Movies move us. They pack a powerful emotional punch. And because they leave very little to the imagination, they often overpower us. Many of us enjoy movies for that very reason, but we don’t always know how to reflect thoughtfully on our emotional encounter with a movie. Most high school and university students
see more movies than they read books. One of my students has seen The Matrix more than twenty times. Although that movie has been one of the most popular movies in Christian youth groups, rarely do students reflect critically on the fact that the movie blends postmodern philosophy with perspectives from both Buddhist and Christian worldviews (see my webpage for links:
www.cmu.ca/faculty/gmatties).
Although we have grown up in a visually saturated culture, we don’t have skills for critical engagement with visual media.
Movies always reflect a worldview. Either implicitly or explicitly they communicate ways of understanding the world, and how men and women see each other and act in that world. Although we have grown up in a visually saturated culture, we don’t have skills for critical engagement with visual media. And so, as passive viewers, we run the risk of being manipulated by what we watch. If we were to supplement our passive viewing with active dialogue with the movie, we would find ourselves seeing more in the movie. Rather than being visual sponges, we would become participants in the discernment of meaning and significance.
There are at least
four disciplined ways we can increase our pleasure and our understanding of the movie-going experience. Each of these can easily be adapted to a discussion after viewing a movie with a group. None of these are more difficult than high-school students are used to applying to analysis of literature or social problems.
- Recall what we’ve seen and heard. One of the best ways to begin a discussion is to have members of the group recall scenes that stand out as particularly meaningful or powerful. As one person after another makes observations about significant scenes in the movie, we are able to sort out what we’ve just seen. We put the movie back together. We begin to put our unconscious processing into a kind of order. And in doing that, we begin to name our experience and, therefore, to understand it. After that initial sharing, the group can begin to make sense of the technical effectiveness of the movie.
- Pay attention to details. Since everything in a movie has been included “on purpose,” it’s worth talking about the questions posed by the actual form of the movie. Why does the plot move the way it does? Is there one plot or several? Is it a simple linear or a complex plot? Do we recognize any opposites in the movie (e.g. light and dark, male and female, good and evil, etc.)? What are the dominant moods in the movie? What is the genre of the movie? What do we expect of that genre? How does this movie bend the normal or conventional expectations of the genre? Who are the characters? How are they presented? What is the significance of the characterization? What does the photography and camera-work contribute to the experience? How are the scenes edited together? How do sound and special effects add to the effectiveness of the movie? All of these will work together to shape the movie’s experiential or emotional impact.
- Talk about the experience of watching the movie. How did my body respond to the movie while watching it? What emotions do I remember? Did I ever feel as though I had to turn my eyes away? Was I shocked at anything I heard? Why? How does my experience of life intersect (or not) with what I’ve seen in this movie? What do I identify with? What do I think is beautiful and good in the movie? What do I find abhorrent or ugly? What was I embarrassed about? What did I want to cheer about? What brought tears to my eyes, and why? Learning to name our emotional response helps us understand the movie’s power to portray a worldview and to shape our imaginations.
- Finally, reflect together on the worldview presented in the movie. Movies create an imaginary world into which we can escape for a few hours. They usually intensify some aspect of human experience so that we find ourselves encountering what we would not ordinarily experience. Such vicarious experience pushes us to the edge of our comfort zones and beyond. As we “live inside” the fiction of the movie, we are invited to accept or to reject the worldview of the movie, to contrast the worldview of the movie with our own, or to modify our own perspective (sometimes quite unconsciously) in the light of what we’ve experienced. That’s why the fourth step in group reflection will move us to think about how the movie tells the truth, either fully or in part, or tells lies that tend to deceive us into thinking we’ve seen the truth about life in the world.
One way of engaging a group in worldview analysis is to ask a few basic questions. All of these will in one way or another help us to name the significant themes that run through the movie.
- Where are we? What kind of world does the movie present? What are the cultural assumptions in the world of the movie?
- Who are we? How are we invited, through identification with the characters, to situate ourselves in that world? How does the movie depict what it means to be human? How does the movie show us, among other things, human sexuality, violence, friendship, love, work and vocation?
- What’s wrong? How did we get ourselves into this mess? What are the fears of the characters in the movie? What are the problems they wrestle with? How are evil and good presented in relation to each other and to the characters?
- Is there a remedy? Can health, wholeness and peace be restored? Can relationships be mended? Does the movie present a hopeful, despairing, or ambiguous world? Is there a savior in the movie? Does the movie offer a source of hopefulness within or beyond human experience? Can humans solve their own problems, or are they essentially helpless?
- Which biblical texts or characters resonate with the movie? Which theological concepts offer a critique of the movie’s worldview? How does the Bible answer the questions posed by the movie? In what ways do the Bible and the movie depict similar (or different) ways of naming the human condition?
- How does the movie invite me to think or behave differently? How will I choose to think and to act because of watching this movie?
Youth leaders and participants can learn much about movies by consulting a wide variety of movie review websites. I have compiled a list of the best websites, including the best Christian review sites, at my Movie Theology page (
www.cmu.ca/library/faithfilm.html). Church libraries would do well to order several of the best new books on faith and film. See my web page for a review of five of the latest books (
www.cmu.ca/faculty/gmatties).
