to find much more objectionable material there.

I pressed on: Did United have a policy regarding such complaints? No, the flight attendants said; whether or not to halt the movie was left to the cabin crew's discretion. It's not a situation that arises very often; with many years of experience between them, they'd only been through this sort of thing two or three times before, they added.

To their credit, they weren't pleased about having felt obligated to pull the plug, and I sympathized: either way, they'd get blamed. One of the attendendants voiced my own sentiment exactly when she said of the complainant: "You'd think she could have just read a nice magazine or something, and told her son to do the same."

The interesting thing was that over the next half hour or so, passengers began politely debating the issue. Four people who'd been loitering in the galley and had overheard my conversation with the flight attendants, or had heard about it from others, came over to introduce themselves and offer their own assessments. The movie's apparent "lack of respect for women" was discussed, and we ventured into theoretical territory: if misogyny was an issue, then would anyone have complained about a James Bond movie, in which most women are inconsequential playthings? (Probably not, we concluded.) How much steaminess is too much? Why is a few seconds of skin a problem when scenes of people getting ripped apart by bullets pass unchallenged? Two fellow passengers I heard from said they'd write United a letter arguing the movie shouldn't have been stopped — that's it's not the airline's responsibility to be its customers' nanny.

It's not a stretch to believe that similar probing exchanges took place in other sections of the plane. And despite everything, that was kind of cool.

Here are my questions to the woman who demanded that the movie be aborted: Since no one was forcing you or your son to watch the movie, why didn't you just avert your eyes — play a game, read a book, take a nap? Why insist that more than 400 people may not see a film because you didn't happen to like a few seconds of it? Why demand that the cabin crew play the parent? Isn't that your job?

And also two questions for United: Why is one single complaint enough to ruin the show for the rest of your customers? Why not tell this woman to take a hike — right there at 30,000 feet if she likes? As far as I'm concerned, you don't even owe her a parachute.

[posted by Rogier]

Comments

[Poustman]

She complained. The 419 didn't, or not effectively enough to get their way. That's power politics in a market setting.

In these kind of struggles, you have a vociferous minority, and a phlegmatic majority.

As always, the squeaky wheel gets the oil.

The Falwell types have been learning their lessons, and have been focusing on not only out-reproducing the other side (majority) but out-shouting it, too (vociferous). Don't know how anyone is going to beat a vociferous majority.