By David Beilstein
When it comes to Christian evangelistic centered cinema, we must periscope into questions concerning audiences.
Whom are movies for?
The question is subtle, but important.
Along with categories of means and aesthetics in films and the otherworldliness central to the Christian religion - the audience, in which movies are glimpsed by, becomes wholly crucial to understanding the purpose and parameters of cinema.
The first short films made sometime at the beginning of the 20th Century focused on common (general) behaviour (action) audiences could relate to. A man spraying family members as they walk by with a water hose while watering his garden; a train pulling into a station with passengers preparing to board. The movement of horses’ galloping. These scenes related to audiences of all ages and beliefs because they are general actions familiar to those particular audiences’ life experience.
It is action that is dramatic.
Action is character in movies, generally speaking. And while actions spring from individual and collective beliefs - the camera describes the action and the consequence dramatically. Movies cannot apologetically sightsee into epistemic areas of consistency and inconsistency. The audience for movies is an audience in general terms that has lost, loved, hated, suffered, gained pleasure; of an audience that has felt all common experiences of this present age. It does not matter the religious views of the audience -or their philosophical views. The audience cannot escape what the world is and as such this is movies central panorama of dramatic context.
Cinema is a descriptive context, not a prescriptive one.
And this is why movies are filled with characters that generally contain the beliefs and struggles the audience with which they are contemporaries therein have. If we go into the past, movies contained ideas, religious affections, religious skepticism - ideas about sex and love - that imitated those categorical beliefs audiences held to at that time.
It is no different today. For instance, large swaths of modern Americans are unchurched. It is not that this is good - it is what the American people have been becoming for generations. Not surprisingly, then, we find in movies characters that are not members of communions of faith or other religious organisations. Since organised religion is no longer en vogue for a variety of low and highbrow philosophical and cultural minutia - individual ideas about spirituality have increased. As such, we find ideas about individual spirituality, unanchored from organised religious pillars, to become more central in the experience of movie characters.
The Christian evangelical’s default position has been movies create culture. This serious error partly explains the fundamentalist Christians’ triumphal need to replace Hollywood with a “Christian” version, as part and parcel to redeeming American culture.
But the problem is, the reverse is actually true. What is generally prevalent in culture creates movies - is the source for stories in movies. For instance, movies did not widely show a husband and wife sleeping in the same bed together until men and women living together unmarried became commonplace. Movies, as it were, were behind the cultural eight ball. In essence, movies are not trendsetters, but instead follow the trends in society generally speaking.
Movies are not a moral statement, but a cultural and individual description of general cultural and individual patterns of living. This is obvious because cinema can only imitate cultural and individual experience.
Cinema is no more than poetic and metaphoric imitation of common life experience in a dramatic confine. The problem with Hollywood is not that they do not make “Christian” movies - as if the Christ, The Son of God reconciles institutions to Himself rather than people. The problem with Hollywood is a serious lack of verity when it comes to recognising general experience in all its vagaries.
When was the last time an espionage movie focused on Islamic-Fascism? Where the enemies are Arab Islamic-Fascists and not European bankers trying to manipulate currency or oil futures? Besides the recent release of Zero Dark Thirty, the espionage genre has focused on cloak and dagger issues of internal significance where a civilly righteous hero
(Jason Bourne & James Bond, 007) must bring down their own corrupt entity. In the case of Bond, an Mi6 Agent - an organisation deeply involved in rooting out Islamic-Fascism - Bond seeks out European dressed villains, not bent on immanentizing the world-to-come, but of profiteering on global arms races.
When Hollywood made Tom Clancy’s excellent novel, The Sum of All Fears, into a movie starring back-in-the-saddle actor and now director, Ben Affleck, Islamic-Fascist baddies were transformed into neo-Nazi European bankers with swastikas on the back of their palatial watches. In other words, Hollywood balked about accurately rendering the verity of our current cultural and global experience, bowing to the golden calf of political correctness. This is propaganda by omission. And just as much as Christian “evangelistic” movies are unnatural to the storytelling media, propaganda by omission is also something to be avoided.
Since movies are a powerful visual medium, there will always be some truths requiring caution before imitating them on film. School shootings is one of them. Hollywood has been wise to avoid the pain and angst such graphic images would bare on the public at large. There is no need to go there.
Truths exist in life cinema does not need to imitate.
But caution does not change what movies inherently are. And the over-realised eschatological vision of proponents of “Christian” films does not change the parameters by which cinematic stories work.
