Stunned!
September Dawn Revisted

As the last scene faded from the screen and the film credits started to roll past, the audience was too stunned to speak, or even move. It wasn’t your typical Friday night Hollywood movie experience.

Last year, I wrote about how the biggest movie to be made about the Mountain Meadow Massacre wasn’t being shown anywhere near where it happened. (See: If If You Look Guilty Then…). I wrote, “The Mormons are making a serious mistake because they still look guilty.”

True enough. When I was researching that article, I was only able to find one theater in all of Utah showing the movie September Dawn. It was a mainstream film timed to reach the market just before the 150th anniversary of the massacre. For a mass distribution Hollywood movie, that has to be a statement that says something.

But as I sat in that unnaturally quiet auditorium here in the heart of Color Country, for the first time, I could begin to see why. I could only imagine what was going through the minds of some of the people in that audience. It’s quite likely that some of them were related to the people who were shown on the screen killing innocents in the Fancher wagon train.

I was proud of my community, however. In much of the world, you can be killed for daring to talk about a side of things that people in power don’t want exposed. But in our little community, we’re not afraid to look at another point of view. We’re willing to listen and decide for ourselves. The rest of Utah might want to shut the door. We open it.

This particular door had an unpleasant surprise behind it. They could have made an honest film; one that developed the incredible tension that must have existed between the early Mormons and the Fancher wagon train. But they didn’t. This film makes Mormons into dead-eyed fanatics, and their leaders into grotesque distortions. And it made the wagon train victims into pure and wholesome innocents. That wasn’t how it was.

I don’t excuse the Mormons for this crime. And Mormon leadership has a lot to account for. But the reasons the massacre happened are not simple, good versus evil reasons. They’re hard to understand. The truth is usually messy, complicated, and difficult. But this film was easy to understand. That’s usually a reliable sign of a lie being told.

It did make me think. And what I thought this time was strangely opposite to what I thought last fall. The people in that audience could see that this was a lie that was just dressed up in facts. The filmmakers made a serious mistake because when you tell lies, you just make yourself look like a liar.

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Countdown: 297 days until the end of the Bush nightmare.