Cipher in the Snow

The Mormon movie used to scare kids in the 1970s.

In the 1970s, we watched a lot of movies in school, always run from a projector like the one in the image above. If you were lucky, and the teacher liked you, you’d get asked to walk to the other end of the school, retrieve one of the projectors that was strapped to a cart, and roll it back to the classroom. Some of us were allowed to thread the film into the projector and get it running — I was one of those kids.

For one thing, we watched movies that were meant to prepare us for the imminent conversion to the metric system. That never did catch on, did it?

But of all the films we watched, two haunt me to this day.

The first was called, The Boy Who Liked Deer. Produced in 1975 by the Learning Corporation of America, this 18-minute short tells the story of Jason, a generally good kid who likes visiting the deer at a local preserve.

However, like Eddie Haskell in Leave It To Beaver, Jason is a different person when he’s around his buddies, Marc and Greg. With them, he’s a bad egg — a vandal who doesn’t care about other people, doesn’t pay attention in class, and generally makes bad choices.

One day in school, for instance, Jason and his buddies don’t listen as his teacher reads from a beloved, first edition copy of the poems of e.e. cummings. A few days later, the bad boys break into the school, destroying the classroom. Jason himself tears page after page from the prized book.

When you watch this scene of the teacher discovering the destruction, I want you to consider how this hit a 10-year-old me, sitting in a dark classroom in Cornelia Elementary School in 1979.

Jason gets his comeuppance. He and his buddies messed around at the deer sanctuary, too, and they inadvertently opened a bag of rat poison that kills all the deer.

Well, actually, they’re not dead. When Jason arrives the next day, the deer are in the process of dying! They’re groaning in pain and lethargically kicking as the caretaker prepares to load them onto a flatbed.

Jason runs away, and the caretaker calls after him, “Hey kid, come help me. Don't take it so hard. I know you liked the deer!”

Maybe Jason was thinking of Augustine, who stole some pears around his same age, and later wrote,

Those pears truly were pleasant to the sight; but it was not for them that my miserable soul lusted, for I had abundance of better, but those I plucked simply that I might steal. For, having plucked them, I threw them away, my sole gratification in them being my own sin, which I was pleased to enjoy.

But there’s another film from the same era of my life that left an even more profound impression, a film that we watched every year in grade school. It’s called Cipher in the Snow, and it was produced by Latter Day Films — that is, the Mormons.

Two minutes into the film, Cliff, on a rowdy bus on the way to school, asks to get off.

He steps off the bus and falls face first into a snowbank.

Dead.

Now, before considering the redeeming qualities of this movie — if there are any — I want you again to put yourself in my seat, that of an elementary school student, watching a short film that opens with a kid dying — of no apparent ailment! He simply dropped dead. And it turns out, he probably died of loneliness!

His math teacher is tasked with writing Cliff’s obituary, and in the course of his research he finds that Cliff was bullied by his classmates and his stepfather. In the school he was a nobody, a cipher.

In the end, Cliff’s math teacher takes a vow never to let another kid slip through the cracks. And frankly, that’s who this film should have been shown to: teachers!

But no, they subjected us kids to it.

I remember going out on recess with my buddies and acting out the movie — one of us would play Cliff and face-plant dead in the snow, while all the others laughed and mocked — our own little Oberammergau.

Those were the days.

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