I worked in the entertainment industry for 15 years – and became
a Christian toward the end of that tenure. In the years since, it has
become more and more intriguing to watch my friends in network programming
and colleagues at the film studios struggle to make shows for the religious,
or the “red states” (the assumption is that this is the political
makeup of religious America), or the folks who want family values in all
of their entertainment. They struggle to understand and create shows that
will reach and be popular with people of faith. Can themes that appeal
to this audience be made … entertaining?
But I have also looked on with much interest as Christians move in
the opposite direction, and wrestle with the entertainment that Hollywood
produces. The pendulum continues to swing – from embrace to evasion
and back to embrace – as it always has with the Church’s
relationship with the arts. But there has been a change recently in
Christian culture that has been interesting to watch. Fuller Seminary
Professor Robert K. Johnston, author of Reel Spirituality: Theology
and Film in Dialogue, was recently quoted in the New York Times,
explaining this shift. “There’s been a recognition within
the evangelical community that movies have become a primary means, perhaps
the primary means, of telling our culture’s stories. For this
reason, evangelicals have become much more open to good stories, artfully
told, but they also want stories whose values they can affirm or understand.”3
This shift – this recognition that movies are the principal purveyors
of our culture’s collective story – is remarkable. The vindication
of the silver screen has occurred because Christians want “in”
on the conversation about culture.
Visual Vindication
Perhaps one reason that you will hear discussion and critique from
Christians upon the release of The DaVinci Code rather than
see the angry street protests that followed The Last Temptation of Christ
is that the filmgoing experience is among the last true community experiences
available. There is a shortage of marketplaces where the Christian can
engage the culture in a way that looks something like Paul standing
in the midst of the Areopagus (Acts 17), where there is a mutual experience
and conversation about the experience. We have that here at the university
– for a time. But upon leaving the academy, where can you find
what we used to think of as “Main Street” in America? You
might suggest a coffee shop, but what one often notices today are huddled
masses leaning over laptops with their lattés or bobbing with
eyes closed to the vibrations of their iPods. In either case, individuals
are having discrete experiences of culture – what Ken Myers has
termed “auto-culture.” When technology provides a cafeteria
of choices for what and how to experience the world as an individual,
there you have auto-culture – a self-culture tailor-made for you
to affirm yourself. While dead-tree publications continue to downsize
or collapse, the Main Street that was created when we all read the same
stories in the newspaper has been replaced by millions of self-made
editors, piecing together our own news sources through blogs, downloads
and internet cafes, as if we were all mini Charles Foster Kanes. Without
the zoos, of course. Even internet portals where we once gathered have
been replaced by a multitude of MySpace memoirists who decide what culture
should be for themselves. Media, by eclipsing community as the lens
through which culture is understood, has created a way to self-style
culture that lacks the incarnational experience that can only happen
with other people, face to face.
The movies – at least for a little while – still do this.
Movie ticket sales have recently dropped. And not surprisingly, DVD
sales, which permit largely private viewing, have risen. But the film
experience in a theater with friends and strangers provides the analog
to the group of villagers that used to gather in the village square
to hear the religious heads of the community read their story –
read the gospel. Yes, the gospel writers in this case are writers and
directors. And the gathering place is the theater. And yes, they often
preach a different gospel that is anathema to what Christians
believe. But the filmgoing experience is an opportunity all too rare
in our culture – a place where people can gather and hear the
prophetic voices of our age, and where we can test those prophetic messages
and the spirits of our age (Dt. 18; 1 Thess 5:19-22) through the wisdom
of the cross. This is Kingdom work. Because if indeed media has surpassed
the older communities and institutions of our culture in creating moral
identity, Christians must be there to engage the spirit of this age
(1 John 4:1). In a world that values choices, Christians are looking
for ways of presenting the gospel as the choice. Christians are starting
to understand that culture is not an amorphous cloud-like blob that
moves over the church like a bad weather system, but that culture is
simply what happens when God’s creation is shaped, understood
and interpreted through the human – and therefore often sinful
– heart. It is literally taking the stuff of what God has made
and using it to shape artifacts and institutions. The larger problem
now is engagement itself: there are fewer and fewer places to have this
community engagement.
But stand at the exit of a theater and take in the diversity of the
departing crowd. Male and female. Seniors, teens and children. Brown,
black and white. Singles and marrieds. Collars blue and white. The poor
and the wealthy and all in between. Atheists, agnostics, Christians,
Jews, Hindus and Muslims. Citizen and alien. The only place that comes
close to offering this sort of diversity and community is the soccer
field on a weekend in suburbia.
The movies are important because they are one of the last, mass-presentations
of the ideas and beliefs of our culture presented in the way that ideas
and beliefs always have – in stories. And that is the shift. Christians
are beginning to understand that cinema is a) not just entertainment
but enstoried accounts of what we believe, and perhaps more fundamentally
that b) entertainment itself is not all bad.4
Film as art has been vindicated by Christians. Not for the reasons
that it should be – because it arranges the stuff of the created
order such as colors, sounds, words and music, and projects on a screen
an appraisal of the world God has made – but largely for the pragmatic
reason that we would like to talk about worldviews. But while film has
been acquitted, what about individual films?
Visual Evaluation
As I write, the A-List release of the last week is James McTeigue’s
V for Vendetta. The film is an adaptation by the Wachowski
brothers (of Matrix fame) of a popular graphic novel by Alan
Moore. Superficially, V for Vendetta is a dystopian story that
mixes Orwell, Batman and Beauty and the Beast. In
the wake of a third world war, a fascist government, Norsefire, has
taken over Britain and a single, mysterious masked figure, known only
as V, is taking them on. V, in the words of the book’s artist
David Lloyd, is portrayed as “a resurrected Guy Fawkes,”
complete with look-alike mask.5
Resurrected indeed. This film, which rehabilitates this pre-modern
suicide bomber as an archetype of revolution and progress rather than
terrorism, also contains narratives and images that Christians must
pounce on because they are what give the movie its power. Even though
much discussion will surround the Wachowski brothers’ view that
any new wave of totalitarianism – one which will be focused on
racial purity, sexual purity and Islamophobia – will originate
from within the loud and manipulative power structures that belong to
Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, subtract the themes that vibrate with the
Christ story, and whatever power this film might contain entirely dissipates.
For example, V is of such larger than life stature that one wonders
if he is a comprehendible character at all. Interestingly, he seeks
to be known not by who we think he is, but by what he does. We only
know who V is through the people whose lives V enters, such as those
he seeks to save like Evey, or the power structures he seeks to overturn.
No one knows who V was before he wore his mask, his early life shrouded
in great mystery. Followers of the book have noted that it is impossible
to know who V was before the experimentation of the concentration camps;
V has no other identity but V. V also instills hope through
his plan to save the world – potentially through his own death.
He already walks through the story as the only one resurrected from
the death camps, still able to show the scars on his hands for having
suffered unjustly. This veiled prophet who slowly, progressively unveils
himself to his disciple Evey seeks to give everyone his identity by
providing them with his mask. He counteracts this dystopian nightmare
by saying that there is no such thing as randomness or chance. “There
are no coincidences, only the illusion of coincidence.”
Is this a great, or even good film? No, it cannot be vindicated for
artistic reasons I should, but cannot outline here. But V for Vendetta
is a postcard of popular culture that Christians should “read”
because many are looking within its story for artifacts of truth, and
trends regarding philosophical movements of our day.6 It is certainly
not a pro-Christian film, by any means (easily seen in the co-opted
use of the cross in the logo of the fascist regime). But the story has
a power because V cares about the liberation of the weak and oppressed,
and the filmmakers use the tropes of the Christ narrative to lift the
story from a level of banality to something that seeks transcendence.
Vindicating Viewpoint
When Jesus entered the world every Israelite story was redefined with
him at the center. Disparate stories of exodus, the coming of the monarchy,
the divisions of that monarchy, and exile became fulfilled in him. More
than filled up, they spill over and expand beyond measure. Now that
the kingdom has come, expanding the rule of Christ to all nations, this
means all stories should be examined and understood in light of who
he is. All believers in Christ must walk as children of light, trying
to discern what is pleasing to the Lord, and while taking no part in
the unfruitful works of darkness, still exposing them (Eph. 5:8-11).
V for Vendetta is a deceptive but still powerful secular humanistic
redemption story, where freedom from bondage is nothing more than personal
freedom. The goal is to become your own authority and come out from
under the control of another. This happens in films like Titanic or
the Sound of Music, where the von Trapp family is redeemed
back from Nazi oppression and death to freedom in Vermont. It is often
the task of the Christian to take the latter day opportunity afforded
by popular storytelling and walk through the modern Areopagus that is
the Cineplex and expose that these stories borrow from our worldview,
and that truth is vindicated in the story of Jesus of Nazareth.
1 John Wilson, Books and Culture 7:5 (Sept./Oct. 2001).
2 Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained, 51.
3 John Leland, “New Cultural Approach for Conservative Christians:
Reviews, Not Protests,” New York Times, December 26, 2006.
4 There is insufficient space to work this out here, but it’s
important that we recognize God as the ultimate creator-artist. God
is entertained by the creation. The very fact that he called it into
being, that it reflected his handiwork, and that he rested on the 7th
day to enjoy the fruit of his hands, indicates his pleasure in the art
of his creation. With this foundation, “entertainment” as
a category need not be slighted. It is good to stop and smell the roses
he created or to enjoy a painting or see a film, provided that “it
is good” as the creation “is good”. Entertainment
need not be a sinful category. It is also important to keep in view
that God also looks upon bad things – our behaviors and the fruit
of those thoughts and actions. But he seeks to re-create those things.
Redeem those things. And as those made in his image, this sort of redemption
is part of our re-creative mandate as well.
5 The real Fawkes was a member of a group of Roman Catholic conspirators
who attempted to carry out the so-called Gunpowder Plot in 1605 by placing
36 barrels of explosives beneath Parliament in an attempt to assassinate
King James I of England and VI of Scotland and the members of both houses
of the Parliament of England.
6 For example, critic J. Hoberman sees strands of the ultra-left political
philosopher Antonio Negri and American political scientist Michael Hardt
in the philosophical construction of the story. Hoberman, J. 2006. “Anarchy
in the U.K.: The Wachowski brothers’ supremely tasteless take
on a visionary 1980s graphic novel” Village Voice, March 14. Still
others see a homosexual subtext – V is a devoted gourmand, a lover
of 40’s torch songs, a dedicated dancer, a high culture aesthete,
with a gift for interior decorating as well as a taste for swashbuckler
films of the 1930s.
The Rev. David Rowe is a former employee of WABC Radio, the ABC Radio
Networks, and the ABC Television Network, and now serves as Associate
Pastor at Westerly Road Church and is a lecturer in Practical Theology
at Westminster Theological Seminary.