As for all the Adam/Eve stuff I also want to add:
1. it occurred to me our earlier discussion of how i happened to choose the quote of Eve misquoting god, taking what he said further… well that’s just like people take a tiny seed of something about “health” and take it way too far, misquote it, and bring us:
obesity hysteria!

2. i’m not religious scholar but to me, in the context of the culture to which i belong, the fruit sorta is sex. the knowledge that they are naked, and that type of thing… it all seems very sexual to me. and the “forbidden fruit” metaphor so often meaning sex.
so i do see a bit of that – she eats it very sensually, and he glowing belly – you could almost interpret that as pregnancy. these are just some thoughts i had while making it.

3. another thought to me was that when we see her ghostly self pulling her back, i thought some might see that as two Eves, like a lesbian couple. and to me the whole food-is-temptation-is-evil is very similar to gay-sex-is-wrong and that sorta thing. and/or this can evoke female comeraderie over shared fears about food, and how common but destructive that is.
so to me, if anyone sees it like two Eves, that’s excellent too!

sorry i have a lot of thoughts floating in my head when i work on something for as long as i worked on this thing…

No, the fruit gave knowledge of good and evil, and sex can be both. So without the fruit she can’t have ever known what sex was. It wasn’t the only knowledge she gained, obviously. She gained knowledge of all sort of things. But not knowing how to have sex is going to be a huge hindrance if you want to have kids.

And it was an informed decision, but not an evil one according to the Mormon interpretation. It was absolutely the right decision. And a brave thing to do. According the LDS beliefs, if she hadn’t, she and Adam would have sat around the Garden doing nothing, experiencing nothing, and knowing nothing for all eternity. They couldn’t even experience joy or love, because Mormons don’t believe you can understand what Joy or Love are without knowing what they aren’t. She brought knowledge and love and an opportunity for life into the world – and sin was a choice that people could make that came with that life.

But Mormons generally regard Eve as being brilliant and informed and brave and all kinds of awesome. Not a victim or a temptress or anything that she is frequently characterised as. Which isn’t to say those are bad interpretations. Everyone’s free to have their beliefs, and morals can be taken from all the different takes on the story.

Granted, the LDS church also has institutionalized homophobia, and whole other slew of other problems, but I just thought I’d mention that this video reminded me of the Sunday School lessons I used to really enjoy where our teacher would assure us that the story we might have heard or grown up with didn’t give women their proper credit. And how much I enjoyed those lessons. How that version seemed so much more fair to me.

Anyway, I’m agnostic now, and don’t really think the story is literally true. So any interpretation works for me. And I like hearing them all.

And I happen to really love the way the story was adapted in this film. I think it is full of pride and beauty.

In regards to the whole Eve’s fault or Adams fault. I found this bumpersticker many many moons ago.
Eve was framed
I have always wanted to put it on my car, but I live in the buckle of the bible belt but somehow I feel it would be misinterpreted. :D

Lilith,
I live in the Bible Belt as well (Knoxville, TN) and I work at a small, extremely conservative and overtly religious firm (prayer meetings on Mondays, Bible study on Wednesdays, etc). I once got pressured into attending church with several of the higher-ups, and the sermon was about how real snake-handling and prophecy and stuff are. Quite uncomfortable for a froofy-liberal Episcopalian like me!

ANYWAY, one day there was a car parked in our lot that had that bumper sticker on it. One of the higher-ups saw it and said, “Ha ha, ‘Eve was framed.’ That’s a neat sticker.” Then he looked over at me and real quick said, “Of course that’s not true,” probably to make sure I didn’t think he was a heathen or something. But later he said again how much he liked that bumper sticker.

So while some people in your area might be jerks about it, if you ever do get that sticker, be assured it’s probably making some conservative Christians think!

Though they’re getting a bit closer with the pain in childbirth – not *there* but closer.

I will say that that is a bit different than what I’ve heard from Mormons before, so it’s interesting to hear.

1) Don’t eat the fruit
2) Go forth and multiply

Seeing as they didn’t even notice their nakedness, Mormons generally assume that Adam and Eve had no idea what sex was, and they couldn’t know and remain innocent at the same time. So, if you follow rule one, you can’t fulfill rule two, and to fulfill rule two you have to break rule one.

(Note: There’s supposedly a reason it was set up this way, and it’s not “God’s a Bastard”, but that would take too long to explain.)

So, the LDS version of the story is that, while the serpent did tell Eve about the fruit, it wasn’t that she was tempted, or an evil woman harlot, or any of that.

It was that she made an informed decision. She wanted children, but didn’t know how to go about it, and so had to decide which rule was most important to her. She made a noble decision to give up her immortal life and go into the unknown in order to do the thing which she felt she needed to do.

And (in the LDS version – note, we have the same Bible, we just read it differently) God didn’t punish her with the pain of childbirth. The pain of childbirth was just a fact. Like gravity and aging. Not a punishment, just a natural consequence of mortality. And so his whole spiel to Eve about how she’ll now feel pain wasn’t him punishing her. It was just him educating, warning, and comforting her. Like the way a mom might try and comfort her daughter when she gets her first period. Same sort of deal. He was just saying “Look, I want you to be prepared, and it’s not anything to worry about, but it will hurt.”

While I’m not much for organised religion, I’ll be honest, I always liked the Mormon interpretation of the story better. It’s one of the few reasons I stuck with the church for so long before finally giving it up. For having such an anti-women reputation, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints often struck me as having a remarkably feminist interpretation of things. According to the Mormons, the reason we are all here is because a woman was brave enough to think for herself and make a choice. She’s the cool one in the story.