Boogie Nights

I saw Boogie Nights last night because I had heard a lot about it, and I feel like there's a lot of pop culture references to it, and I heard it was pretty good. Everyone is in this movie. Don Cheadle, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Mark Wahlberg, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Heather Graham, William H. Macy, John C. Reilly. Well, what I didn't know was that it is about a kid trying to break into the porn industry. The movie made me cringe and hate myself afterwards like Requiem for a Dream did. It's just a hard, gross picture of the dregs of humanity. It was hard to watch.

Towards the end of the movie (which took forever - it's 2.5 hours long), each of the characters' worlds started imploding. Mark Wahlberg gets involved in a drug deal that goes wrong and then gets the crap kicked out of him by some dudes in a parking lot. Don Cheadle in denied for a loan and is involved in a convenience store robbery. Heather Graham and Burt Reynolds try to mix reality and porn and kick the crap out of a random guy. Julianne Moore was denied custody of her son because of her involvement in the porn industry. Another guy goes to jail for porn.

I couldn't figure out if the ending was commentary on society not accepting pornographers and our own sexuality (some kind of puritanical backlash like what happened in Brokeback Mountain) or if it was a judgment on the pornographers for their sin and disgusting behavior (kind of like how horror movies kill off the "sinners" first).

Who knows, but it all got me thinking about purity. What is it? Why does God desire it for us? I think the answer is pretty clear of why it is desirable just by its contrast with the movie, but I want to think about it more. Should I not watch things that have a lot of pop culture references and that I hear are good because I know they're disgusting? This, of course, varies from person to person. But what exactly does purity mean?