Letter #114: Hooray for Hollywood?
Why Turn to Tinseltown for Religious Wisdom?
Spike.
We’ve learned so much about Jesus from talking about Hollywood, it raises the question: What’re we, nuts? Why turn to the second most corrupt city in the country to learn about the source of truth and beauty?
Well, there actually is a reason. Hollywood is a town that sells stories. The story-selling business can be very lucrative. Ambitious people, desperate not to fail, have done everything they can to reduce the unpredictable storytelling art to a formulaic science. An elevator pitch works because the frightened executive you’re pitching to has thought long and hard about what core themes speak to an audience. Building a franchise “universe” works when those core themes are big enough to support more stories than one. And surprise endings work when they illuminate the core themes that were lurking unseen in the story all along.
But you’ll be shocked to learn that there are negative lessons we can learn from Hollywood too. When your central goal is money, or power, or fame, or prestige among your fellow elites, the formulaic mechanisms of storytelling can become corrupt.
Storytelling — along with all the other arts — is a way of communicating a truth that can’t be spoken: i.e. the experience of being human. Storytelling techniques are just that: techniques. They are designed to charm, excite, move, frighten and delight in order to transfer a vision of human experience from artist to audience. But even if you empty them of all meaning, these techniques continue to do that thing they do.
If you make an inventive film like The Matrix, which conveys our sense that there is a very different reality underneath the cosplay of daily life, some fearful studio executive will note that people were excited by the slow motion fight scenes. He’ll then demand sequels full of slow motion fights even if they are empty of all meaning. And it will work! It will bring in the simoleons. By this same process, a taut, intelligent horror film like Halloween, about the dissolution of suburban America in the wake of feminism and sexual liberation, morphs into garbage like Friday the 13th, about women with big breasts being stabbed to death in a cinematic orgy of sexualized violence.
You may ask: What’s this got to do with Jesus?
The point of the elevator pitch, the cinematic universe and the surprise ending is that they remain valid only so long as they convey a true vision. Otherwise, they just become a means of exciting our basest feelings in order to bring us into the theater.
So it is with religion, which is meant to be the elevator pitch, the story and the sequel of Christ. Even if today’s sermon is entitled Jesus XVI: This Time It’s Jesus, it’s no longer the good news if it does not communicate the truth of Christ’s words, life, death and resurrection.
Bible verse, orthodoxy, ritual, passionate declaration of faith: these are empty vessels if they do not carry the Word.
Love, Dad
Art, reflecting reality, seems to activate the imagination in the same way memory does.
When I hear a statement and check it against my memory, I really check it against my imagination.
And so I find it important to cultivate my imagination with good, useful art that I can take with me for reference in the challenging scenarios of life.
I find when I make His story my story and strive to live the Gospel of Jesus Christ in its fulness, as He would exemplify, then His Spirit is with me and I am led to those places where the true and living Word is proclaimed and enacted. Nothing else comes close to the good news, the greatest story ever told. I am 80 years old and its has taken years of detours, mistakes and study to find the Gospel story is as good as it gets here in mortality and the realer it becomes the more joy comes with it. Happy travels.