Imagine being forced to wear a pair of translator earmuffs that would filter the dialogue from every movie you ever watched that would replace it with the same script. Or, a pair of goggles that reduced every movie’s images into what you wanted to see.
That’d be boring wouldn’t it? You’d never be surprised, challenged, changed, or moved by what you saw.
That is what seems to occur all the time when I hear of Christians reviewing movies. Since it’s been popular to do so of late, let’s use The Golden Compass as an example. These folks couldn’t see the movie because of all the filters they’d already put in place. I imagine that if it were not that Philip Pullman was atheist, or it was not known that he was, the movie would have garnered no real interest from Christian wack jobs. Or, if it turned out that C.S. Lewis was an atheist, his Narnia books could have got the same response: “Aslan is leading our kids into moral depravity! The ‘Beast’ has come, and he is a lion!”
So, let’s turn our attention briefly to I Am Legend. Aside from it being a good movie and the group of seven people I saw it with all agreed that it was a thumb’s up, it had a lot motifs in it that I saw as being “Christian”. Yup. Christian. Gulp.
As an Irish Catholic, of course I’m going to be always sensitive to the ways a movie could relate to the larger Western Myths, which happen to be largely Christian. And in this movie I found several.
I found it very interesting that Denny Wayman and Hal Conklin over at www.cinemainfocus.com decided to take their movie review the way that they did. Of all the themes that they could draw from the movie, the one they did choose to discuss was that of ‘genetic engineering’. The paranoia that some have about gene therapy and cutting edge technologies that can and do improve and lengthen life has obviously so pervaded these men’s perspectives that they could not see anything else.
Instead of coming out of the movie and saying “That’s what it looks like to be like Jesus” (finding the good) they said, “That’s what happens when you try to play God!” (finding a paranoid negative)
The movie carries a bit of Shyamalan’s Signs in it-the reestablishment of a character’s faith through ‘chance or random’ events. This was not picked up on in their review either.
So, what goggles and earmuffs will we choose to wear to the movies or when we meet those who differ from us? Does it matter? Who are the ’zombies’ in our lives who we view as ’less than’? What destroys and devalues life more-science and medical research or cluster bombs and the lies that leads us to drop them?
Ryan McGivern
Denny Wayman and Hal Conklin: www.cinemainfocus.com
January 6, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Thanks for this text, Ryan! I had similar fears of people pickung the movie up the wrong way. It is easily imaginable that Ned Flanders, after watching I Am Legend with his kids, says to them: “And that’s what you get if scientists go meddling around with human life, kids. So what do you want to become?” “Preachers.” “Doodeligood!”
I have the desire to recommend to you the book “Challenging Nature” by Lee M. Silver of 2006. It anticipates exactly this and explains, from the view of a very far-travelled molecular biologist, the fears arising in western Christian cultures in respect to new biotechnologies.
January 8, 2008 at 12:22 am
Ryan,
I loved your critique of our commentary on “I am Legend.” It is absolutely true that each of us come to art with our own mental structures, values, fears, religious views, scientific interests, and all. That is what makes responding to and creating art such a fascinating and enriching experience. It gives us an arena in which we can expose our inner ways of perceiving.
As a pastoral counselor I spend the majority of my life talking with people about how the decisions of their life have landed them where they are. The motivations, fears, interests, appetites, experiences, are woven together into a fabric that explains why each of us see things as we do and why we make the decisions we do.
Art, and especially film, has the ability to explore with us some of those primal fears, motivations, beliefs, etc., and expose them for discussion. So… let’s discuss the film.
When you saw the film from you own “Irish Catholic” mental structures, values, beliefs, concerns, etc., what do you see it exploring? If the possibility of a genetically mutated human life were to create a world like the one Neville inhabited, do you see that as only a stage on which to express a primal myth with a dying savior? And if so how did his death do that? Why, if he had found a cure, did he not wake up the young lady and allow her to communicate to her “hive” and use the cure to save them? What did he die for? A Christ-figure requires some purpose in the death. What is the purpose of the enclave with the church in the center? Is this an example of the biblical promise of a “remnant” that God protects throughout history from the various messes in which we find ourselves? Do you see the relationship with Neville and the leader of the hive as being dualistic – reverse images – like a Jungian shadow self? What changed within you as you watched this film? What are your filters that are challenged or affirmed by this work of art?
As a lover of science fiction, I was disappointed. Were you? If not, how do you deal with the holes in the film?
You make a strong statement claiming we are “wrong.” I’m not sure I understand how that judgment makes sense when discussing art. How can one person’s interpretation of the art form be “wrong” and the other “right”? Isn’t that the point of art – that it provides ways of coming together for discussion rather than making one person right and another wrong?
Denny