When Liberated hits movie screens this fall, audiences will witness Spring Break party scenes from South Padre to Panama City Beach and ending in Cancun. But this isn’t your conventional sex-fueled romp, designed to pack movie theaters with hormonal teenagers and young adults.
Liberated attempts to answer questions about how our conception of gender fuels our sexuality and the role the media plays in shaping our ideas about what it means to be a man and women in today’s culture.
The film has a Baylor connection: Sarah-Jane Murray, Baylor’s popular Associate Professor of Great Texts and Creative Writing, is the executive producer. Director Benjamin Nolot met with Murray following completion of his previous film, Nefarious, in order to teach his team about storytelling structure and resonance.
Liberated is the second film from an organization called Exodus Cry, which has been “built on a foundation of prayer and is committed to abolishing sex slavery through Christ-centered prevention, intervention, and holistic restoration of trafficking victims,” according to its website. Liberated focuses on western culture and examines “a society where sex sells, where women are expected to conform to an idealized sexual image, and where men are “socialized to consume money for sex.”
“We have taken this really powerful human act that is the only way for two human beings to wholly give themselves to each other and we have so exploited it and overexposed it, trivialized it, monetized it in every way possible,” says Nolot. “We’ve stripped it of all meaning… I think that is what has resulted in the fact that one out of five girls will be sexually assaulted during their time in college, which is totally unacceptable.”
Murray says she’s already seen “tremendous” interest by some Baylor offices to show Liberated on campus this fall, and that a number of students have expressed interest in helping to promote the film.
“Our community is committed to pushing back against these kinds of forces at play in our culture,” Murray says.
Murray said that before she met No-lot, sex trafficking was mostly a statistic to her, although she did recognize it as a significant problem. But then she heard the story of a girl in Cambodia left to bleed to death by her purchaser.
“What really got me that day is that the girl whose story he was telling was 3 or 4 years old,” Murray said. “I have a little nephew that age and my brain literally could not wrap around it. I remember telling Benji that I just needed to sell all of my stuff and move to Cambodia.. he put his hands on my shoulders and said ‘No SJ, you have to fight it with your pen.'”
Instead of focusing on guilt or shame, Liberated attempts to empathize with young adults and uncover the culture in which they have been raised.
“Our goal is to understand that we are being fed this script by the media about how we should engage and relate to one another and that script is broken,” Murray said. “It is to some extent making victims of all of us.”
Nolot described a young woman named Kimmy who participated in a bikini contest over Spring Break. Recalling Kimmy’s vulnerability after the contest, Nolot said, “You live in anxiety and fear. You lived trapped in the pornographic imagination of men. You live trapped seeing yourself through the lustful male gaze and wondering ‘Is this body part big enough? Is this body part tight enough?’”
However, it became clear through the production process that women are not the only ones motivated by societal expectations. Several, young men opened up to Nolot about the pressure they feel to participate in the “hookup culture.”
“Men are portrayed in our culture as being strong, powerful, not having emotions and using women,” Nolot said. “It was interesting to see them open up at that level and say that there is an element of pressure to conformity into this hyper masculinity that has become sort of the norm in our culture.”
Quoting Nicaraguan author Gioconda Belli, Nolot said, “We have had a sexual revolution, but the sexual revolution has only made sex more pervasive. It hasn’t granted the level of reverence and respect that it should have.”
Though Liberated deals with explicit and heartbreaking issues, there is hope. Murray saw this hope when one of the young men who participated in the party scenes on the beach reached out to Nolot with an update.
“Since filming Liberated, he has completely changed his life,” Murray said. “He quit drinking, doing drugs, and treating women that way. He now wants to tour with the film when he’s available in the fall and speak on college campuses about why he changed his life. I really believe that this film that Benji has put together has the power to not only tell a story but to change lives.”
She went on to say that “My hope is that regardless of how people are living their lives when they watch the film that instead of thinking of this heuristic point of view into the lives of other people, we ask ourselves the question ‘how am I fueling this?’ When it comes to the entertainment and media world, we are consumers. We must become more conscious of the choices we’re making and divest in things in which we no longer believe. We don’t have to be prisoners of this script.”
