Tony Watkins » Media

An Island of Misfit Toys – Moneyball

Tony Watkins — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:58:29 +0000

This article was first published on Culturewatch. © Tony Watkins, 2011

Brad Pitt as Billy Beane in Moneyball. Image © Sony Pictures Releasing

Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) sits brooding in the empty Oakland Coliseum stadium. He switches on his radio to listen for a few moments to the commentary of a baseball game, then turns it off. It’s only moments before he turns it on again. Off. On. Off. A little later, as Billy sits in his truck, it is clear from the snatches of commentary that the Oakland A’s have lost the match. He hurls the radio out of the window into the rain before climbing out of the truck to angrily stamp on it. It’s October 2001, and the A’s, the team for which Beane is general manager, has just lost the American League play-offs to the New York Yankees. The problem, as Beane sees it, is that the wealthy teams can pay huge salaries to buy the best players, leaving modestly funded teams like the A’s unable to compete on equal terms. And straight after the play-offs, those rich teams rub salt in Beane’s wound by poaching his star players. It’s a classic sporting underdog story. Bennett Miller’s engaging Moneyball, written by Aaron Sorkin (reworking an earlier script by Steven Zaillian), is based on a non-fiction book of the same name by Michael Lewis which explains how a statistical approach to baseball, developed by Bill James, transformed the game, starting with Billy Beane’s 2002 team. The arc of the film is, therefore, familiar – in that the story is about the changing fortunes of a losing team – yet also refreshingly unfamiliar in that the focus is on changing attitudes rather than achieving success.

The solution is obvious: the A’s needs more money. ‘I can’t compete against a hundred and twenty million payroll with thirty eight million dollars,’ Beane complains to the team’s co-owner, Steve Schott (Robert Kotick). But Schott insists, ‘We’re going to work with the constraints that we have. . . . I’m asking you to take a deep breath, shake off the loss, get back in a room with your guys and figure out how to find replacements for the guys we lost with the money that we do have.’ Billy is ambitious, determined, and haunted by the spectre of failure. So if the obvious solution is not an option, he will need to find another approach. By the time he meets with his scouts to consider players for next season, he has concluded that the game is fundamentally unfair because it all comes down to money. And he knows that the conventional ways of assessing the worth of a player are flawed. As a young man, Billy had turned down a scholarship to Stanford in favour of joining the New York Mets because, the scouts had said, he had the makings of a baseball superstar. Only it hadn’t happened. All Beane’s promise as a player had come to nothing; the scouts had been wrong. Now, he is certain, they must think differently.

The difficulty is always how to find a significantly different perspective. How are we looking at things within the wrong framework? How can challenges be approached in a different way? Louis Pasteur once noted, ‘chance favours only the prepared mind,’ so when Billy Beane meets with his opposite number at the Cleveland Indians, his mind is ready to notice the discreet influence of one of their front office team: Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). After the meeting, Beane quizzes Brand about his role, and discovers that this young economist, just out of Yale, has precisely the alternative perspective that the A’s need. ‘There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening,’ he says, ‘and this leads people who run major league baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams. . . . Baseball thinking is medieval. They’re asking all the wrong questions and if I say it to anybody I’m ostracized.’

Beane wastes no time in recruiting Brand as his assistant so that the young man can bring his mathematical approach to finding players. ‘We’ll find the value of players that nobody else can see,’ he tells his new boss. ‘People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws: age, appearance, personality. Of the 20,000 notable players for us to consider, I believe there’s a championship team of 25 people that we can afford because everyone else in baseball undervalues them. Like an island of misfit toys.’ Together, the two men identify a number of players whose careers had been all but written off, or who were considered almost worthless. But in everyone else’s mind, it is a completely wrong-headed approach; Billy is ignoring years of accumulated wisdom in favour of some economist’s computer projections.

Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill in Moneyball. Image © Sony Pictures Releasing

Sport is a rich source of metaphors for life, and the central thread of Moneyball reflects the way in which the value we place on people is so often subjective and superficial. Peter Brand, for example, is the sort of person who is often undervalued: far from being athletic and cool, he is overweight, diffident and nerdy. One of Beane’s new acquisitions, Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), was considered of no value after an injury to a nerve in his elbow, but Beane and Brand knew that he still had immense value – if he learnt new skills to play in a new position. The Oakland A’s as a whole was looked down on as a hard-up team (especially when Beane signed up a collection of ‘losers’), but once each individual’s specific contribution was properly recognised, it became a powerful force which could give the rich teams a run for their money.

Billy learns to re-evaluate himself as well as others. He comes to understand that his unsuccessful career in baseball was a result of being swept along by other people’s views of what he could and should be. He comes to think differently about what really has value in life, and when he is faced with a similar choice to the one he faced as a teenager, he takes a radically different decision. Having been in a situation of desperation, he was forced to look at things differently, and, with Peter’s help, he learns to look beyond the obvious to the things that really matter.

The real value of a person is not on the surface, in baseball or in life. Indeed, the true worth of a person as a person, rather than as a baseball player, is not revealed by any statistical analysis, but by what they do, how they speak and behave towards others, how they respond to adversity, and a host of other actions that we might easily overlook in a world preoccupied with money, status and looks. As Jesus noted, ‘A tree is identified by its fruit. Figs are never gathered from thorn bushes, and grapes are not picked from bramble bushes. A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart’ (Luke 6:44–45). Billy finally recognises that his worth does not lie in achieving victory in the play-offs, but in who he is: what he contributes to the team as a whole and, even more, his role as a father. From a Christian perspective, one would want him to go even further and discover that his true worth is found in his standing with God, but he nevertheless becomes a more rounded human being who has discovered the immense value of looking beyond the surface. Whether he is aware of it or not, his approach actually reflects that of God, who ‘chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful’ (1 Corinthians 1:27). There’s a warning, and an encouragement, in this for all of us: the value this world puts on people is, all too often, a result of looking at things from the wrong perspective altogether.

Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) sits brooding in the empty Oakland Coliseum stadium. He switches on his radio to listen for a few moments to the commentary of a baseball game, then turns it off. It’s only moments before he turns it on again. Off. On. Off. A little later, as Billy sits in his truck, it is clear from the snatches of commentary that the Oakland A’s have lost the match. He hurls the radio out of the window into the rain before climbing out of the truck to angrily stamp on it. It’s October 2001, and the A’s, the team for which Beane is general manager, has just lost the American League play-offs to the New York Yankees. The problem, as Beane sees it, is that the wealthy teams can pay huge salaries to buy the best players, leaving modestly funded teams like the A’s unable to compete on equal terms. And straight after the play-offs, those rich teams rub salt in Beane’s wound by poaching his star players. It’s a classic sporting underdog story. Bennett Miller’s engaging Moneyball, written by Aaron Sorkin (reworking an earlier script by Steven Zaillian), is based on a non-fiction book of the same name by Michael Lewis which explains how a statistical approach to baseball, developed by Bill James, transformed the game, starting with Billy Beane’s 2002 team. The arc of the film is, therefore, familiar – in that the story is about the changing fortunes of a losing team – yet also refreshingly unfamiliar in that the focus is on changing attitudes rather than achieving success.

Image © Sony Pictures Releasing

Sport is a rich source of metaphors for life, and the central thread of Moneyball reflects the way in which the value we place on people is so often subjective and superficial. Peter Brand, for example, is the sort of person who is often undervalued: far from being athletic and cool, he is overweight, diffident and nerdy. One of Beane’s new acquisitions, Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), was considered of no value after an injury to a nerve in his elbow, but Beane and Brand knew that he still had immense value – if he learnt new skills to play in a new position. The Oakland A’s as a whole was looked down on as a hard-up team (especially when Beane signed up a collection of ‘losers’), but once each individual’s specific contribution was properly recognised, it became a powerful force which could give the rich teams a run for their money.

No related posts.

Twilight – True Blood and True Love

Tony Watkins — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:40:25 +0000

This is a repost to coincide with the cinema release of The Twilight Sage: Breaking Dawn (Part 1)

This article was first published on Culturewatch.org. © Tony Watkins, 2010.

Vampires are currently one of the biggest phenomena in popular culture. They are central to hit television series like True Blood, Being Human and The Vampire Diaries, but leading the pack are Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books and their film adaptations. These are just the most obvious examples of a recent surge in interest after Buffy the Vampire Slayer a decade ago.

But of course the popularity of vampires in fiction goes back to John Polidori’s short story TheVampyre (1819) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Since then the folk-tale origins of vampires have been overlaid with all kinds of newer traditions, including fangs, sensitivity to sunlight and having no reflection.

Meyer gives them some new twists. Her vampires are not afraid of being in the sunlight, except when humans are present, because the light reveals their ‘true nature’ – not ugly monsters but possessing a beautiful glittering skin. A more important variation is that Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), the vampire hero of these stories, comes from a family that has learned to control its lust for human blood. They call themselves ‘vegetarians’, meaning that they feed off animals, not humans.

This takes us to the heart of the tension that pervades The Twilight Saga: deep-seated physical urges are at odds with an ethical sense that they should be kept in check. Edward and his family struggle with instincts that could reduce them to the monstrous behaviour of other vampires.

Bella (Kristen Stewart), the saga’s human heroine, experiences similar inner conflict, although she doesn’t have the same strength of will to resist her longings. She is completely infatuated with Edward and will risk anything to be with him, despite how obvious it is that a human-vampire romance will have bad consequences.

Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said we are driven to reproduce, so ‘ the lover shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him, overlooks everything, misjudges everything, and blinds himself for ever to the object of his passion.’ Bella certainly demonstrates exactly this in the first film, insisting that she doesn’t care that Edward is a monster who has killed people.

But although the films don’t make it very explicit, there must be more to their love than mere animal magnetism. If not, these movies would follow most others about teen love and make the relationship sexual (that’s coming, but not until the fourth film). Vampire stories have long been a metaphor for sexual desire and gratification, so the fact that Edward and Bella abstain from sex, and he from drinking her blood, is counter-cultural. It’s one of many ways in which Meyer’s Mormon background shapes her narrative.

Bella and Edward are each convinced that the other is their soul mate, that they could never love another person as truly and deeply. They want to be together forever, just like any young couple that has fallen madly in love. As far as Bella is concerned, the solution is easy: all Edward needs to do is bite her and make her like him. But he is reluctant to oblige, and with good cause: to do so would, he believes, destroy her soul and condemn her to hell. At the end of the second book, New Moon, he finally agrees to her request, but decides to wait for a few years.

The main attraction of The Twilight Saga may well be the brooding, unfulfilled longing for an idealised, apparently unobtainable lover. But why the wider preoccupation with vampires? Perhaps part of the answer is that when our instinctive longing to be connected with spiritual reality is obstructed by the prevailing secularism of our culture, it still comes creeping out of the shadows in some misshapen way. It seems that we can’t stop telling, or lapping up, stories about the supernatural or spiritual, and about humans becoming immortal, even if through terrible means.

The love that Edward and Bella yearn to share, once she sorts out the place of werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) in her affections, is what we all long for: exclusive, intimate and forever. It’s how we feel true love should be because it echoes precisely what we were made for: an exclusive, intimate, eternal relationship with God himself.

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All at Sea – Submarine (dir. Richard Ayoade)

Tony Watkins — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:10:55 +0000

This article was first published on Culturewatch.

‘Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.’ Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) would probably agree with Tom Stoppard’s wry comment. Oliver is fifteen years old and anxious to be grown up, yet struggling with the transition to adulthood. He’s a rather serious boy, full of both the self-importance and the insecurity of youth, and desperate to feel like he really belongs in the world. This desperation is a prominent feature in the landscape of adolescent experience. But Oliver feels it particularly keenly as he struggles with social isolation at school and frets about his parents’ (Noah Taylor and Sally Hawkins) marital problems.

Like many teenagers, Oliver is insecure about his identity, not yet sure what kind of person he really is. In a voiceover at the outset of Richard Ayoade’s sharply observed and slightly surreal film, based on Joe Dunthorne’s novel, Oliver says, ‘Most people think of themselves as individuals, that there’s no-one on the planet like them. This thought motivates them to get out of bed, eat food and walk around like nothing’s wrong. My name is Oliver Tate.’ He knows he is different from others of his age, but we soon realise that he senses plenty wrong with his own personal world. We first see him daydreaming in a lesson in which his teacher challenges the class to deliberate on the question, ‘Who am I?’ Later, Oliver reflects:

I don’t quite know what I am yet. I’ve tried smoking a pipe, flipping coins, listening exclusively to French crooners. Other times I go to the beach and stare at the sea. Someone made a documentary about a prominent thinker who struggled with unspeakable loss. I’ve even had a brief hat phase. But nothing stuck.

A sense of identity is not something that we form in isolation from others, however. Oliver must work out for himself what kind of person he is, but, like all of us, he can only do so in relation to others with whom his life intersects. He fantasises about being respected and adored by his peers, and about being somehow greater than ordinary human beings. He imagines himself as the subject of a film documentary, and daydreams about how the news of his death would shake, not just his school, but the whole country:

I find that the only way to get through life is to picture myself in an entirely disconnected reality. I often imagine how people would react to my death. Mr Dunthorne’s quavering voice as he makes the announcement. The shocked faces of my classmates. A playground bedecked with flowers. The empty stillness of a school corridor. Local news analysis. . . . The steady stoicism of my parents. . . . Candlelit vigils. . . . And finally, my glorious resurrection.

Oliver may have a particularly dramatic imagination, but he voices the yearning to belong which everyone feels. Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs sees only physiological requirements and the need for physical security as more basic than the need to belong and be loved. But Oliver makes a common error and confuses this desire with his hunger for physical intimacy. He badly wants to lose his virginity, and has his eye on Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige), an abrasive, sullen pyromaniac who is also rather a loner. He is so desperate to win her approval that he joins in the bullying of a classmate, though he feels guilty for doing so. As is so often the case, mistreatment of others stems from personal insecurity and the drive to be seen as powerful in the eyes of others. The tactic seems to have worked when Jordana tells him to meet her secretly after school, and to bring a diary and a Polaroid camera. Yet Oliver’s self-doubt and confusion is reinforced by the realisation that Jordana is toying with him.

Although a strange kind of bond develops between Oliver and Jordana, his world becomes even more precarious when he realises that Graham (Paddy Considine), the New Age motivational speaker who has moved in next door, was his mother’s first love. Oliver decides that his mission is to save his parents’ marriage, at least partly because in doing so he can save his sense of who he is. Whatever changes he may have wanted in his relationships at school now fade away in comparison to his desperation for his world to stay as it was. ‘I don’t want a mystic ninja as a stepdad,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to be from a broken home like Chip’s . . . I want my family back. I don’t want anything to change.’ Hampering his mission, though, is the impossibility of discerning what is actually going in another person’s mind and heart. Oliver says:

Tonight I stumbled across an encyclopaedia entry on ultrasound. Ultrasound is a sound vibration too high frequency to be audible. It was first developed to locate submerged objects – submarines, depth charges, Atlantis and such. Some animals, like bats, dolphins and dogs, can hear within the ultrasonic frequency. But no human can. No one can truly know what anyone thinks or feels. What’s inside Mum? What’s inside Dad? What’s inside Jordana? We’re all travelling under the radar undetected. And no-one can do a thing about it.

The famous developmental psychologist Erik Erikson outlines eight stages of human development, the fifth of which is adolescence. He argues that the key crisis at this stage is that of identity (he is credited with coining the term ‘identity crisis’) and confusion about roles in life, as teenagers struggle to work out their own intentions and those of others. He says that the main question which adolescents grapple with is, ‘Who am I and where am I going?’ This question burns at the core of Oliver’s existential crisis, but it is fuelled by the realisation that his solid home is suddenly fragile.

Submarine repeatedly uses water as a metaphor for the feeling that life is overwhelming, particularly in one surreal sequence when Oliver despairs of resolving his situation. When his father Lloyd sinks into depression, Oliver asks him what it feels like. ‘Like being underwater,’ replies Lloyd, prompting Oliver to ask, ‘Is that why you became a marine biologist?’ Water may also function as a metaphor for Oliver’s perplexity about his identity. If so, the two would be closely related: the sense of being swamped by life compounds his uncertainty at the very time when he most needs to know who he really is.

This growing up story appeals strongly to viewers. As well as being very funny, skilfully directed, and with fine acting performances, perhaps Submarine also connects with our own uncertainty about life. The question of ‘who am I and where am I going?’ is no longer one only asked by adolescents, but one which puzzles many people. Indeed, our society as a whole sometimes seems so bothered by the question that it’s tempting to see our culture as, in some sense, adolescent. It’s a burning question, yet many of the things which might once have provided firm foundations for answering it now seem flimsy and vulnerable. It’s a question which is right at the heart of most religions. Christianity, in particular, provides not only an answer to it, but a comprehensive explanation of why the question is such a vexed one so often.

In the Christian worldview, our identity is grounded in the fact that we are created by God, in the image of God, to be in relationship with God. The biblical understanding of human beings is that we, uniquely, are both physical and spiritual, and that while we are disconnected from God, we are inevitably failing to discover our true identity. But the Bible also recounts the dreadful facts of human rebellion against God, so that our default state is one of rejecting or ignoring God. As a consequence, our human relationships are compromised since, on the one hand, we expect other people to meet all our needs while, on the other hand, we let people down, or abuse or exploit them again and again. We end up trying to define our identity in relation to other people, yet we are all broken and damaged. It’s no wonder that we struggle.

The biblical story, though, isn’t a pessimistic catalogue of despair at our brokenness; it also offers us the hope of finding a new identity in relationship with God through faith in his son, Jesus Christ, who died and rose again in order to reunite us with God. The consequence of that is a new destination in life: no longer need we be condemned to drift through life, alienated from God and doomed to separation from him for ever. Instead, the Bible anticipates the day when God will renew his creation, purifying it from all that corrupts this present order so that the redeemed humanity can live in an intimate relationship with God for ever.

This is a story that both makes sense of who we are now and holds out to us the possibility of us discovering our true identity and ultimate destiny. None of this is on Oliver’s radar – or sonar. He says, ‘No one can truly know what anyone thinks or feels. . . . We’re all travelling under the radar undetected. And no one can do a thing about it.’ No human can, for sure. Except the one human being who was also fully God: Jesus Christ. We cannot define ourselves; we cannot rescue ourselves. Until we realise that God is reaching down to us, we’re all sinking under the waves.

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The Monster Inside – Tyrannosaur

Tony Watkins — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:42:22 +0000

This article was first published on Culturewatch.

Peter Mullan as Joseph in 'Tyrannosaur' (dir. Paddy Considine). Image courtesy of StudioCanal.

Life in a broken world is deeply unjust. Some people breeze through life with material security, happy marriages and hardly a care in the world. Others struggle through every miserable day. The central character in Paddy Considine’s astonishing and harrowing debut as writer-director, Joseph (Peter Mullan), is a struggler. Living on a sink estate in Leeds with only his dog for company, he spends his time in pubs and betting shops. We first hear, rather than see, him in a betting shop, roaring and bellowing with rage while his dog is tied up outside. Fuelled by booze, and boiling over with fury, Joseph unleashes his anger upon the first thing he sees as he stumbles out of the door. His boot connects with his dog with a sickening thud, and the reality of what he’s just done knocks all the wind out of him. The next day, Joseph hurls a brick through the window of the Pakistani-run post office after being banned for his abusive behaviour, and then gets into a brawl with three lads in the pub.

When the lads turn on Joseph, he flees and takes refuge behind a clothing rail in a charity shop, to the surprise of Hannah (Olivia Colman), who runs the shop. She offers him tea and prayer. When Joseph remains silent, she asks God to touch him, and thanks God for bringing him there for a purpose. Joseph, crouching behind the coats, quietly weeps. The next morning, Hannah finds him, badly beaten, asleep outside the shop. ‘I prayed for you last night,’ Hannah tells him, but Joseph is dismissive: ‘It didn’t ******* work. . . . I don’t think he heard you, love.’ She presses him to explain why he has returned to the shop: ‘Do you want God to forgive you for something?’ she inquires. Joseph laughs bitterly: ‘I don’t want anything.’ ‘God loves you,’ she tells him. Joseph’s anger and hatred towards God come pouring out. He hurls abuse at Hannah, sneering at her middle class life, and questioning both her faith and her motivation for working in the shop. Afterwards, Joseph is appalled at his behaviour, asking himself, ‘What the **** is wrong with you?’ He returns to the shop the following day to apologise, they go for a drink, and Joseph asks Hannah to pray for his friend whose death is imminent.

Hannah’s life is far from the untroubled existence which Joseph imagines, however. Her husband, James (Eddie Marsan), may appear charming and pleasant to most of the world, but in the privacy of his own home he is an abusive monster. When he grills her about why she wasn’t in the shop that day and why she was seen with a man, she ends up with a black eye. Later, he too is full of regret over his actions and cries, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. . . . I don’t deserve you. . . . I prayed to God but he doesn’t hear me.’ Hannah’s life spirals out of control, driving her to take refuge with Joseph. The unlikely, but deeply touching, relationship between Joseph and Hannah is brilliantly portrayed by Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman. Colman, in particular, delivers an extraordinary performance. Peter Mullan remarks that ‘Olivia had by far the most difficult part, because on the one hand she’s playing someone who has a certain social face, that she has to put on, and then also has to keep her private misery behind that mask. That’s a more difficult part than what Eddie and I had to do. To pitch that role is difficult, because on the one hand you’ve got to be someone who is a credible human being with a relatively straightforward life, but inside there’s this terrific turmoil from the abuse she’s suffering. I think she’s astounding.’

Olivia Colman as Hannah and Peter Mullan as Joseph in 'Tyrannosaur' (dir. Paddy Considine). Image courtesy of StudioCanal.

It is very interesting that Paddy Considine chose to have a Christian as one of his main characters, though it’s very hard to know what he really thinks about faith. The inspiration for Hannah came from Considine’s research for his role as a Christian in Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2004 film, My Summer of Love:

As I was doing my research, I found out about this charity shop, and how people would come in drunk and just vent their anger at the volunteers. One of the women would close the door and pray for them; a lot of the time she’d be afraid but she had this faith that overrode everything. She’d pray for these people and they’d come back day-on-day, oftentimes quite sober and apologetic. That shop became like a haven, and she was the sort of person who attracted these kinds of people.

There is a sense in which, as a Christian, Hannah embodies the idea of redemption. Her faith is no naïve wish-fulfilment lived out in a bubble of unreality, but one which both sees God as rescuer and also results in practical care for those in need. This drives her to deep compassion for Joseph – despite his sneering abusiveness – and for his dying friend. Yet at the same time, she is deeply damaged by James’s violence, driven by it to actions which are profoundly unchristian. She is desperately in need of redemption herself, as is Joseph, though he makes the all-too-familiar mistake of assuming that he is beyond the point of ever finding it. Both Hannah and Joseph are so used to the pain in their lives that they expect no change, but their encounter with each other transforms them. Peter Mullan observes:

When I read the script I took it as an allegory; It’s about saving souls – whether that’s domestic abuse, social violence or a neighbour from hell – it’s not a single issue piece. It’s about two souls who are adrift, confused and desperate to find some kind of solace, some kind of peace in their lives. Theirs is a spiritual connection – not necessarily religious – and a spiritual journey, about the connection of souls. There’s this anger, the spirituality, the hope and the loss, and on a more grounded psychological level all the characters are trying to stay afloat in a variety of ways, and, ultimately, in very destructive ways.

While watching Tyrannosaur is a harrowing, traumatic experience, the film is nevertheless infused with a delicate hopefulness. Life can be bleak and violent and chaotic, but there are hints of joy and optimism – in friendship and community, compassion and tenderness. In his book Useless Beauty, Robert K. Johnston writes about films in relation to the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, which recognises the meaninglessness of life when people live without reference to God, and yet reminds us that God is still at work. The writer of Ecclesiastes says that ‘God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end’ (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Johnston refers to the glimmers of this reality as ‘fragile beauty’, which seems precisely right for describing the developing relationship between Joseph and Hannah, as well as for the hope that begins to take root and grow in their hearts.

Considine seems to see Joseph and Hannah as bringing about each other’s redemption, rather than God doing so. Yet at the same time, perhaps he cannot quite shut the door on the idea of God being at work, in the way that Joseph did when he raved at Hannah. Is Considine aware that, when Hannah thanks God for bringing Joseph into the shop for a purpose, the whole film could be seen as an outworking of that? And as a testament, too, to the terrible consequences of human freedom expressed in a will to power over others? When, right at the very end of the film, Joseph confesses that he found himself praying although he doesn’t believe, Considine is – perhaps unwittingly – hinting at the way God sometimes gently draws to himself those who find themselves at the absolute end of their own resources to put the world right.

Joseph asks himself the question, ‘What the **** is wrong with you?’ He confesses to not being ‘a nice human being’, but deep down he longs to be. He knows that, however bleak his circumstances have been, the answer to the question of what is wrong does not, ultimately, lie in the world around him, but in his own heart. He refers to his late wife as a ‘tyrannosaur’ because of the way she clumped around the house, but he is the monster, attacking and biting anyone who gets in his way. So is James. So is Hannah. A tyrannosaur lives in all of us, and the only way it can ever become a mere fossil is for us to discover the extraordinary truth that Hannah insisted on to Joseph: ‘God loves you.’

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Using Film in Christian Communication – downloads

Tony Watkins — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:15:30 +0000

It’s taken me a while to get round to it, what with holidays and teaching in Norway, but I’ve now produced pdf and epub versions of my recent series of posts on films and worldviews.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Tony Watkins — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:20:42 +0000

This is the article on the book of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows which I wrote for Culturewatch. Warning: contains major plot spoilers.

Daniel Radcliffe as Harry in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2”, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures Copyright: © 2011 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Harry Potter publishing rights © J.K.R. Harry Potter characters, names and related indicia are Trademarks of and © Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

Ten years after Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone blasted onto the best-seller lists, J.K. Rowling has finally brought the series to a spectacular and moving conclusion with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It is one of the most satisfying books in the series, though not without its problems. Rowling has resolved many of the earlier mysteries and tied up many loose ends. Yet at the same time she has wisely refrained from bringing everything to a neat and tidy resolution; there are still mysteries – even some new ones introduced in the seventh book.

Since the confirmation of the final volume’s title, fans have feverishly speculated as to what the ‘Deathly Hallows’ are. I’m not sure whether to feel relieved or disappointed that I didn’t spend long hours poring over the first six books and debating possible clues and theories with other fans online. Looking over some of their speculations now, I’ve seen many extremely well-thought out and accurate guesses about the nature of the horcruxes, but nothing that comes close to the identity of the Deathly Hallows. Given the sheer number of ideas on this in cyberspace, it would be surprising if someone somewhere hasn’t made a lucky guess about some aspect of the Hallows, but it’s largely a new piece of the puzzle that we haven’t been given much inkling of previously.

Although each of the three Hallows plays a vital role within the plot development (one of which we are very familiar with since the first book), we never quite see them brought together to achieve their full power. And it’s a good thing too, because we learn that they would give their bearer immense power: they would make him or her the ‘Master of Death’ (p. 333). The temptation to gain this power had proved too much even for someone as great as Dumbledore. Although Harry spends a considerable proportion of this book feeling resentful that his old headmaster had kept secrets back from him, Dumbledore’s wisdom is proved right once again. Harry needs to know about the Hallows in order to achieve his ultimate goal of destroying Voldemort, but he must not be tempted to put all his effort into acquiring the two which he doesn’t possess. It’s questionable whether or not he would beat the Dark Lord in the race to find one of them – and to lose would make finding and destroying the remaining horcruxes immeasurably more difficult. Perhaps just as seriously, Harry would find the lure of such immense power impossible to resist. Not only has Dumbledore kept Harry ignorant of their full potential, he magically locks one of them away until such time as Harry must use it, once most of the horcruxes have been destroyed.

It is interesting to compare the three strongest wizards of the series with the tale of the three brothers who first received the gifts from Death. The first brother, ‘who was a combative man, asked for a wand more powerful than any in existence: a wand that must always win duels for its owner, a wand worthy of a wizard who had conquered Death’ (p. 331). Little surprise that this is the Hallow which the violent Voldemort desires so deeply: he is determined to possess a wand that Harry cannot resist. He plans to destroy his nemesis and live for ever. The second brother has interesting echoes of Dumbledore: ‘an arrogant man [who] . . . asked for the power to recall others from Death’ (p. 331). It is a surprise to discover that Dumbledore had been an extremely arrogant young wizard, though we know he has some dark secret from the Half Blood Prince. And it seems that a little of that arrogance had stayed with him. Dumbledore acknowledges how wrong he was to desire the Hallows, describing them as, ‘a desperate man’s dream! . . . Real and dangerous, and a lure for fools. . . . And I was such a fool. . . . Master of death, Harry, master of Death! Was I better, ultimately, than Voldemort? . . . I, too, sought a way to conquer death, Harry’ (p. 571). Harry rightly protests that Dumbledore had not wanted to conquer death in the same way as Voldemort. He had, after all, wanted to right the terrible wrong of his sister’s death by bringing her back from death. Nevertheless, he wanted the power for his own ends, not for the good of others. And he ought to have known that what he wanted was impossible, from the story of the second brother if for no other reason. Rowling insisted years ago that one of her rules for the books was, ‘Magic cannot bring dead people back to life. . . . there is no returning once you’re properly dead.’¹

‘The youngest brother was the humblest and also the wisest of the brothers, and he did not trust Death. So he asked for something that would enable him to go forth from that place without being followed by Death. And death, most unwillingly, handed over his own Cloak of Invisibility’ (p. 331). There is an obvious connection with Harry, the bearer of the Cloak. Harry does not consider himself to be wise – he has always looked to Dumbledore for wisdom – but, as Jesus said, ‘wisdom is proved right by all her children’ (Luke 7:35). Harry has learnt well from his mentor and now, with extremely limited information and an immense challenge, he chooses the right course of action – not the risky race for the Elder Wand but the annihilation of Voldemort’s soul fragments.

That these three central objects are related to mastery over death is not surprising, given the preoccupation with death throughout the series. Rowling acknowledges that, ‘My books are largely about death. They open with the death of Harry’s parents. There is Voldemort’s obsession with conquering death and his quest for immortality at any price, the goal of anyone with magic. I so understand why Voldemort wants to conquer death. We’re all frightened of it.’² Harry lives because of his mother’s self-sacrifice on his behalf – a magic that was beyond Voldemort’s comprehension – and he lives in the shadow of that event; the Dark Lord will stop at nothing to achieve immortality, including murdering people like Cedric in Goblet of Fire; and significant characters die because that’s what happens in war. Rowling’s treatment of death is not callous or morbid: she deals with it as a fact of life, the most unfortunate of all facts, sometimes coming with a growing sense of inevitability and other times coming quickly and unexpectedly. Death can come as a natural end to life or as a deeply unnatural end as a consequence of great evil. It is something that J.K. Rowling has had to come to terms to in her own life, but she still considers that the death of a loved one is her greatest fear.

The most significant death is, of course, Harry’s. Not that he quite dies, as Dumbledore makes clear in their touching meeting almost-but-not-quite beyond the grave:

‘But you’re dead,’ said Harry. ‘Oh, yes,’ said Dumbledore matter-of-factly. ‘Then . . . I’m dead too?’ ‘Ah,’ said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. ‘That is the question, isn’t it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not.’ They looked at each other, the old man still beaming. ‘Not?’ repeated Harry. ‘Not,’ said Dumbledore. ’But . . .’ Harry raised his hand instinctively towards the lightning scar. It did not seem to be there. ‘But I should have died – I didn’t defend myself! I meant to let him kill me!’ ’And that,’ said Dumbledore, ‘will, I think, have made all the difference.’

Harry’s offering of himself as a sacrifice in order to save others is a profoundly moving moment in the book. It has a particular resonance for Christians because of its potent echo of Jesus Christ willingly giving himself over to forces of evil which wanted to destroy him. In fact, Voldemort only destroyed the horcrux in Harry, but it nevertheless took Harry into some kind of intermediate state (an echo of Neo at Mobil Av station in The Matrix Revolutions) where that he was able to choose whether to return to life or to embrace death. His return to life (having apparently suffered no ill effects of his near death experience) can, I think, be seen as some kind of resurrection, or at least a close analogy to it. Until Rowling speaks about this in interviews, it is difficult to be sure whether or not she was deliberately making this connection with Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection (after all, death and resurrection are not unique to Christian faith). Is it simply coincidental that death’s waiting room is King’s Cross? My guess is that Rowling has been more like J.R.R. Tolkien than C.S. Lewis. Tolkien did not set out to write any Christian allegories, yet his Christian worldview shaped much of what he wrote, whereas Lewis was very deliberate in his construction of the allegories in The Chronicles of Narnia. Rowling shares the same Christian worldview, saying that she believes in God and attends church for more than weddings and christenings, though she also says, ‘like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes about if my faith will return. It’s important to me.’³

Whether deliberate or not, Rowling has created an allegory that powerfully illustrates the central truth of the Christian faith (arguably a better one than Lewis’s in some respects). ‘Greater love has no one than this,’ said Jesus, ‘to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’ (John 15:13, TNIV). This is what Harry knows he must do. He packs away his wand and the invisibility cloak (remember the third brother in the tale finally took off the cloak so that he could greet Death as a friend) and steps forward, surrendering himself to Voldemort’s malevolence. By then returning to life, he has broken Voldemort’s power, not only over himself but over those for whom he died. His ‘resurrection’ encourages and empowers his followers, and enables him to finally destroy the great enemy (in fact, the enemy destroys himself because his power is reflected back at himself). It is, of course, like all analogies and allegories, imperfect. Harry himself is a very real human character, with faults and failings. He dies to rescue his friends and all good people from a great evil, but he does not die to rescue them from their sin, their rebellion against God, since God is almost entirely absent from the fictional world of Rowling’s imagination. Dumbledore recognises that he was not worthy to bear the three Hallows: ‘I was fit to possess only the meanest of them, the least extraordinary’ (p. 576). Harry also recognises that he cannot become Master of Death, and drops the resurrection stone hoping that it will not be found. But Jesus, in the real, historical world, died and rose again to become Master over death, breaking its power over those who trust him and promising, not a vague, shadowy, temporary return to the world of the living as the resurrection stone brought, but a real, physical and eternal resurrection. Rowling quotes from 1 Corinthians 15:26: ‘The last enemy to be destroyed is death.’ Harry is no longer afraid of death, the Dark Lord and the Death eaters are defeated, but Jesus Christ alone destroys death itself.

Christopher Lydon, ‘J.K. Rowling interview transcript’, The Connection (WBUR Radio), 12 October 1999, quoted on www.accio-quote.com ↩
J.K. Rowling, interviewed by Geordie Greig, ‘There would be so much to tell her . . .’, Tatler,10 January 2006, p. 130; scanned copy at gallery.the-leaky-cauldron.org/picture/2464 ↩
Interview with Geordie Greig, ‘There would be so much to tell her . . .‘ ↩

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Using film in Christian communication – part 6

Tony Watkins — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:07:41 +0000

Read the rest of this series.

Why use film in Christian communication?

Although aspects of the Christian worldview still do hang on in western culture, it’s all too obvious that very few films communicate much of it clearly. As I have already noted, films are primarily about telling a story, and often the worldview aspects provide the framework for that story rather than being part of it. And it’s also blindingly obvious that many films are expressing other worldviews altogether. Perhaps surprisingly, all this does not create a barrier to using films when communicating. Ironically, at some levels, it’s a positive advantage. The reality is that just about everyone is already thoroughly immersed in a culture which is full of competing worldviews. The mediascape is such a part of our lives that we are constantly exposed to a wide variety of influences. In this context, using film does two very important things.

Itchen Bridge, Southampton. © steve9091, used under a Creative Commons licence

First, it creates an extremely effective bridge into people’s lives because it is so familiar to them, just as altars and Greek poets were an effective bridge for Paul in Athens.[1. Acts 17:16–34; See Lars Dahle, Acts 17 as an apologetic model] Using examples from the media world immediately connects with people, especially younger people. This is very often true even when the film is not one which is particularly popular. There clearly are films which barely connect, but younger generations generally have such a high level of media literacy that they respond to the medium of film itself, as well as to the content. As Marshall McCluhan famously said, ‘The medium is the message.’ When we do use films which are already relevant to our audience, the sense of connection is even greater.

Second, films deal with the big issues of life: subjects like relationships, sexuality, religion, politics, society, the environment, spirituality, meaning, purpose, love, happiness, identity or fulfilment. Any film is always, to some extent, about one of these issues, or something similarly significant. So if we can use film material which deals with one of these weighty themes, we are likely to be in a good position to stimulate some lively conversation. There is a Christian perspective on all these issues, which becomes easy to talk about once we have actually started talking about the issue in a way that engages people. We need to think carefully about what a film is saying about these big themes in terms of the worldview aspect we have considered above. Then we need to ask how this compares with a Christian worldview.

It is important that we try to use films with integrity. If we just want to use a clip rather than an entire film, we need to put that clip in context and use it in a way that is fair to its context within the film as a whole. Don’t focus primarily on finding film clips which illustrate (whether positive or negative) some aspect of Christian truth. Instead focus on exploring how the big themes (which are at the heart of all narratives) are worked out, and on how the five worldview aspects are expressed. It does take practice.

If we are going to use films as a positive way of engaging with people, we will need to be careful not to keep responding critically to the films. It seems very easy for Christians to condemn aspects of contemporary culture, sometimes with good justification. But Paul in Athens was very careful to be positive about some aspects of his audience’s culture, as well as being negative about others. We must learn to affirm ways in which films express right beliefs, and right values, show right behaviour, explore the right issues and ask the right questions. It is also important to be clear about ways in which films express wrong beliefs and wrong values, show inappropriate behaviour or neglect important issues. So we need to celebrate the good, but graciously challenge the bad. We need to maintain the biblical perspective of seeing human beings as image-bearing rebels, and the films they make as manifestations of both sides of human nature.

Most importantly of all, we need to be alert for how films illuminate the deepest longings of the human heart, whether for love or freedom or happiness or fulfilment. And we need to recognise that these are just reflections of the deepest longing of all, the yearning for peace with God – a yearning which many people in western culture don’t recognise for what it is.

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Using film in Christian communication – part 5

Tony Watkins — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 15:02:27 +0000

Worldview dimensions, continued

Morality

Image from iStockphoto.com

Some of the issues which I raised in the previous post, in relation to human nature are profoundly moral questions. What does it mean when we say that darkness and evil reside in the human heart, and that genuine goodness can be found there too? What makes for a good person, or a bad person? What makes things like courage and honour good, and cowardice and self-interest bad?

There are moral questions in most films, and they are often linked with the motivations of the main characters. Why is this character making that particular moral choice? We need to think about what their basis for ethical decisions is. One of the most common approaches to ethics in the west, and which is reflected in many films, is called consequentialist ethics. It is about making choices on the basis of what the outcome will be. In The Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009), Mr. Fox is interested in only one thing: self-preservation. Every choice he makes is motivated by his drive to achieve this one outcome.

The main alternative to consequentialism is deontological ethics, which stresses doing the right thing according to underlying moral principles, rather than according to what achieves the desired result. A powerful example of this is found in The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009). It is set in a post-cataclysmic world which is now dying, and is the story of a man (Viggo Mortensen) taking his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) on a long walk to try to find somewhere warmer. Along the way they face dangers from the few survivors who will stop at nothing to eke out their existence. Yet despite facing such extreme circumstances that any action seems justifiable (in consequentialist terms), the man insists that they should continue to behave morally. By that he means, behaving in accordance with moral principles which transcend time, place and circumstances.

For a Judeo-Christian worldview, ethics are always primarily to do with what is right before God, rather than with what is expedient. Christian ethics are deontological, not consequentialist, which suggests that there are moral absolutes. Within a naturalist worldview, some kind of consequentialism is the only ethical approach that really makes sense since there is no possibility of transcendent moral values without God.¹ Yet people still instinctively feel that some things are absolutely, in principle, right or wrong.

Some films tackle the difficulties of making moral decisions head on. In Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck, 2007), Patrick (Casey Affleck) must make a tough choice. He can follow principles of truth and justice, which is likely to lead to unhappiness, or he can ignore the principles in favour of a happier outcome. But Patrick realises that it’s not that simple. Whose happiness should he consider? Who has rights that should be upheld? He can only guess how the future might unfold, and the option that appears to offer happiness may turn out to be a disaster. Good (Vicente Amorim, 2008) shows this inability to predict the future starkly in a story of a German professor before the war who abandons his principles in favour of pragmatic considerations, but with devastating results.

Knowledge

image from iStockphoto

The fourth aspect of worldviews is to do with what we know and how we know it. The films that explore this directly tend to be somewhat philosophical or or rather quirky, such as I ♥ Huckabees (David O. Russell, 2004). But the process of investigating and weighing evidence is something which comes up in many films, especially crime dramas. Within a naturalist worldview, the only legitimate sources of knowledge are empirical evidence and logic, both exemplified by Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr. in Guy Ritchie’s 2009 film). But if the worldview underlying a film allows for a spiritual dimension, then other ways of knowing become possible. Intuition is particularly valued in nature-based spiritualities, and revelation is an important idea in many religions. In Knowing (Alex Proyas, 2009), Nicolas Cage plays a professor who discerns a pattern in a series of apparently random numbers written fifty years previously – a pattern which predicts major disasters. It shakes his hard-nosed scientific rationalism to its core, and it eventually leads to reconciliation with his father, a pastor.

In contrast to the pursuit of certain knowledge, some films emphasise just how problematic the business of knowing things can be. John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt (2008) is all about the difficulty, if not impossibility of knowing anything for certain.

Salvation

Image from iStockphoto.com

The final aspect of worldviews is the question of what human beings most need in life. We face many problems, but what is the most fundamental of all human problems? And what is the solution to that problem? How can we be saved, in other words? Where can redemption be found?

Salvation and redemption are rarely seen in films within specifically Christian ways, though it may be in the background. In Amazing Grace (Michael Apted, 2007), for example, it is clear that the faith of William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) is what motivates him to fight slavery. Similarly, in The Blind Side (John Lee Hancock, 2009) it is Christian convictions which prompts a mother (Sandra Bullock) to give a home to a disadvantaged African-American boy. But in both of these films, the focus is primarily on what the central characters do to change the world, rather than the faith which motivates them.

Some films deny the possibility of redemption at all. Martin Scorsese was brought up a Catholic and constantly explores religious ideas in his films, but he seems to have turned his back on Christian beliefs and values. Speaking about his film The Departed (2006) he says:

Good and bad become very blurred. That is something I know I’m attracted to. It’s a world where morality doesn’t exist, good doesn’t exist, so you can’t even sin any more as there’s nothing to sin against. There’s no redemption of any kind.²

However, at some levels, redemption is what all films are about, as Brian Godawa argues in Hollywood Worldviews. They show us characters who have hope restored or relationships mended or all kinds of other limited redemptions. These resolutions inevitably suggest that certain things in life are good, even essential. It may be apparently something as simple as finding a good place to live and bring up a family, as in Away We Go (Sam Mendes, 2009), though even here the real focus is on having a good loving relationship.

Love is frequently held up as the thing that human beings need more than anything else. There are countless romantic comedies and melodramas which indicate that once someone has found true love, they have found everything they need. Other films suggest that we need to embrace freedom, perhaps especially films that come out of a worldview which denies any accountability to God, as in The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998). Some films encourage us to find our true purpose in life which will give true fulfilment, as in Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) or Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster, 2006) or The Soloist (Joe Wright, 2009). Underlying all these is the longing for ultimate peace – a reflection of the fact that we were created to live in relationship with God.

See, for example, William Lane Craig, Can We Be Good without God? ↩
Martin Scorsese interviewed by Ed Pilkington, ‘A History of Violence’, The Guardian, 6 October 2006 ↩

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Using film in Christian communication – part 4

Tony Watkins — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 10:00:16 +0000

Worldview dimensions, continued

Humanity

A human head, divided according to Gall and Spurzheim's system of phrenology. Coloured lithograph by C. Ingrey, 1824. Image courtesy Mary Margret, used under a Creative Commons licence

The second key aspect of worldviews is the nature of human beings. What does it mean to be human? This is closely bound up with the question of reality, of course. Are we simply physical beings – very clever animals or biological machines – or are we also spiritual beings? What happens when we die? The question of our identity – what and who we really are – is so important to us that is vital to reflect specifically on what films say about the matter.

The possibility of a spiritual dimension to human beings is obviously often explored in films which are about death. The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson, 2010) is about the abduction, rape and murder of a twelve-year-old girl, Susie (Saoirse Ronan). Much of the film is about her experiences after death. She is in limbo, a beauiful in-between state; she is dead but not in heaven, and often aware of what is happening in the world of the living. There is no mention of God in the film, yet it assumes that life continues after death and that we might go to heaven. This kind of God-free afterlife is what many people in western cultures now believe. They have rejected the traditional Christian belief in a day of judgment followed by eternal life or expulsion from God’s presence, but they don’t want to let go of the idea of heaven. It’s exactly what we get in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) which it concludes with a powerful death sequence in which the hero (Russell Crowe) is reunited with his murdered family.

What Dreams May Come (Vincent Ward, 1998) is primarily about the afterlife, following the death of the central character Chris (Robin Williams). He has made it into heaven because he was basically a decent man, not because of any faith. There is no indication of how he is judged to have reached the required standard; it’s simply a question of cosmic cause and effect, like karma. His wife Ann (Annabella Sciorra), however, commits suicide because of her unbearable grief and therefore ends up in hell, so Chris, feeling that this is unjust, sets out to rescue her. It seems to be a mixture of ancient Greek and eastern ideas of life after death, with a little Christian material thrown in for good measure. Chris Sinkinson says that, ‘Contemporary western culture is now trying to find a new concept of death.’ He notes that in What Dreams May Come and in Flatliners (Joel Schumacher, 1990): ’. . . the experience after death is related quite directly to how we think in this world. The after-death world is a place of our own imagination and its contents depend upon the kind of moral imagination we have had. A suicide victim is portrayed as being in hell. The hell is of her own making as she has chosen a thought world of intense self-pity. Even in heaven, God is nowhere to be found in the world of What Dreams May Come? One character admits not knowing where God is but speculates; ‘He’s up there somewhere shouting that he loves us and wondering why no one is listening.’ The film portrays heaven as the product of our personal imagination and not the gift of a personal God.¹

In eastern thinking, death leads to successive cycles of reincarnation until a state of nirvana, or enlightenment, is reached. It is still relatively uncommon in western cinema, though it is clearly present in the Matrix trilogy, particularly with the reincarnation of The Oracle (Gloria Foster/Mary Alice), and it is discussed in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). The most entertaining film about it is Dean Spanley (Toa Fraser, 2008), in which we gradually realise that the Dean (Sam Neill) had previously been a dog.

The nature of humanity is explored in other ways, too, of course. Cold Souls (Sophie Barthes, 2009) tells the story of a man (Paul Giamatti) whose soul is weighed down but who engages the services of a company which stores or exchanges souls. It is a biting satire on a materialist view of human nature and on the contemporary willingness to sell our souls in a bid to gain short-term happiness. What Paul finally realises is similar to what Joel (Jim Carrey) realises in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004): that we must accept the bad aspects of life as well as the good to be authentically human. Suffering and pain are part of reality, at least in this world.

Clint Eastwood has directed a number of films in recent years that very thoughtfully examine aspects of human nature and identity. Mystic River (2003) explored similar territory to Unforgiven (1992): the capacity for evil that lurks in the human heart, and therefore also the yearning for some kind of redemption (these also relate to other worldview aspects which we shall consider shortly). In contrast, Paul Thomas Anderson also points to the darkness within us in There Will Be Blood (2007), but with little or no sense of redemption being genuinely possible. Eastwood’s films seem to be rooted in a basically Christian worldview which highlights our fallenness, insists on moral absolutes and offers the possibility of redemption. There Will Be Blood, however, seems to suggest, when taking into account its mockery of religion, that there is nothing beyond us. Therefore there is ultimately nothing driving us other than simple self-interest, which expresses itself aggressively when the pressure is on. This is nihilism. Eastwood’s pair of films from 2007 about the Battle of Iwo Jima, Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, both explore some of the tensions in human nature: our capacity for courage as well as fear, and our sense of responsibility to others as well as the instinct for self-preservation. They reflect the Christian view of human beings as being capable of immense good because we are God’s image-bearers, and of immense evil because we are fallen. More recently, Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2009) and Invictus (2010) have explored in very different ways the importance of realising that all human beings share a common humanity, and that we are at our best when we act for the good of others.

Chris Sinkinson, ‘World Religions: A Matter of Life and Death‘, Culturewatch, 2000 ↩

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Using film in Christian communication – part 5 Worldview dimensions, continued Morality Image from iStockphoto.com Some of...

Using film in Christian communication – part 3

Tony Watkins — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:00:00 +0000

In the third part of this series on using films in Christian communication, we start looking at the five key dimensions of worldviews.

Worldview dimensions

There are five key dimensions of any worldview map to which we we need to pay very careful attention. They may seem a little abstract or theoretical at first. In fact, all of them have significant practical implications for life because they form the foundation on which the rest of life is lived. They are all inter-related, and each of them has many smaller features which we could to pay attention to. I can only introduce each of them briefly here.¹

Reality

The first dimension is reality itself. What kind of world do we live in? What really is real? Is it just the physical world, or could there be a spiritual world, too? And if so, what kind of beings live in it?

Film has become a global medium, but the majority of the films we see are the products of western culture – a culture which has been profoundly shaped by Christianity for centuries. As a result of this, a significant number of films assume a broadly Judeo-Christian view of reality. That is, the material world is not the sum total of what is real; there is also a spiritual realm. Occasionally, there are films which make this very explicit. Bruce Almighty (Tom Shadyac, 2003) and Evan Almighty (Tom Shadyac, 2007) are are two obvious examples. The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Scott Derrickson, 2005) is another. Here Christian and rationalist perspectives on the nature of reality are pitched against each other in a tense court-room drama with horror sequences.

Often the existence of some spiritual reality is explored through stories in which the central characters are asking big questions about life, or are facing some major crisis. Michael Keaton’s directorial debut, The Merry Gentleman (2009), hints at the possibility of a spiritual reality: one of the two main characters, played by Kelly Macdonald, is inspired by a statue of Jesus she sees when wandering into a church one day. It seems that she is not at all sure of whether or not God really exists, yet there is a faint suggestion that a higher power may be at work behind the scenes.

Over the last century or so, several intellectual movements have strongly challenged traditional Christian beliefs. In particular, atheism² has become an enormously significant force in the west. Very many films contain no reference to, or even a hint of, God or a spiritual dimension to life. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are based on an atheistic worldview, though. Obviously, spiritual dimensions simply aren’t a particularly relevant aspect of many stories. Some films, though, clearly have a view of reality which excludes the spiritual, or is at least sceptical about the idea.

Woody Allen’s well-known scepticism about the existence of God is expressed in many of his films. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2009), for example, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Sacarlett Johansson), meet an artist, Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem). He invites them to join him for a weekend in Oviedo, where he plans to visit a sculpture he finds inspiring. The statue he shows them is of Jesus on the cross. Cristina asks him if he is very religious. Juan Antonio insists strongly that he is not, and adds, ‘The trick is to enjoy life, accepting it has no meaning whatsoever.’

Ricky Gervais’s atheism is clear in his film The Invention of Lying. It is about a world where people can only speak the truth until Gervais’s character, Mark, suddenly discovers the ability to make things up. One of the things he dreams up, in order to comfort his dying mother, is the idea of a kindly ‘Man in the Sky’. Everyone automatically believes that Mark is telling the truth, so his falsehood spreads like wildfire, and he embellishes it further. Eventually he has huge numbers of followers believing his lie. The implication is clear: religion is nothing but a human invention to stop us feeling afraid.

The nature of reality is clearly a central question in Jon Amiel’s film about Charles Darwin, Creation. It shows Darwin (Paul Bettany) struggling with the question of suffering in the world. He is troubled by the apparent cruelty of the natural world, and he presses his friend, the local vicar, on the question of why God created 900 species of intestinal worms. Much more personally, Darwin is torn apart by grief over the death of his much-loved daughter Annie, aged 10. Darwin has concluded that, if there is a God, he has done nothing other than start everything off, and is not at all involved in the world.

Eastern ideas have been an influence on films since the hippy days of the late 1960s, but particularly since the emergence of New Age spirituality in the 1980s. The eastern understanding of reality is that the physical world is illusory, and that the only true reality is spiritual. This perspective comes through very strongly in the Matrix trilogy. Hindu and Buddhist ideas pervade all three films (along with many other influences, including Christianity, Greek myths and postmodernism), especially in its questioning of the nature of reality. In The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), Neo (Keanu Reaves) discovers that the apparently physical world in which he had lived his entire life is, in fact, an illusion – a computer simulation called the Matrix. He is rescued into another level of reality – a world largely destroyed through warfare between humans and machines. He learns to control the Matrix ‘reality’ by his mind; there is nothing he cannot do while he is within it. But at the end of the second film, The Matrix Reloaded (2003), Neo is able to use his mind to destroy enemy sentinels in the ‘real’ world (that is, not inside the Matrix). It is evident that this level of reality can be no more real than the Matrix. Westerners instinctively assume that this, too, is a computer simulation, and that there must be yet a further level of reality which really is physical. The Wachowskis never resolve this because, in eastern thinking, however, there is no physical reality; it’s all an illusion.

Most films coming out of Hollywood don’t deal with the question of reality very explicitly. They take for granted the existence of the material universe and sometimes have a vague suggestion of some further spiritual dimension. That’s because, even now, the traditional Judeo-Christian view of reality is still the default way of thinking for the majority of people. It’s a dualist view – seeing reality as composed of two distinct aspects. The rise of eastern and pagan or nature-based spiritualities, however, has led to beliefs about spiritual reality becoming increasingly fuzzy. We are at an interesting – and confusing – point in the development of worldviews in the west with people hanging on to some aspects of a Judeo-Christian worldview while rejecting the specifically Christian understanding of what it means and bringing in eastern or pagan ideas in their place.

For more on worldviews, see James W. Sire, Naming the Elephant (IVP, 2004) ↩
Often in the form of secular humanism, and also referred to as naturalism, rationalism or scepticism, though these are not quite synonymous terms. ↩

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