Seven Mistakes Movies Make
by Tom Hoopes - February 12, 2008
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
At the turn of the last century, Mark Twain loved poking fun at the tidy religious stories that were told in his day, even as he produced his own versions. The stories led to a payoff that dealt a death-blow to wickedness and a cheery boost to saintliness, all neatly summed up in a secondary character's sermonette.
When movies came along, they followed the same trend, but in a condensed, visceral format. You knew what you would get in the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s: morality plays pitting the false against the true. The best movies, as with any work of art, transcended their times, but retained a trace of the pattern.
Writers spent the latter part of the 20th century pedaling quickly away from the mistakes those stories made. And that's a good thing. Gone went the assumption that the only happy ending was an artificially perfect one. Gone went the presumption that God's plan is knowable to man, and that it's pretty much our plan, super-charged.
But the problem was, after Hollywood got to a good place, it kept pedaling – and eventually created its own formula, its own typical mistakes.
They are the mistakes of a different culture from the one that invented movies – a post-religious culture. I've counted seven (and left the last one expansive enough that you can add your own).
Before we start, though, a caveat: In identifying the mistakes in these movies, I do not mean to say, "These movies are without artistic merit and have no redeeming value." Quite the contrary. The movies I use as examples often have something important to offer. I simply mean to warn against falling for the mistake along with the rest of the story.
1. Images don't count.
You and I and our grandmother's friends would never think of going together as a group to sit and watch a live sex act. We wouldn't enjoy it – and if we did, we would feel like perverts (for good reason). It would disgust us to learn that a group of coworkers had gone to see such a thing. But many Hollywood producers want us to believe that getting together to watch a sex act in enhanced form – in giant color images, intercut with close-ups and punctuated by music – is a perfectly normal way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Which is to say, many Hollywood producers are perverts, and want us to be perverts, too.
The real difference between watching the live sex act and the simulated sex act on the screen is that after the first, you need to confess voyeurism; after the second, you need to confess pornography. The lasting impression the image makes on our brain is very similar: It's the chemical stimulation of a hormone, not the excitement of emotions by human drama.
Nudity tends to crowd everything else out in our minds. Ask a group of people – and not just guys – what they remember about the movie Witness, for instance, and they'll say, "Harrison Ford in an '80s Amish mystery." Ask them if they remember a scene in the movie, and, if they remember anything at all, they will remember, "He looks through a keyhole while a woman takes a bath" – a gratuitous scene in the film, which did nothing to advance the plot.
Gore also crowds out drama. If you or I saw a person get shot or knifed or blown up in a movie theater parking lot, we wouldn't simply remember it for the rest of our lives, it would become a focal point of our history. If it came up in conversation, we'd tell people "we're dealing with it." But movies assume we can watch the same thing in billboard-sized slow motion without consequence.
War movies in the old days had a lot of guys clutching their breasts and falling, dying in a way that seems quaint by today's standards. But I remember being just as inspired by The Longest Day as I was by Saving Private Ryan; ironically, the old D-Day movie actually told the tale of human dignity better by not continually shocking my system with so accurate a depiction of human road-kill.
The fact is, images do count. They stay with us, and it's important to keep the harmful ones out.
2. Hubris wins the day.
Movies tell you that the more certain you are of your own abilities, the more likely you are to succeed. The ultimate hero is the skilled loner: James Bond, Jason Bourne, Neo.
And it isn't just action heroes. Last weekend, I went to see the Hannah Montana 3-D concert movie with my eleven-year-old daughter (we were intrigued by the overwhelmingly positive reviews at RottenTomatoes.com). The lyrics of one of the first songs went as follows: "Life is hard or / It's a party / The choice is up to you / Life's what you make it / So let's make it rock."
Hannah's message: By looking inward, one finds the resources necessary to create the fate one wants. Hubris wins the day.
All this is the reverse of the classic literary arc. In traditional literature, a protagonist triumphs; the bad guys fight back and get the hero into an impossible bind; if the hero believes only in himself, it's called hubris, and he fails. This kind of story was called a tragedy.
But if the hero turns outside himself for help – to God, country, friends, lover, second mate, or faithful dog – he wins.
Take an old story like Treasure Island or Kidnapped. Each features a boy who is thrust into a situation where he faces the bad guys virtually alone. But Jim Hawkins and David Balfour don't "believe in themselves," and in so doing, overcome their foes. Rather, each sees his weaknesses so clearly that he grasps for anyone who can help him, even outlaws.
In modern kids' corollaries, like Spy Kids and Hercules, the opposite is the case: What the kids need to triumph in these movies are gizmos to wield with swaggering confidence. The trope is so prevalent that Toy Story 2 even jokes about it: The toy dinosaur is surprised that "believing in yourself" isn't the way to defeat Zerg in a video game.
This movie mistake comes from, and feeds, radical individualism. In these stories, the self is the important thing; others are just props, obstacles, or boosters on the hero's stage. But this error leaves audiences ill-equipped for the real world, where true success comes only to those willing to see their shortcomings and trust others.
3. Religious people aren't normal.
Since most people in Hollywood aren't religious, they don't seem to understand what religious people are all about. In fact, their knowledge seems limited to knowing that we believe weird things and want to spoil their social lives. As a result, they often portray religious people as creepy or scary.
Even when Hollywood is trying to be nice and reach out, they seem incapable. Often, the highest praise Hollywood can pay to religion is the backhanded compliment of making its practitioners merely banal instead of baldly malevolent.
We don't have to look far for examples: The Da Vinci Code notoriously cast an "Opus Dei monk" as the evil-doer, and The Golden Compass is about the evil "Magisterium's" wicked designs. The cliché appears even when religion isn't a major theme: The Shawshank Redemption has its evil Christian prison guard; Shiloh turns the book's nasty Church-shunning man with a sour family history into a Bible-thumping anti-evolutionist with a sour Christian family history.
