The Old School Lunch

[Because apparantly every Amish kid during Rumspringa starts smoking]

The first time I put Devil’s Playground in my netflix queue, they sent me the wrong DVD. It was Devil’s Playground, alright, but it was some weird 70’s movie about some dark night at a church.

Anyways, this time I got the actual documentary and some interesting things I learned:

1. The Amish aren’t necessarily so anti-technology as people would believe. One guy cites an example of how an Amish community could potentially embrace a solar-powered battery charger while completely dimissing cars and motorcycles. It’s not so much about hating anything that require electricity as opposed to seeing how certain new things could negatively impact the “slow down, enjoy the scenery, don’t obsess about material things” community attitude.

And, unfortunately, that’s about it. I can’t name anything else. This was a very disappointing documentary because I feel that it could’ve been so much more but concentrated to exhaustion on the teen partying/drugs/alcohol “I want freedom” one-sided aspect of it while almost completely ignoring anything that has to do with gender, sexism, or race. I don’t know, but when in the beginning you have an Amish girl saying something along the lines of “you’re supposed to have kids until you can’t have any more” and “women are the weaker sex so they don’t do men’s work” it’s probably something to follow up on as the kids venture outside into the world. They do sorta get into it with that Velma/Verba character but that’s more of an “I want an education and career and choices” thing (though she does say that if she returned to the church, she’d have two kids by now) but it’s not nearly enough or specific enough. The documentary does dangle some bait at you though when one Amish girl says “during Rumspringa, the boys dress in English clothes but the girls usually still wear the traditional clothing” at which point you’d think “hmm, the filmmaker probably asked a follow up asking why, right?” Wrong. No follow up because either they didn’t think it was important or they wanted us to come to our own conclusions which I think is pretty lazy documentary filmmaking.

And race. I have a hard time believing that a kid growing up in an Amish community who is suddenly thrown into the “English” world doesn’t have any sort of questions or experiences regarding race. There isn’t one single mention of race anywhere in the documentary and actually I don’t think I saw any person of color in the entire film. Emma comes the closest because I suspect people will think she’s mixed American Indian or something but even that’s a huge stretch. The kids didn’t make one sort of comment like “woah, there are all these different kids of people in the world” during the entire filming process? Really?