Dir Mirjam von Arx
For the Wilson family, every little girl gets to be a princess for a day. But it comes at horrifying cost. The patriarch of the family, Randy Wilson, founded the American custom of purity balls: ceremonies where daughters dress up in gowns and promise their fathers that they will remain virgins until marriage. The film focuses on Randy and his oldest unmarried daughter Jordan (22 years old).
The film is predictably disturbing, not because the family has hidden secrets or are hypocritical monsters, but because they really do embody their own twisted Christian ideals. The mood in the Wilson home is suffocating. Von Arx described the feeling of filming the Wilsons as “claustrophobic” and it is comes across in the movie. Their entire existence is wrapped up in gender norms that are so restrictive being a woman is a full time job for the Wilson ladies. Jordan waits to meet her husband while she teaches other young ladies to embody grace and manners at workshops she organizes. And every goddamn (sorry, I mean gosh darn) thing the family does is marked by some strange ceremony they invented for the occasion, always preceded by exhausting beauty prep.
Von Arx sometimes seems to reach a little when stating the political importance of the Wilsons, but their story is no doubt important when you consider how many people in America are either just like the Wilsons or aspire to be. Perhaps most shocking of all is how sympathetically the family is represented in the movie. They are constantly reaffirming how much they love each other and they are principled, even if their principles are grotesque to most liberal-minded audiences. The audience was obviously at once horrified and drawn in by the Wilsons. Despite a pointed and often mocking Q&A discussion of the documentary, when Von Arx announced that after the film wrapped Jordan did indeed marry the man of her dreams, the crowd cheered.
If you missed Virgin Tales at VIFF, a shorter cut will air on CBC television on October 20 on the Passionate Eye.
I watched this documentary on CBC last night. It truly was creepy. The scene during the ball when the father places the ring on his daughter’s ring finger made my skin crawl. I truly feel for these girls and, indeed, the boys. The message is that dad owns your body until he sees fit to hand it over to another guy, but only if he agrees to marry you. Ew. The scene of the couple speaking about the first year of marriage was very telling as well. They seemed to be saying we thought we knew and liked each other but now we find we don’t but we accept that we are stuck because of our beliefs. How truly sad. I fear for my daughter’s future if this “movement”, if it can be called that, truly takes hold and gains traction. Thank goodness we live in Canada.
Men controlling women… That is all this is. I don’t condone promiscuous sex, I think it can be harmful, but this film was downright insulting. And why aren’t the dads having little “purity” balls for their sons?