The Honest-to-God Truth About Movies (Part 2)The best films don't shy away from truthfully depicting the human condition—even when it's ugly and sinful.by W. David O. Taylor |
posted 7/20/2004
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People do not like dishonest stories. They become annoyed by artificial characters. There's a reason why most people, including Christians, disliked the movie Left Behind, and it had less to do with its theology than with its aesthetic merit.
In one scene the philandering pilot, Rayford Steele, sits at the edge of his bed, staring at his wife's crumpled nightgown. She's disappeared and he, the husband with a mistress, is "obviously" distraught. Then he sees a Bible which he "obviously" throws at a mirror, which "obviously" shatters. He then "obviously," though utterly inexplicably, grabs the Bible and "obviously" starts reading it. A few scenes later he walks in on a nameless, backgroundless, sinful-who-knows-why pastor who got left behind and yells at God in melodramatic soliloquies and throws racquetballs at crosses, but then instantaneously and weepily asks God to use him.
Rayford leans down and says, "He already has, he already has." He has? What? Really? How? When? They don't even know each other. What happened?
The problem here lies with the film's contrived, i.e. dishonest, depiction of non-Christians. Their badness is never shown, only talked about. They bear no resemblance to any pagans most of us know, and their experience of redemption becomes a facile and in-credible transaction, soundtracked by heavy-handed Christian music. The formulaic conversions, devoid of actual characterization, rob the viewer of a genuine encounter with the mystery of Christ, and it is this that turns people off. Conversely, the two non-Christian and one Christian business associates who talk about faith in the film The Big Kahuna look a lot more like, well, "real," people, which explains the film's more meaty effect.
To summarize, then, honesty is the manner by which the filmmaker depicts his subject matter. Honesty involves the strength to see what is there, not what he wishes were there. With honesty, regardless of the message, one gets the unvarnished version: the good, the rotten, the irrational—in short, what God sees and then redeems.
The Way People Really Are—in Truth
What role then does truth play? The phrase, "the way people really are," is a way of saying something about truth. But what is truth?
Truth is that which accords with fundamental reality. Truth coheres not only with actual human existence but with God's intended purposes, or ideal, for human beings.
For the filmmaker there are two essential kinds of truth: the grand and the common. The grand truths deal with the big religious ideas. For the Christian this includes things like the sovereignty of God, the dislocation of human nature, the atonement of Christ. The common truths traffic in the more ordinary things of life: food, old age, racism, cerebral palsy. What's frustrating to a lot of Christian filmmakers is the presumptive expectation that they should only work with the grand or religious truths to the exclusion of the common, human truths: the little things. This expectation however is not only theologically problematic, it excludes the greater part of our lives and stagnates the imagination.
But let's take a common truth for now: life is messed up, nothing fancy. In The Hours, a gorgeously acted, beautifully shot movie, everyone's life is messed up. The situations resemble our own and we quickly find ourselves empathizing with the characters. But even as it begins with the simple truth, "Life is messed up," it ends with an un-truth, "There's nothing I can do about it but choose what's best for me." There is no intervening God, no incarnation to make sense of the senseless, no supernatural power. There is nothing but choice: self-serving, self-justifying choice.
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