YMMV / Rock: It's Your Decision

• Accidental Aesop: The dangers of indoctrination.
  • One could read Jeff's hate-filled speech in the end — where he completely misses the point of the songs he lists off — as a example of how hateful people with their mind made up can deliberately misinterpret the meaning of anything to fit their bias agenda.
  • Reverend Owen, at one point, tells Jeff's mom how Jeff could easily use Bible quotes as a argument for why soap operas are as bad as rock and roll. While the movie wants to use this as a point to show that Jeff's mom is a hypocrite, both rock and roll and soap operas are harmless, enjoyable forms of entertainment. If anything, Owen making that claim just instead shows how easily someone can use scripture to condemn anything they dislike as a means of justification, no matter how silly or irrelevant it might be as an argument.
  • Don't cram your beliefs down other peoples' throats. No matter what your views are, it is not your place to try and actively force people what to think or believe. Likewise, don't be shocked if your judgmental attitude only drives people away from you when you act like that.
• Alternate Aesop Interpretation:
  • Stay away from fundamentalist Christianity, or else you'll end up becoming a bigoted jerk and losing all your friends and loved ones in the process.
  • Be willing to question what your family and authority figures tell you, rather than just accepting it uncritically and adjusting your life around what they think you're supposed to be like. Grown-ups are wrong sometimes, and you making the same mistakes as them, far from making them right, makes you wrong too.
  • Talk to your kids about concerns you have, especially when it comes to the media they consume, and listen to them when they explain their views on the subject rather than being an authoritarian about it... or worse still, just pawning them off on someone else who might fill their heads with not-so-great ideas or accidentally get them to start acting in ways that aren't healthy.
  • For that matter, when people like Jeff already have Confirmation Bias towards something like Rock and Roll (and indeed, anything or anyone else that they go out of their way to hate), they will easily twist the meaning and interpretation of said thing to fit their own biased view points, even when it clearly is not the intended meaning. A fundamentalist will only ever see what they want to see, regardless of the actual facts.
  • Jeff loses all his friends as the movie progresses, and this movie wants to use it to show how Jeff is to be admired for sticking to his beliefs. The problem is, however, that the reason Jeff starts losing all of his friends in the first place is because he repeatedly tries to force his views onto people and jump on them when they don't share the same beliefs. Understandably, his friends get sick of his judgmental attitude and stop wanting anything to do with him. Instead of the movie making you admire Jeff for actively taking a stand against temptation, it can be used to show how when you just attack and vilify people for enjoying something you don't like, no sane person will tolerate what you are doing. If Jeff simply respected his friends' opinions instead of personally attacking them for their viewpoints, they would have done the same for him.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Due to the nature of the film many see Jeff's story as less of a movement against sin, and more the story of an innocent boy who only liked fairly harmless music twisted by his controlling, fundamentalist elders into a bigoted Jerkass. From that point one can see Jeff as a Designated Hero who forces his opinions on others, or a tragic Jerkass Woobie whose perceptions on life were heavily warped, and ultimately ends up driving away everyone who cared about him.
  • Alternately, since fundamentalist religion obliges people to be intolerant of beliefs that don't match their own, then Jeff, from a fundamentalist perspective, doesn't become a Jerkass at all, but a Wide-Eyed Idealist, and his insistence on forcing his views on other people is not twisted or Jerkass behaviour but Jeff giving his loved ones plenty of What the Hell, Hero?, because Being Good Sucks.^note If, in the story, the other characters don't listen to Jeff and his warnings go unheeded, then this is genuinely a Clueless Aesop, since all it goes to show is just that Jeff is rubbish at bringing other people around to his faith. If it were effective fundamentalist propaganda, his conviction would be such that everyone he calls out would not reject him, but mysteriously come to agree with him, because such is the power of God. But, like most fundamentalists, the filmmakers seem to be willing to forget about Matthew 7:21.
  • Some viewers (like this Agony Booth reviewer) have interpreted Jeff as being a deeply closeted homosexual.
• Bile Fascination: Many people check out this film to mock its wildly and often hilariously misinformed warnings over an otherwise innocent form of entertainment, as well as to point out how its flimsy effort instead comes back as a warning against its fundamentalist leanings.
• Broken Aesop: The action in this film is spurred by Jeff's mother becoming concerned about Jeff's recent bad attitude. Examples of his "bad" behavior include mouthing off to his mother and other boundary-pushing behaviors found in pretty much all children of any time period. In fact, Jeff seems to be a pretty good kid; he even feels guilty about talking back to his mother and delivers an unforced apology. It's later, after he's supposedly a better person, that he unrepentantly screams at her for (in his eyes, at least) being a hypocrite. Somehow showing us a kid that's pretty normal, or even better-behaved than average (if anything, talking back to your parents at least a little bit is considered healthy, part of a perfectly normal stage of development as a teen begins to set boundaries and define themselves as separate from their parents), turning into a judgmental creep doesn't exactly sell the "rock music makes your kids rebellious" message.
• Confirmation Bias: Jeff engages heavily in this, as does the film itself. It rarely lets the other side have a voice, and presents Jeff's arguments at the end in a format that doesn't allow for the other side to be explored. At no point is Christian Rock even discussed, nor does anyone ask Jeff if artists without overtly demonic, sexual, or blasphemous lyrics are equally as wrong just for performing "rock music."
• Designated Hero:
  • Jeff, although not at first. He starts out as a relatively normal kid until he slowly transforms into a bigoted hateful religious fundamentalist Jerkass who disowns rock music and tries to force everyone around him to do the same and dumps his friends for listening to the genre. He even yells at his own mother for watching soap-operas thinking they are evil.
  • Jeff's Mother is meant to be a Christian woman at the end of her rope about what to do with her rebellious child, but the way she's written, she's a Hypocrite that barely involves herself in her kids' life (even being told off by the Reverend for not knowing his interest in rock music before he got his stereo and refusing to discuss it with him after), has more of a mind to sic other people in Jeff's life on him like an angry dog when he steps out of line than actually try to converse with him, and is seemingly more preoccupied with using Christian Fundamentalism to make the music stop than the quality of the media he's consuming. (besides the movie pointing out her (harmless, but sinful in the movie's context) soap opera interests, she isn't shown even GOING to church until the tail end of the movie). Tellingly, when he pulls out the Soap Opera line after "relapsing", she SLAPS him, which she gets NO comeuppance for, other than a few lines at the end where they say they talked it over and everyone's good now.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: For a movie that's about extolling the evils of rock music, it has amazingly good taste in it.
• Don't Shoot the Message: Many Christians who feel that more people should be with the religion see this movie and feel this is not the way to do it.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Jeff has renounced rock music and purified his soul, yet he's become an alienated religious fanatic with paranoid delusions about an artistic medium he once enjoyed and an even rockier relationship with his mother than he had previously. He has also lost friends over his change in attitude and for that matter despite his new found faith, Jeff has become a far worse person then when he was simply a somewhat mouthy but still seemly decent kid that liked rock and roll.
• Strawman Has a Point: We're meant to see Marty and Melissa as antagonists trying to tempt Jeff back into his old ways. But they make some valid points about him becoming a "fanatic" as he repeatedly tries to push his new lifestyle choices on them and others.
  • Melissa seems pretty justified in being angry with Jeff for cancelling his plans to go to a rock concert with her — which, for reference, were plans made months in advance for her birthday — because of a deal with his youth pastor he made only recently. Threatening to take another guy to the concert may seem a bit harsh, but she does apologize for it later.
  • Later, Jeff gets angry with Marty for playing rock music at a party he was hosting in his own house. Yet we're expected to take Jeff's side earlier when he refuses to let Melissa listen to a rock station when he's giving her a ride in his car. Marty even rightfully tells Jeff that if it bothers him that much, he should just leave instead of staying there complaining and ruining everyone else's good time. Likewise Marty through out the whole movie constantly points out how judgmental and unbearable Jeff is acting when ever Jeff starts talking about Rock music.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Jeff's best friend Marty, who repeatedly shoots down Jeff's misinformed comments against rock music and is openly critical of Jeff's growing intolerance of those who listen to it. It's clear the film intended to paint him in a negative light for defending himself, and yet he comes off as one of the few people with any common sense in the wake of Jeff's constant ravings. Even though the movie isn't trying to intent it, Marty makes many good points against Jeff.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The main character is meant to come off as a good Christian trying to steer clear from the "sins" of rock and roll and save others from it, but instead he comes off as a closed-minded and bigoted jerkass to anyone who doesn't share the same values and interpretations of Christianity as the protagonist (and then in some cases, as many Christians have no difficulty reconciling their faith and an enjoyment of secular entertainment). Ironically enough Jeff was a nicer person when he was listing to the supposedly "sinful" rock music then when he actually got religious.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The film's premise counts, as while the belief that rock music is Satanic or evil was all but dead by 1982, the belief is mostly seen as a joke even amongst Evangelical Christians apart from highly fundamentalist circles.
  • Jeff citing rock musicians known to be homosexual as evidence of the alleged evils of rock. Nowadays such a view would get Jeff labelled as a bigot, probably even within his church. In the early 80's, there was still quite a bit of rampant homophobia among rank-and-file Americans, even the non-religious, with many viewing the AIDS epidemic as proof that homosexuals were dangerous, but even then, it was a view that was starting to change.

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