SPOILER ALERT!!
I am sitting at my in laws house watching the above movie.
Now I have always been a keen action movie fan. Despite the crap scripts and easy to guess plot lines, and despite the fact that the main characters always have more muscles than acting talent,watching stuff explode followed by the inevitable witty one liner has always appealed.
So let me say I am more shocked than anyone else to find that this has changed!!
I mean Bruce Willis!? Who can say no to a good Bruce Willis flick??
And yet something is sitting ill at ease with me as I watch cars flipping and the chandeliers falling and the gratuitous use of swear words and the name of Jesus used as a profanity. And not for the reasons you are thinking.
There seems to me to be someone fundamentally wrong with a world that pays millions of dollars to watch a movie that cost millions of dollars to make because it blew up millions of dollars worth of stuff.
Does any one else wince when hundreds of cars are destroyed simply to make a good 30 second shot? Does anyone else consider it an injustice to a country to go into the poorest parts in order to cheaply destroy and rebuild people's houses in order for entertainment? Does anyone think that it is bad form to pick at the worst parts of a country's history in order to create a plot line or a believable villain?
Does anyone else think that the movie industry earns its money by playing of the real world horrors of war, murder, death and destruction? Not to mention the twisted use of sex.
Now maybe I am getting old, or maybe my study has warped my brain, but when I watch people purposely smash into cars I tend to think of innocents who in real life may have had their lives destroyed by uncaring drivers. I watch people get their brains blown out and think of the families that never get to see their loved ones after they have died overseas in war.
Movies like these hold no joy for me anymore. The more real they get the more I am disgusted. The more the cool guys pay no attention to the havoc they wreak, the more angry I become with the industry as a whole.
Movies are our new day colosseum games. We watch the gladiators kill each other in ways that put us right in the ring with them. The reality of what we watch in a movie means we may as well be watching the real thing. The blood splatter, the life like choking of people, the use of people as pawns in a game.
Why do we need this? What drives our blood lust? What makes us want to watch body bits blown off people? What makes us cheer when the good guy walks away without looking back at the explosion?
I am coming more and more to think that it is our fallenness humans that fuels the movie industry. Our desire for bigger, better, faster. Our drive for sex and violence. Our altruistic tendencies that turn people into objects to be watched. We know it is acting and no one is really getting hurt so we excuse the fact that we are turning war into entertainment, that we revel in true death of the baddy, that we want revenge and not forgiveness to win out in the end. As long as the good guy gets to walk away in one piece we will quite happily forget what he did to the hundreds of people he left in tatters behind him. We want a hero, not a saint, and heroes make things messy sometimes.
There are too many movies out there that sell on sex and death. There are so few stories of real redemption, forgiveness and healing. There are so few stories that show the best of humanity rather than the worst. And as I write this I am watching a man be thrown into the blades of a helicopter instead of being arrested and taken to trial. His daughter is killed too, instead of getting counseling for having a psychotic maniac as a father. Makes my point quite well I think.
*sigh* theology has destroyed my ability to mindlessly watch anything anymore.
I guess I will stick with Despicable Me.
Although unlike the gladiatorial games the destruction depicted in the movies doesn't destroy real homes or real cars or cause millions of dollars of real damage to cities. And the actors live happily into their next movie with no harm, aside from an abrasion or two.
ReplyDeleteI think it's up to the individual watching the movie to create the differentiation in their own mind between what is real life and then what is depicted on the silver screen. And yes there are cases where someone who has been mentally unstable has sadly tried to bridge the gap and create that violence in reality, for the most part that doesn't happen.
I myself am not a fan of watching destruction, always wondering, "but what about those people in the building which just collapsed?!" However I find solace in the fact that these movies are not real and I no longer have to go to a gladiatorial game.
Good post Christine :) I've been pondering about something lately that might relate a little to what you're talking about. That is, I think there is a particular religious hunger in us that needs to be satisfied. We long for true worship, to be able to offer ourselves, bodily, in adoration of God. This is what liturgy is about. It is Christ's gift to us, to offer the acceptable prayer to the Father through, with and in Him. In the liturgy we are fed by the very Word of God, our senses are engaged by the holy signs (sacred art, sacred music, incense, fine vestments, consecrated Bread and Wine) and we share (together) in a foretaste of heaven. This, I might suggest is the thirst that the entertainment industry is attempting to fill (or rather, exploit). What do you think?
ReplyDeleteIt is a good point Thomas that it isn't reality so we can walk away from it and know the difference. I think though it begs the question of what are we celebrating in watching these things, real or not? I do though think the difference is very important to make between real life killing and movie fantasy but is one that some people do mix up. I would say that fantasy and real life in the bible are considered as bad as each other, take Jesus saying that looking lustfully at a woman is as bad as sleeping with her. Is that not fantasy? Does that not mean we should be careful what we are feeding our minds with?
ReplyDeleteCheryl, I think you are on to something here. I believe that our liturgies in church are there to engage our imaginations when thinking about God. Unfortunately in Protestant churches a lot of this imaginative aspect of liturgy has been discarded as there is almost a fear that engaging the imagination is engaging with the unreal. This means that there is a real lack of imaginative worship and we have lost an understanding of how to engage with God that is vital. So instead Hollywood has taken it upon itself to tell us how and what to imagine and how to engage with the world and others through that. So yes, movies become our worship while the worship in our churches stays purely at the level of the intellect.
ReplyDeleteI think that this is problematic for two reasons. One, we assume that if it is imaginary then it is outside the realm of God and it doesn't matter or hurt anyone.this is wrong and Jesus points out (see reply to Thomas). Second, it alienates those who have no ability to connect with God cognitively, such as children and the mentally disabled. Imagination is key for those people in understanding and relating to God. But with the realm of the imagination being dictated by movies we now find it hard to talk about God in the imagination. I think it is crucial that we regain our imaginations for God through liturgy and art in order to teach people how to imagine well. Perhaps it is time we start learning from the Catholics