Director Deborah Kampmeier’s controversial film Hounddog has the spotlight at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, currently underway in Park City, Utah. Hounddog, which premiered Monday night, for the most part sounds like a compelling, feel-good drama — except for a scene in which the young protagonist, played by Dakota Fanning, is raped. It’s an image that has left some viewers disgusted and outraged. With phrases like “child exploitation” and “child pornography” floating all over the blogosphere in response to the scene, Fanning — Hollywood veteran at the tender age of 12 — insists in that oh-so-precocious way of hers, “It’s called acting.”

Kampmeier, too, in defense of the scene, tells the Associated Press that it’s simply a succession of harmless images simulating a rape: “If you have a hand hitting the ground, Dakota screaming ’stop,’ and you see a zipper unzip, that creates a rape.” Hm. It seems to me that no matter how you put it, it’s pretty unsettling. But I digress.

Now, I know that the spirit of Sundance is all about “creative risk-taking” and “nurturing the diversity of artistic expression,” as they put it, and I do recognize the value of confronting and exposing sensitive subject matter through film. At the same time, I don’t think that filmmaking should be a free-for-all in the name of art; we, as major media consumers, can all attest to the fact that film is an incredibly powerful medium, and as such, it has the potential to impact people for better or for worse. Yes, it’s a complicated issue, and I realize the futility of jumping into the thick of this latest culture war in the hopes of winning you all to my side.

Instead, I’ll challenge all of us to put our own answers aside and to allow ourselves to be posed these tough questions anew. After all, isn’t this the meaning of an undergraduate education? At what other point in our lives will society let us sit around all day (all three hours or so) discussing questions like, “What is art,” and, “What is morality?” College is a unique time, and we can’t afford to go into it thinking we have all the answers.

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