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Catching Light: Looking for God in the Movies by Roy Anker Eerdmans, 2004 400 pp., $20.00 
Useless Beauty: Ecclesiastes Through the Lens of Contemporary Film by Robert Johnston Baker Aacdemic, 2004 208 pp., $17.99 |
Is it cooler to be a Jedi or a Jesuit? A band of Jesuit novices argued this question on the way to see the then-new Star Wars film, The Phantom Menace. The Jedi side had a lot going for it. These twentysomethings had all been raised on the Force, the Dark Side, and Obi-Wan. The rich mythology had not a little to do with their pursuit of mystery and desire to save the world.
Yet Jesuits were cool too. Cool enough to make these smart, attractive, basically well-adjusted young men vow to poverty, chastity and obedience. Another movie added to their sense of vocation: The Mission. They didn't just weep at that film's portrayal of sin, conversion and nonviolence in colonial South America. They signed up with today's version of the Society of Jesus.
On the way out of the colossal disappointment of Menace, the novices were quiet. The Jedi side had so obviously lost that the argument was no longer fun. One finally sighed: "Definitely cooler being a Jesuit."
The pairing of God and the movies, variously construed, has been the subject of a raft of recent books, dozens in the last several years alone. Interest goes both ways—theologically minded writers paying more attention to movies, even as the movies seem to be paying more attention to God—ensuring that our authors have lots to work with. How ought Christians go about discerning God's presence at the movies?
With enthusiasm, according to longtime Calvin College Professor Roy Anker. The movies don't just physically depend on the light shining through miles of film, they also depict well the divine Light that occasionally shines at the edges of things. In Catching Light: Looking for God in the Movies, Anker organizes his detailed readings of mostly blockbuster films over the last 30 years around Frederick Buechner's tripartite discussion of the gospel as "tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale." In Anker's hands, great movies become great religious commentary: The Godfather, with its chilling portrayal of Al Pacino's Michael Corleone making baptismal promises as his henchmen slaughter his rivals, shows us tragedy. Robert DeNiro's Rodrigo in The Mission, looking strikingly like Jesus, weeping and laughing at his absolution from the very Guarani whose children he had abducted for slaves, demonstrates the redemptive comedy of the Christian story. The grand, sweeping mythology of Star Wars suggests the extravagant promises of the true fairy tale of the gospel. Anker adds to Buechner's scheme a fourth section called "found." Here, for example, is Kevin Spacey's suburban dad in American Beauty, converted—just before he is shot—from seeing his daughter's friend as an object of sexual conquest. The slogan of that film, "look closer," could describe Anker's overall approach. Movies can help us see "the world as it truly is: resplendent and suffused with a radiant, implacable love that shows itself in the exquisite beauty of the very fabric of the created world."
A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture by Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor Baker Academic, 2003 320 pp., $19.99 
God Is Not: Religious, Nice, One of Us, an American, a Capitalist by Brent Laytham, ed. Brazos, 2004 160 pp., $14.99 |
Anker's enthusiasm as a theological interpreter of the movies occasionally gets the better of him. I don't doubt that Superman's creator meant for Kal-El, his white haired father Jor-El, and the green crystal that teaches the former about the latter to hint at the Christian Holy Trinity. But should Christians agree to so thin an analogue for the Godhead we worship? Is Luke's willingness to die instead of killing Darth Vader really "a perfect rendition of the notion of substitutionary atonement"? Films may be best at showing the faint light around the edges, the numinous spirituality that is broadly interesting to the movie going public, and less at showing the particularities that make specific religions most precious to their adherents. To speak in literary terms, they may do better with Tolkein-style typological allusions to faith rather than Lewis-like allegorical showings.
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