The Scarlet Letter juxtaposes the sensual, natural world of Native Americans and its star-crossed lovers with the painfully repressed realm of the Puritans. In the film's telling, even adorable woodland creatures want Hester and Dimmesdale to fuck, social protocol be damned. Tapping into his Sid Vicious magnetism, Oldham embodies the reverend as rock star, the preacher as pop icon. He pouts. He sulks. He inspires. He aims to stir the minds and consciences of his female parishioners but ends up affecting them profoundly farther down their anatomy. When Hester gushes while gazing adoringly at Dimmesdale ("It's rare for a man so young to speak with such force of passion"), she sounds more like a groupie prostrating herself before her favorite musician than a new parishioner extolling her spiritual leader's eloquence. The Scarlet Letter posits Dimmesdale as the original emo heartthrob. He struts, emotes, and broods during his sermon like a 17th century Ben Gibbard. Dimmesdale cuts himself repeatedly by rubbing his open palms against jagged tree bark in the pounding rain, because he feels everything so deeply. He digs books; when Moore's hormone-addled bibliophile lends him a bushel of books, he reads them all in a matter of days, many of them twice. He has enlightened attitudes toward liberated women and Native Americans. At home that night, Hester replays in her mind's cinema the image of Oldham's naked flesh gliding through the water. Meanwhile, her slave girl sidles saucily up to a peephole and gazes longingly as the naked, aroused Hester poses and pouts.

Then one day, Hester receives wonderful news: Her husband is dead! She is now free to explore her burning hunger for the good reverend. They consummate their illicit passion while the slave girl once again affords herself a front-row seat and slips her fingers into her honeypot as she helps herself to a bath. I had no idea that slave/ owner relationships in 1660s New England were defined largely by frenzied masturbation. The Scarlet Letter is edifying and arousing, in an unedifying, non-arousing kind of way.

Dimmesdale and Hester pay for their stolen moments of pleasure with intense, almost unbearable pain. Hester is imprisoned when she becomes pregnant and won't disclose the name of the father. Upon her release, she is forced to wear a scarlet "A" for adultery. Equally ominously, Chillingworth isn't dead at all. Introduced spinning around madly while wearing the disembodied corpse of a deer as part of an Algonquian ceremony, he sneaks into town incognito and torments his wife while trying to discern the identity of her child's father. At this point, the film trades sex for ultraviolence. A villager tries to rape Hester. Chillingworth, dressed in Native American garb, mistakes the rapist for Dimmesdale and murders and scalps him while letting out a cartoonish war whoop. Chillingworth's attempt to blame the scalping on indigenous Americans backfires, conveniently enough, when Dimmesdale is about to be hanged publicly after confessing his indiscretion, and a Native American arrow lodges in the hangman's neck. In the chaos, Dimmesdale, Hester, and their love child escape, in the happy ending no sane person could have expected or wanted. Hester and Dimmesdale share a lusty open-mouthed kiss as their baby climactically throws the cursed scarlet letter on the ground. Joffé gives audiences a Hollywood ending at the expense of everything Hawthorne's novel represents.

Film adaptations of literary classics serve a sneaky dual purpose as cinematic cheat sheets for lazy teenagers. As a celluloid Cliffs Notes for backward students, The Scarlet Letter is hilariously misleading. In the years since Scarlet Letter slunk shamefully out of theaters and onto video and DVD, high-school teachers have undoubtedly been inundated with oblivious book reports on Hawthorne that look something like this. (Needless to say, if freshmen think the film will help them pass English, they're sorely mistaken.)

Webster's Dictionary defines "shame" as "the painful feeling arising from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improper, ridiculous, etc., done by oneself or another." Author-person Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is primarily a book about female masturbation and interracial homoeroticism but it's also about shame and how it's bad and stuff. It is about a sexy married woman named Hester Prynne who sees a hunky preacher skinny-dipping and masturbates thinking about him. While she is masturbating, her foxy slave looks at her through a peephole and begins touching herself even though that is an invasion of privacy and probably a violation of the Third or Fourth Amendment.

Hester Prynne and the preacher guy do it while the slave gets into a tub and masturbates and later frees a cardinal that symbolizes freedom or repression. The book takes place in the 1700s or 1800s because everyone looks weird and has a mustache even if they're not gay or a cop. I think it takes place in America but I'm not sure. The town fathers find out that Hester Prynne has been doing it because she's pregnant and make her wear a scarlet A for adultery.

Hester Prynne goes to jail because she won't snitch on the reverend guy. Later, Hester Prynne's husband, who everyone thinks is dead but isn't, spins around with a dead animal on his head and scalps this rapist guy while pretending to be an Indian. Also, there is a happy ending. In conclusion, The Scarlet Letter is a good book because it uses symbolism and has a lot of sex and a dude getting scalped.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Failure

Excerpted from My Year of Flops by Nathan Rabin. Copyright © 2010 by Onion, Inc.  Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.