All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Chapter Ten

This post is a two-for-one. As I was reading Brian Godawa’s article in the latest epistula, I felt a blog post coming on. Hours later, as I was gingerly flipping the pages of Ken Myers and considering my weekly book club post, I made a decision. Why in the world would I need to critique Godawa when Myers already did it, and twenty years in advance at that!

A Little Background

It is important to know, if you are not reading along, that Chapter Ten of All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes is called Popular Culture’s Medium: The Entertainment Appliance. It is about television specifically, and the cultural domination of words by images in general.

It is also important to know that Brian Godawa is the author of a book that we own and generally like called Hollywood Worldviews. More importantly, Mr. Godawa is the author of the screenplay for one of my top-five favorite films, To End All Wars.

With that said, I completely and totally disagree with Godawa’s assertion in his epistula article {called God Loves Movies}, where he asserts:

God loves movies. Movies are visually dramatic stories, and in the Bible, the dominant means through which God communicates His truth is visually dramatic stories—not systematic theology, not doctrinal catechism, and not rational argument. A survey of the Scriptures reveals that roughly thirty percent of the Bible is expressed through rational propositional truth and laws. Therefore, seventy percent of the Bible is story, vision, symbol and narrative. Sure, God uses words, rationality and propositions to communicate his message. But modernist Christianity has neglected to understand how much more important visual imagery, drama and storytelling are to God.

Such poor logic really shouldn’t be allowed by folks from Veritas Press, who are supposed experts in classical education. This is a logical misstep on Mr. Godawa’s part, and I am wondering why the editors at epistula didn’t catch it.

I love that God uses stories. I love that Jesus told stories. But we have access to those stories because they were {a} told orally and {b} written down using words. God did not use images to communicate very often at all. If I use Mr. Godawa’s reasoning, I think I could also assert {and more rightly so as far as logic goes} that graffiti might be acceptable since God wrote on a wall in the Old Testament.

Ahem.

Moving Pictures, a Limited Medium

Moreover, Godawa begins to back up his claim by saying:

Movies are a visual medium. Cinematic composition, color, light, and movement confer emotional states and embody symbolic meanings and ideas with deep effect. Consider the sense of awe at the majestic panoramic depiction of good battling evil in The Lord of the Rings.

This is funny because, as much as I like those movies, I believe they now hold my imagination in bondage. Whereas before I imagined Frodo according to the text {forty years old, for instance}, I now only picture Elijah Wood.

Now, I’m not about to say that God doesn’t like movies. I’m just saying that Godawa’s logic is poor.

I would suggest that movies are almost nothing like stories told using words {either aloud or written}. Myers writes:

Any idea of motion is much easier to communicate in pictures {especially in moving pictures} than any idea of being. The simplest verb in all human language, to be, is the hardest to present visually. Yet it is the verb that God used to define Himself as the great I AM.

The important part here is that stories founded upon words rather than images are rooted in the reality of human existence rather than action.

Pictures also tend to cut us off from the past. They cannot easily communicate like or dislike. They are completely subjective in nature:

[I]mages are wholly inadequate to express what ought to be, what ought not to be, or conditions under which something will or will not happen. In images, everything is in the present tense and the indicative mood. Images are very nonjudgmental and undemanding. This poses some obvious problems for theology and ethics.

Myers then explains the nasty result of the domination of the image:

A culture that is rooted more in images than in word will find it increasingly difficult to sustain any broad commitment to any truth, since truth is an abstraction requiring language.

God and Drama

Godawa goes on, in his pitch for God loving movies, to explain that movies are dramatic in nature, and God loves them because God loves drama. Then he gave examples of God’s use of drama, relying heavily on the major prophets.

I agree that, when times became really tough, God did choose to use dramatic intervention in human lives. But I’m not sure that God using drama as a vivid depiction of His judgment on evil, for instance, is correlated enough with drama as fun and entertainment in the form of movies to form a foundation of solid argument. Myers writes:

Television communicates and entertains using three main forms: it tells stories, it depicts conversations, and it displays action. All three of these forms are dramatic forms, which has led critic Martin Esslin to suggest that “the language of television is none other than that of drama.” Esslin says that drama is not only a language, but a “method of thinking, of experiencing the world and reasoning about it.”

Myers goes on to explain how drama has taken the place of true analysis when it comes to reporting of current events. As our culture relies more and more on images, news crews find one storyline for each admittedly complicated situation. They “analyze” it by telling the story of a single man on the street through conversation. What is lost culturally is the ability to analyze in a true sense of the word and make connections between the many different things which impact the situation being reported upon.

So how is drama a “method of thinking”? Myers explains:

[E]ven at its best, television is a means of promoting the immediate experience as the dominant way of dealing with life. Reflection, analysis, and reasonable discrimination are discouraged. Eslin argues that in dramatic communication, the “linguistic element, insofar as it is concerned with the transmission of abstract ideas, may often come very far down our ladder, after gesture and movement, after costume, even after the impact of setting.” Abstract ideas are, however, essential to the maintenance of the social order; freedom, justice, and duty, to name a few abstractions, can be illustrated by drama, but understanding the essence of them requires the analytic powers of language.

[snip]

Even if all of the entertainment on television was inoffensive to Christian ethics and of the highest artistic merit, its form of communication {form of knowing} encourages the aversion to abstraction, analysis, and reflection that characterizes our culture at all levels.

Movies are a Story?

Mr. Godawa says that “Movies are first and foremost stories.” He then explains that since the Bible is the story of God’s intervention in history, therefore God loves movies. First of all, this doesn’t logically follow. Just because God wrote a story doesn’t mean that God loves stories, nor does it mean that God loves all stories.

But I’d actually like to debate the point of movies being a story in the first place. I’d say they are…and they aren’t. The stories of the Bible, and all stories for thousands of years had a foundation in language. What I mean is, the story was communicated using words. This created a story that was, for the most part, absolute in nature. Think of Aesop. He tells these wonderful, wise stories, but because he is using words, there is no room for misunderstanding.

Jesus did likewise. Most of His parables are followed by explicit interpretation, which keeps us from running away with the story and using it for our own purposes.

Movies, on the other hand, are experiences more than they are stories. They are experiences which often tell a story, but they are experiences first and foremost. I like movies. Si and I probably watch an average of three per month. I am not anti-movie. But the thing about movies is that they are completely subjective, as experiences often are. There are certain Christian movies that try to overcome this fact and preach in one way or another. And you know what? Those movies often seem like bad ones to us. This is because the medium is not meant for preaching, and it isn’t even meant for telling didactic tales. It is meant to offer an escape into another world.

Mr. Godawa ends his article with this:

Because of our modern western bias toward rational theological discourse, we are easily blinded to the biblical emphasis on visually dramatic stories. We downplay the visual as dangerous or irrational, while God embraces the visual as a vital to His message. We elevate rational discourse as superior and dramatic theater as too emotional or entertainment-oriented, while God elevates drama equally as part of our imago dei. We consider stories to be quaint illustrations of abstract doctrinal universal truths, while God uses stories as his dominant means of incarnating truth. God loves movies.

Do you see the logic here? Essentially, Godawa is saying that stories are a part of what it means to be human and have a culture. Movies are a story. Therefore, God loves movies. {I might have botched the syllogism just a little.} I would debate the idea that movies are a story in the traditional sense. I would grant that movies often fill the human need for story, but I would say that they do this in a superficial way.

Allow me to, um, tell a story. I once had a professor. She was an obviously lonely person. She was an instructor in one of my media classes, and she was up on all the latest shows. Through the course of the class, it because evident to me that one of the reasons she was up watching all of these TV shows was that it filled her need for human companionship. She was a very large woman living a painfully small life, and TV gave her a sense of intimacy and connection. {Myers talks about this in his book.} Even though TV did this for her, the fact remained that she was in reality isolated from others. She didn’t have real friends other than the cast of Friends. TV was a substitute, and a poor one at that.

I think movies actually work in a similar way when it comes to story. We humans have a need for stories. But stories were traditionally used to pass on culture, virtue, wisdom, and so on. They ran deeply. Movies are {for the most part} a shallow substitute. We feel like we’ve experienced a story. But because it is image-based, it is as Myers says, which is to say that nothing abstract has been communicated, at least not specifically.

My hunch is that Godawa doesn’t have a broad reading experience with traditional stories. If he did, he would know that great stories are filled with kernels of truth that are explicit in the text rather than implicit in an image. I think of Howard Pyle, great writer of fairy tales, who will say things like “the stepmother was as beautiful as she was wicked and as wicked as she was beautiful and this is often true with very beautiful women.” The story will then dramatically illustrate the extreme wickedness and the extreme beauty and then overtly teach young men to beware dazzling beauty.

When you take away the words of the story, you are left with images which may or may not lead you to any knowledge of conniving women, depending on your disposition. The movie as a medium doesn’t naturally generalize itself. In fact, we could take Mr. Godawa’s own screenplay, which is a beautifully written tale of essentially a great books curriculum taught in a prisoner of war camp. I love his movie, I really do. But I don’t think it extrapolates itself in such a way that the viewer walks away seeing any need to enrich himself with great books. The typical viewer does not see that great books could elevate him from the prison of his own mundane life.

The Bottom Line

I’m not advocating total abstinence from movies. But I also think we shouldn’t be sitting around trying to pretend they are something they aren’t. They are a substitute for reading most of the time, and they are contributing to a culture that is becoming increasingly unable to reflect and analyze. Reflection and analysis automatically take place when reading a story, but this only happens deliberately when a person watches the average moving picture.

An Exception

I think an exception needs to be made here for LOST. LOST is interesting in that it has folks pouring through old books, studying John Locke, Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham and so on. LOST reaches back into the written world in a way that encourages us to want to understand that world because we see that it has significance within the show in a way that isn’t overt. In this sense, LOST encourages great books reading in a way that To End All Wars cannot. Because of this, I feel I can applaud LOST, and its reliance on curiosity as an engine, even though it might come to a disappointing end.

And Finally

I would compare Godawa’s assertions with Comenius. In a recent email from New College Franklin, the school’s rooting in Comenius’ ideal of pansophism was explained. Tenant two is where I have interest today:

II. WORD BASED

God reveals himself first and most particularly in words, and so literary substance is at the root of pansophism and classical education. The foundation of this principle comes from Christ the Logos-Word. Christ the Incarnate Word and the Scriptures are God’s specific revelation, and this literary prominence carries over into all other subjects and disciplines. For instance, the study of physics means reading works of physics, not solely doing experiments in labs. Reading is the core of all disciplines.

The concept of Christ-as-Word isn’t something to be taken lightly. After all, God dramatically created the world…with a Word.