In-Flight Movies Becoming Mix of Bad Porn and Tear-Filled Chick Flicks

August 19, 2011 at 1:36 PM | by Omri | Comments (0)

It's hardly news that different airlines often have different ideas about the best way to do things. Hub-and-spoke vs. point-to-point. Legacy airlines vs. LCCs. Treating your customers well vs. whatever it is that Ryanair does. There's hardly an issue on which the airline industry has formed a consensus, let alone reached unanimity.

But you'd think that when it comes to in-flight movies, there'd at least be reasonable agreement about how to approach things (the upcoming and deeply ill-advised trend toward in-flight 3D movies being the possible exception). Get some DVDs, put them in the player, and hope that enough passengers get distracted for long enough that the flight becomes a little more bearable for everyone. But from borderline soft porn to warnings about sappy movies that might make grown men cry—we just don't know any more.

On one side you have Qantas, which has taken to screening a 50-minute French documentary titled "The Female Orgasm Explained." We suppose this is technically more of an instructional video than a documentary, interspersing as it does lots of nakedness with what we assume are dispassionate clinical overviews. The airline wants parents to know that the content can be blocked in those rows where their children are sitting, a trick that will work perfectly unless the kids figure out how to "turn their heads sideways."

On the exact opposite side of the porn-watching spectrum you have Virgin Atlantic, which has begun providing "emotional health warnings" before movies that might make men cry. They claim that they've got a study showing that 41% of men who fly have hidden under blankets to hide the shame of tearing up at in-flight movies like Eat, Pray, Love. That number can't be right, can it? We wouldn't have a civilization left if that number was right, would we?

[Photo: David Lytle / Wiki Commons]

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