Devil's Playground

Devil's Playground
by Lucy Walker

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DVD Reviews of Devil's Playground

DVD Review: Amish Demystification
Summary: 3 Stars

When Amish teenagers turn sixteen they are encouraged to leave their communities and experience the pleasures and conveniences of life in the outside "English" world. This period is called Rumspringa (literally "running around") and is intended to ensure that the Amish who come back into the fold will have made a conscious choice to do so. The appeal to free will is well-intentioned, but ultimately disingenuous. When given their first taste of adult freedom, Amish teenagers do what any other teenagers do: they drink too much, have sex, and spend a lot of time driving around in cars. For most teenagers this is just a phase. For the Amish it's the preliminary to the most important decision of their life: whether or not to join the Amish church. The subjects of Walker's documentary are no better prepared for the trials of adolescence than any other group of sixteen year olds, and it comes as no surprise that most of them, after a few tumultuous years, seem ready to return to a way of life that represents family, security, and a rock-solid sense of identity.

Rumspringa, an Amish elder says at one point, is really a vaccination. You get just enough of a taste of the outside world so that when you give it up you won't wonder what you're missing. His candor is winning, as is the level-headedness of most of the Amish elders Walker interviews. Her main subjects are the kids, but they are in many ways like deeply religious small-town kids anywhere: confused and self-obsessed, but basically decent, and given to projecting a theological dimension onto the normal pains of growing up. Beneath the strange clothing is a familiar conflict between piety and hell-raising.

It's in the interviews with Amish adults that the most intriguing aspects of Amish society are revealed. Despite the horse-and-buggy trappings, the Amish are not opposed to technology per se, just technology that they consider disruptive to their way of life. So cars and televisions are out, but a solar-powered battery charger is fine. (You can imagine a hippie commune reaching a similar conclusion after much earnest debate.) Their attitude towards sex, while hardly permissive, is surprisingly laid-back and pragmatic: a little premarital fooling around can be overlooked as long as it leads to an Amish marriage and Amish children. The adults interviewed for this film come across as relaxed and candid, and have none of the prickly self-righteousness you find in other religious conservatives. Their condemnations of the outside world are rote, without any real heat. It appears that in choosing never to engage the modern world, either as participants or evangelicals, they feel little need to either judge it or defend themselves. In their inwardness, the Amish seem more like Hasidic Jews than Christian fundamentalists.

But Hassids still drive cars. Despite their conviction, you still come away wondering how long the Amish way of life can last. In one telling interview, a preacher bemoans the way work has changed. Fifty years ago, he says, Amish children would have stayed home and helped out on the farm. Now they go to work in a factory, get some money, and the next thing you know, they want to buy a car. Now here's a battle that started back when everyone drove a horse and buggy. For family ties and religious values to overwhelm teenage rebellion is the easy part. The hard part comes when an agrarian way of life squares off against factory jobs and pocket money.