Movies That Changed My LifeIn an excerpt from his new book, Through a Screen Darkly, CT Movies critic Jeffrey Overstreet tells how certain films opened his eyes wider than ever, enabling him to look closer than ever before.By Jeffrey Overstreet |
posted 3/06/2007
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I've always had this sense that there is another language I once knew, a joy that was mine before I was born. When I get a glimpse of that glory through art, I can feel the memory of it pressing against the back of my mind, and the longing for that peace and resolution wells up inside me. I can't quite grasp it. I can't speak my native language. Not yet … but I'm learning.
If I do the difficult thing and pull myself away from art that is merely entertaining and start searching for those currents of truth that reside within beauty and mystery, I will be drawn off the path of familiarity and comfort. The reality of God is not bound to a particular earthly language, country or style. His spirit can speak through anything. But he is far more likely to be encountered in those things that are excellent rather than shoddy; particular rather than general; authentic rather than derivative. I will find myself investigating art and expression that never played for audiences in this country—art that waits overlooked on the shelves full of foreign and or independent films at the video store. And I will be changed, concerned with cares and disciplines that make no sense to Hollywood movie publicists.
It could be a lonely road. But it's a road that leads further up, further in, to greater majesty and more transforming truth.
First Steps into a Larger World
Like a pillar of cloud or fire, sometimes art offers us mysteries that draw us out of the captivity of our own perspective.
Growing up in a Christian home in Portland, Oregon, I lived in fear of the world of sinners beyond the walls of my sanitized religious subculture. My family showed up at a Baptist church on Sunday morning and socialized in a Christian community. My younger brother and I attended Christian schools from kindergarten through college. Word around the Sunday school room convinced me that I lived in a place like Rivendell in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, where all was beautiful and good, while everything "out there" was like Mordor. I came to believe that I was safe around believers but endangered by the worldly.
In our church community, the artwork of pop culture was treated with grave suspicion. Only rare exceptions such as cute and innocuous children's stories, Sesame Street and the Disney cartoons were beyond reproach. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was the first movie I saw projected on a big screen, and it planted the seeds of curiosity about cinema in my mind. But commercial fiction, the Weekly Top 40 on Z100 FM in Portland, the blockbuster movies of the week and all other secular stuff was considered dangerous because it showed all kinds of behavior that could lead people into temptation.
The homes my family visited were full of Christian books — usually the same volumes we had on our own shelves. So it was that I became fascinated with the larger world of literature through the neighborhood public library.
Advertisements in the newspaper for that forbidden world of movies—those "worldly" stories — intrigued me as well. I remember being troubled and fascinated by Marlon Brando's fearsome expression on the original newspaper advertisements for Apocalypse Now. And when something called Star Wars showed up on the page, my imagination grew extremely restless.
One afternoon in my grandparents' living room, Uncle Paul announced to the family that he was going to go see George Lucas's special-effects sensation. When he said that he wanted to take along his seven-year-old nephew, I braced myself to hear my parents refuse. They had heard rumors that the movie was scary and violent, and in retrospect, I completely understand their concerns. But then from his La-Z-Boy chair in the corner, my grandfather, who rarely spoke, stunned the whole family by announcing that he too wanted to see what all of the fuss was about. And he promised that he'd keep an eye on me. That tipped the scale in my favor.
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