Amy Welborn gives her brief review of The Chronicles of Narnia movie and then adds a great insight into something I’ve been thinking for some time.
It took a couple of hours for my thoughts to form on this…as Katie and I followed up on a thoroughly lazy day by watching Mad Hot Ballroom…but I think I decided that I am weary of the dynamic of this new Christian market - what Barbara Nicolosi calls the Passion Dollars. I am tired of the film producers and distributors using (some) Christian churches and organizations to market their films and tired of (some) Christians clinging on to these cultural products in the hopes that they will evangelize. It all comes out seeming rather sad in the end. It is this web of mystery we are caught in. Art is a fundamental part of life, and people see glimpses of the transcendent through it, which has the power to open their hearts to God.
I believe this goes even beyond marketing of secular products with a religious bent, but to celebrities who we hear are Christian or even Catholic and so we leap with joy and rush around like little fanboys, all excited that Jim Caviezel or Mel Gibson or some athlete or politician is Catholic. Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad they are and appreciate the opportunity they give for people to be reminded of the Gospel. But too often we let that be a substitute for real evangelization work by us, something which is supposed to be a personal sharing of the Gospel. Like calling government handouts funded by involuntary tax payments charity, calling movies and TV shows and celebrity appearances evangelization is a bit of a stretch.
As I said I’m glad they make movies with explicitly Christian themes and I’m glad that celebrities are embracing their faith. I’m less glad of Christians falling over themselves to lap up the scarps thrown to us by the cultural elites, who are mainly interested in the dollars we can provide than in the mission we imbue their work with. I’m certainly not happy when Christians confuse marketing and evangelization, like running a contest for pastors, awarding a prize for the best homily that flacks a movie. Ugh.
Technorati Tags: C.S. Lewis, culture, media, movies, Narnia
I think you and Amy are painting these different films with too broad and rough a brush. Gibson’s Passion is a work of religious art, while Lewis’s Narnia and Tolkien’s Ring are good fantasy fiction. All good art is based on truth, and Truth is Christ, so the best movies will conform to Christian values. For example, I thoroughly enjoyed the promotion of the Culture of Life in George Lucas‘s Star Wars: Episode III.
I can understand that Hollywood sees a vast unexploited market in Red State America. The corollary of this is that there is a vast population of people who are currently being denied access to the benefits of film-making technology by that industry cartel’s insistence on saturating its products and distribution channels with intolerable levels of indecency, immorality and anti-Christian heresy. So it’s good for Hollywood to produce and distribute products that can be consumed by practicing Christians, just as it’s good for Telemundo to broadcast the news in Spanish. /p>
But while Gibson’s movie can at least be seen as a candidate to be a helpful tool for evangelization (and catechesis), I am hard pressed to see the same with Narnia and the others. If that’s truly how Narnia is being marketed, then the history of the making of the Passion is repeating itself as farce.
P.S. this is my third attempt to post this comment.
Movies shape the culture, Dom. We should be glad for a Christian theme whenever it appears.
And speaking of it appearing, my husband and I visited our daughter the other night. She had some DVDs laying around, most of them animated, and my husband and I watched Shrek for the first time.
According to our daughter, people in their 20s like movies like Shrek as much as the kids do. I suspect that goodness is appealing no matter how old we are. I liked it too. I also noted it was a love story with a happy-ever-after ending. That theme used to be available in adult movies. Now that the adult movies are full of sex and violence, I guess we have to turn to the kids movies to get back some goodness.