Mortified Nation

Mortified Nation is a pretty fun little documentary. It's kind of part documentary and part comedy show. It will make you laugh, relate, but it will also move you. It didn't exactly blow me away or bring anything new to the table, but it does work.

The whole idea is that there's a live show called Mortified that is in different major cities across the United States where people get up on stage and read their humorous and embarrassing diary entries from when they were kids and teens. It exposes that point in a persons life where they are figuring out who they are. There's a mix of interviews of the performers and show creators, and the actual performances. These performances are always funny, but range from the laugh out loud story of a teen who keeps trying to convince himself that he's NOT gay, even after having a sexual encounter with another guy, to a girl whose mother was abusive (but the humorous side is still there).

At the end of the film, you will have laughed a lot, but you'll probably feel better about your past embarrassing situations. It kinda shows that stuff like that, and even hard times, eventually will become something that doesn't matter anymore, and perhaps you can even laugh about it. Or maybe not.

There's a lot of high anxiety involved in being a teenager. I've a grand daughter going through it right now and it's frustrating trying to connect with her. And, wouldn't you know it, just as I was pondering what I could do, this documentary comes up on the Sundance Channel with a partial answer. Have her watch this movie! Now this will hardly be a risk-free or even acceptable ploy for many parents. There's some very graphic talk about explicit sex in about an eighth of this movie and some parents will want to 'protect' their children from it. The genius of this raw language, though, is that it's not that important to the movie though it definitely belongs as it's in the words of a hormone addled teenager. The heart of this movie and the phenomenon which it documents is in its title, mortification, not some sexual titillation. It's about being extremely embarrassed to reveal, years later, to an audience what you wrote to yourself in your diary or journal as a kid.

As one of the participants explains, there's a precious moment won in doing so that's been lost to you since you were that anxious teenager. Almost without exception everything you thought you were the only person on earth to feel or think is shown to have been experienced by a wide number of your fellow citizens. The resulting laughter is quite genuine and somehow extremely therapeutic. This is not anything I'd do, for sure, but I can't help admiring these brave souls for doing it on our behalf, and I can't help thinking there isn't an adolescent in the country who wouldn't benefit from hearing it now, while they're going through it, for the solace it offers.

I've never seen anything more likely to break through to teenagers whether straight or gay, male or female. I've given this movie a very high rating, not for its cinematic niceties but for its message which is: the mortified movement is quite unique and valuable.

"Mortified Nation" is an unusual documentary, to say the least. It's a film about a strange phenomenon where people get up on stage (like a stand-up comedian) and read their childhood diaries to the crowds. Mostly, the readers focus on the truly awful and embarrassing things they wrote when they were young, though later in the film some very poignant and even sad diary entries are read. Interestingly, after this was done in one city, the idea has caught on it's spread to many other cities--and folks are volunteering to get up and bear their souls for the audiences' entertainment!

The film is not perfect. After a while, the film does lose its momentum just a bit and might have benefited from a slight editing. Still, the film is daring and innovative. It also fits in wonderfully with the philosophy and psychotherapy of Albert Ellis, an amazingly brash and successful guy who encouraged his patients to deliberately embarrass themselves in order to make themselves stronger and no longer controlled by irrational fears. Well worth seeing.