For: fornication/adultery, nudity, sexual scenes and sensuality, language, and moral confusionThe Notebook is the story of a girl named Allie who falls in love with a wonderful young man and promises that the two of them will be together forever. However, she proceeds to have an affair with another man, and decides that she would be happier with him. After a period of living together, the couple’s illicit passions and constant fighting result in a happy, satisfying marriage. Then they die, holding hands. The end. Cue music. Roll credits.
NOTE: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF The Notebook WHICH ARE NOT RECOMMENDED FOR READING BY PERSONS UNDER THE AGE OF TWELVE
Fornication/Adultery
Depending on whether motives and intentions factor, Allie and her boyfriend Noah either commit near-fornication and actual-fornication once each, or fornication once, and adultery once. Either way, Allie and Noah’s extramarital sexual relationship is portrayed very positively.
As teenagers, Noah and Allie attempt to have sexual intercourse and are interrupted just moments before consummating the relationship. Their intention is extremely clear, and it’s through no change of mind that they do not finish what they started.
As adults, while Allie is engaged to another man, she and Noah begin an affair that does result in illicit sexual intercourse, once on screen, with other times obviously implied. Before they decide to become sexually involved, Allie refers to herself as a married woman, and while Noah initially argues that she and her fiancé aren’t married yet, after their affair is discovered he angrily accuses her of having planned the whole time on going back to her “husband”. Biblically, her mere engagement to another man makes this affair adultery1, rather than mere fornication, and despite the generally weaker view of “betrothal” in modern Western culture, Noah and Allie’s own view of her engagement show their consciousness of having violated a relationship much closer to marriage than their own.
Allie says that her affair with Noah was “wonderful”. After experiencing sexual pleasure with Noah, she, still unwed, regrets with surprise having missed out on it “all this time”.
Before his affair with Allie, Noah carries on an extramarital sexual relationship with another woman, and the two of them are seen unclothed in bed together.
In the end, Allie, having made up her mind to leave her fiancé, brings all of her luggage from the hotel to Noah’s house, where it is implied she intends to live with him outside of marriage.
Allie’s mother, in a positively-portrayed moment, wistfully says that while she does love her husband, she sometimes drives out just to watch another man she used to know, and try to imagine what her life would be like if she had married him instead.
Nudity, Sexual Scenes and Sensuality
In two separate sexual scenes, Noah and Allie watch and assist each other in stripping to the skin and are portrayed as fully nude, only just barely covering their own (or each other’s) most private parts. One scene watches the two teenagers engaging physically, passionately kissing and embracing nude on the floor, with Allie nervously asking Noah to talk her through it as they “make love”. The other is a prolonged, close-up scene of fornication shown from beginning to end.
Male nudity also includes full-length three-quarter profile shots with single hands covering their sexual organs, as well as a lengthy scene involving a naked man shown from the rear. Female nudity also includes brief shots of bare breasts and backside during one of the sexual encounters, and two separate scenes of naked women shown from behind, from the lower back up, revealing their breasts to a greater or lesser extent.
There are too many sensual and passionate kisses in the movie to count, between the various possible combinations of Allie, Allie’s boyfriend, Allie’s other boyfriend, and Allie’s boyfriend’s mistress.
Language
G-d
G-d
G-d
G-d
G-d
G-d
G-d
G-d
G-dd-mn
G-dd-mn
G-dd-mn
d-mn
d-mn
d-mn
d-mn
d-mn
d-mn
h-ll
h-ll
h-ll
h-ll
Jeez
b-tch
b-tch
b-stard
a--
a--
crap
crap
Moral Confusion
Despite her engagement to another man (whom she loves), Allie has dinner with Noah, goes boating with him, and ends up involved in a two-day sexual affair with him. This episode in their relationship is portrayed as being “irresponsible” but not morally wrong. And yet, if she had been engaged to Noah, and these various acts of intimacy were committed with another man, or if either Noah or the fiancé had had an affair with someone else while in a relationship with Allie, the actions would be obviously immoral and even repulsive to the audience. Allie’s fiancé justifies her affair by telling her that it was “normal” not to forget her first love. During his period of separation from Allie, Noah enters a long-term sexual relationship with another woman. After Noah’s mistress discovers that he has been sleeping with Allie, the two women merely smile and say they’ve heard a lot about each other, and proceed to have a good time as a threesome. Again, though, if Noah was cheating on Allie, rather than on this other woman, this weird relationship between the two women sexually involved with him would be obviously morally perverse.
Allie believes she could have been a bird in a previous life, specifies that she’s talking about “reincarnation”, and gets Noah to go along with her.
Allie and Noah, as an old couple, treat their love as a mystical power. They believe that their love can “create a miracle,” and can in fact “do anything we want it to,” including ending both their lives whenever they want… which it does.
Allie’s relationship with her parents is horrible, and despite the fact that the parents have good intentions toward her (however mistaken their methods might be) and that Allie herself has only bad intentions2 toward her parents since meeting Noah, Allie is portrayed as the only party with something to complain about. On their first date, Noah makes fun of Allie for making important decisions with her parents. Allie says that, after meeting their disapproval, Noah should have told her parents to go to hell.
The Notebook uses contradicting descriptions and portrayals of “love” to make Noah and Allie’s relationship appear to advantage over against other couples’ relationships or other people’s dismissal of it. On one hand, the young Allie screams at her disapproving mother, “You don’t look at Daddy the way I look at Noah! You don’t touch or laugh. You don’t play. You don’t know anything about love!” and she is made to sound convincing. But on the other hand, the relationship between the old Allie and Noah, which is portrayed as the consummate example of lasting “love”, doesn’t involve any more public looks or touches than Allie’s parents showed her, and doesn’t involve any laughing or playing at all.
The young Allie is shocked that her mother would do something as immoral as stealing her letters from Noah, and yet, engaged to another man, sitting naked on the front porch of her new sexual partner’s house, Allie thinks it’s “unbelievable!” that her mother can stand there and think of her as a tramp.
Fighting - yelling, shoving, striking, throwing furniture - is portrayed as a normal part of Noah and Allie’s “love”. Noah tells Allie that “that’s what we do: we fight.”
Noah’s initial attempts to get Allie to go out with him include telling her that he will become whatever personality type she wants. This is portrayed as sweet. If it was the girl promising to change her personality to suit the guy’s ideal, however, the line wouldn’t be considered sweet, it would rightly be viewed as a symptom of inappropriate obsession and an off-kilter self image.
Noah and Allie are, with implied praise, described as “armed with warnings and doubts… going down a very long road with no regard for the consequences.”
As an aside, Noah and Allie - individually, together, and with other friends - display almost constantly immature behavior, both as teenagers and as adults. For instance, Noah risks his life, and pretends to be about to commit suicide, to get Allie to agree to date him. Noah and Allie lie down in the street and are almost hit by a car. After their being nearly killed, Allie laughs hysterically and says the experience was “fun”.
1 Deuteronomy 22:22-30
2 God commanded honor, not merely obedience, to be given to parents. However wrong Allie may have thought her parents’ beliefs and actions, she was required to honor them, not to obey them kicking and screaming. See Exodus 20:12, Matthew 15:1-9, Ephesians 6:1-3
