SPEAKING OUT offers responsible Christians a forum. It does not necessarily reflect the views of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
Not long ago, several readers protested the reviewing of popular movies in a magazine for Christian parents and educators. Less than 30 years ago their denomination had taken a stand against the evils of worldly amusements—movie going, card playing, and dancing—and these readers now gagged to see how the magazine had fallen. The editor defended his practice. “See you at the movies,” he concluded with a smirk.
The editor’s self-assurance hints at a general change in the Christian community’s response to movies—easier access, more casual use, and less critical attitudes. The causes of change include the development of new technologies—videodiscs, videocassettes, mostly movies cable television networks, large-screen TVs, and satellite dishes for private use.
Producers and marketers typically aim mass movies, especially in summer, at passive consumers who seek escapist pleasure without consequence. Their name is legion. Now increasingly throughout the nation, the escapist mentality loves to nurse on its new hi-tech pacifier. Thus movies are moving: from the public theater to the living room, bedroom, or den.
The privatization of viewing has serious implications. First, the symbolism of viewing is changing. Protestant evangelicals used to regard the movie theater as a den of worldliness where the sanctified would not set foot. Theater attendance, a public act, was a kind of reverse profession of faith. A trace of that old stigma remains. But modern man tends to see the home as a safe haven, protected from view and, to an extent, from public canons of morality.
As the means of transmission shift to accommodate and stimulate the home market, the latent effect is that what is deemed tolerable and desirable in movies begins to change. Producers become more inclined to back financially the “home” movie, and directors look for scripts with home marketability. The production industry, if it knows little else, knows how to turn a buck.
Recent movies like Bolero and Body Double—soft porn billed as normal weekend fare—testify to this trend. If not actually aimed from their conception over the theater crowd and at the bedroom, they at least take advantage of a new permissiveness. These movies join Porky’s and the rest of its litter in transforming voyeurism from a crime and a perversion into a national pastime.
The second serious implication of home viewing is the greater possibility of moral anesthesia among viewers. Goodness does not sell movies. The movie industry must calculatedly scrape against social mores and ricochet off popular taboos in order to pique the viewers’ interest. Since profanity and nudity still offend, popular movies often present a world in which profanity and nudity are more prevalent, casual, or emphatic than in our own.
Shock soon loses its effect. As the audience grows jaded, the movie industry must either scout up new taboos to violate or find new markets to exploit. While the older popular audience ages and grows either more calloused or less patient, a new audience queues up at the younger end.
Movies will always be able to make an impact on this less-experienced cadre. Young people, flush with cash, low in discretion, hunger powerfully for new experiences. Along with records and TV shows, movies become the learning labs for those whose work and sexual experience is so long postponed. Thus the industry’s resources are heavily slanted toward youth, and movies like Kotch or Harry and Tonto, which a decade ago dealt sensitively with issues of old age, are rarities.
If the younger crowd should grow jaded through overstimulation, their powers of discrimination be dulled, their intellectual curiosity surfeited, and their moral orientation unimproved, the cost to our society, though hidden, must be incalculable.
Home viewing does not in itself threaten to dull the moral sense: the home and the company of Christian friends and family may provide a better milieu than a theater or restaurant for giving a movie a critical shakedown.
But as our lives become more awash with movies, we may lose awareness that movie viewing is a choice and a challenge. The real danger of anesthesia lies in the dynamics of production should the home viewer come to be perceived as more tolerant and hedonistic than the warier theater patron.
As movies are increasingly made to satisfy the taste for private luxury, will we spot the trends? Will we have courage to protest and the vision of a better way?
Perhaps. But a huge burden falls on the custodians of our consciences—parents, teachers, church leaders, and the movie reviewers in Christian periodicals. They must wake us if we doze.
RANDALL VANDERMEY1Mr. VanderMey, assistant professor of English at Dordt College, who is on leave completing his dissertation, wrote this article while a fellow of the Dordt Studies Institute.
