How to Watch a Movie

You're actually making the case not whether we should do this but almost that we have to do this, that in thinking about mission and engagement, and in thinking about how to function in a culture that has these stories that are almost omnipresent, if I can say it that way, that we have to become conversant with the conversations that are being generated.

And we have to be able to do it with a wisdom, and a discernment, and a capability that can tease out what's being sought for in and through these stories and what is being – I'm gonna be negative here a little bit – what's being sold through these stories – those are not the same things – and to do so in a way that invites a conversation with someone on the outside – if I can say it that way, but someone coming from a different place may be a better way to say it – that reflects on the experience that we may or may not share with that person.

Well, let's talk about what this actually involves. What does it mean to engage in these conversations in your view – and, again, I'm gonna pick on a valuative work, so I don't know what other word to pick – kind of authentically? In other words, not artificially where almost we get in the way of the conversation, if I can say it that way.

On the other hand, when I say to my friend or to my child, "I read you," that's more than just reading. That's saying, "I get you." That's saying, "I'm involved. I put myself in your place, and I am on your wavelength. Now we can move on from there. I get you. I read you."

That's what one has to do when they go to a movie or when they watch a television show. If it's not just mindless escape or entertainment – it is entertainment, but entertainment can be valuable.

What I find is the exciting part of dealing with media is you're given permission as a culture to do that. I can go to Starbucks with you, Darrell, and I can say, "I thought that movie was awful," and you come back at me and say, "It made me cry. That's the best movie I saw this year." And I'll say, "Darrell, how could you say that? It was – " and you'll say, "Oh, but – " and then you'll tell your narrative as to why that connected with you. And I'll say, "Thank you for sharing that. I had no idea," – or not. But you're able to really engage that.

You're given social permission to both agree and to confess when you're dealing with a story or a film or a movie, something from out of the popular culture, and in a sense we expect it. We don't expect that in too many areas of life.

I know when my wife and I go to see a really good movie, we can tell whether it's a really good movie or not by the conversation that happens after we walk out of the theater immediately because it's either, well, there's nothing to talk about, or it's, "Man, what did you think of that scene? That raised some really interesting questions about life." You immediately translate it out of the story that you saw into the generic categories that the story is playing with.

But I want to say when you're listening to another person, when your spouse is talking to you, they know whether you're listening or not or whether you have an agenda that you're trying to respond quickly with.

And all I'm saying is not that your perspective as a Christian isn't fundamental, but your hospitality, your generosity in relationship says, "I want to listen to you. I want you to set the table for me. I want you to share your vision of life, tell your story, whatever that is, and then I'm happy to respond." That response will come from my own center of power and meaning, which is my Christian faith, but it comes as a response.

So you start with that experience –

Now if you take the New Testament, I think that's what Paul does in Acts 17.

Paul in Lystra or Paul in Athens, those people don't have a clue about what the Jewish –

And so Paul takes the time to say, "Wow. You really understand this is a spiritual world. You recognize you don't even know that there's mystery there. Now I don't much like your idolatry, and let me tell you about Jesus," but he starts with having listened to them at that central point.

Well, the way liberal scholars put that together is the Paul of Acts 17 can't be the Paul who wrote Romans 1, and I go, "Nope, you just don't get it. You don't get the cross-cultural move that Paul has made, with a lot of wisdom, which is that although he looks at the culture – and he knows the culture has problems and that things are not great in the world, and there's a need for God to step in and act – that there is a spiritual quest that people are on that he's going to respect and then walk into, and he's gonna go from there."

And that's what we're doing when we go to a movie, in my opinion.

Of course the problem you had with Noah is if you did a movie strictly on the script that you had in the Bible, it would be a short. [Laughs]

So obviously there's gonna be fill-in and things done, but what the movie did, or attempted to do, I think, was to actually raise some very core questions about existence and choices that people face, portray it very, very vividly. I actually think they did some mixture of – and this is a spoiler, so if you wanna turn it off, go ahead – that there actually was a mixture of the Abraham and Isaac story in the midst of Noah. When that move started to happen, I went, "Whoa. We've jumped ahead."

But I also, at the same time got, I think, what the author was trying to do, which was to raise core life questions. Here's Noah going through this destruction of humanity that's happening before him, and there are core choices that he faces in the midst of that.

And I found myself in the movie saying, "This is raising some pretty good, core, life questions that everybody has to wrestle with and contemplate to one degree or another, unless they've totally turned themselves off to the existence that they live in."

Now the Bible doesn't talk about that – that's only one possibility –but you think about that. You and your little group are the only people alive, and you hear all those people yelling and groaning and knocking on the boat saying, "Let me in." You have to be feelingless.

Whether you think that's necessary, or whether that's what God's told you, there’s got to be just a huge amount of anxiety and sadness. Even if they're your enemy, that kind of carnage – well, so that's a question we in the protestant tradition haven't usually asked of the text. We have taken that text, and we have said it's about this good man, Noah, who saved the animals.

The Noah story, as you know – probably you know, Darrell – is the second most used story in all children's Bibles. There's been a study on Google of 170 children's Bibles. From the 19th through the 20th century, the nativity number one, Noah number two, more than the cross and resurrection, more than the good Samaritan, more than David and Goliath, more than Adam and Eve – Noah. And that story is always told as a story of this good person who rescued all these cute animals.

Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't – I'm not saying it's not. That's actually pretty key – but he has really looked at that text and talked about God's sadness and Noah's depression, and those are also in the text, but we somehow have just –

You've talked, also, some about negative examples. I'm gonna share on that I used to do with a message. There used to be a message I would preach on I Corinthians 13, the great love chapter. And I compared it to the lyrics of – and I'm going way back here – to the lyrics of a Tina Turner song – What's Love Got To Do With It? And it was a contrastive piece. It was using a message that was coming out of the culture that was different, that we might even assess as negative, but I think it was more disengaged. It's almost tragic.

To ask the question what's love got to do with things is, to me, an opting out of a depth human experience that is sad because I don't – who needs a heart when a heart can be broken? It's almost out of a fear of engagement, if you will.

And so sometimes I think the way in which we handle – there's a way to handle culture and engage it and critique it, I think, without being, if I can say this, finger-shaking, just descriptive of the options that are put before people that they face when they think about, "How do I handle love?" That's an example of one using lyrics.

My question is this, with kinda that in the background: what advice would you give people as they think about watching movies, and engaging movies, or engaging music in a way that tries to listen and reflect?

Secondly, I think that, for any of us, we need both a community that we can talk to about our experiences, and we need some sort of reflection that comes just from critics in the field. So if a movie has gotten a consistent half-star, why bother to see it?

So in five or ten minutes, one can figure out, from the 25 movies that are available, these four or five might be interesting, and then, given your taste, and given your sensitivity – for example, I don't like horror movies. They stay with me. My friend Scott Derrickson makes horror movies, is a strong, conservative Christian who's committed to the fact that horror is the one genre where good is good and bad is bad, and that if there's any morality that needs to be emphasized, a horror movie does that best.

I'm thinking. I don't know if we have time, but I'll make it short. I make an assignment in class for all the students to have a discussion group in which they see a movie and then talk about it afterwards. It's a discipleship – it could be evangelism but – ministry opportunity.

I had a Korean woman who had the assignment, and she went to her pastor and said, "My professor has said I need to show a movie and have a discussion." Out of respect for professors – sometimes too much respect, as you know – that Korean pastor and student said, "Well, then we'll need to show it in our church."

So she picked X-Men, and I'm thinking, "Oh, this doesn't sound like it will end well. These are first-generation Koreans. This is gonna be a tough one." But so they had that Sunday night. Everybody came. All the youth came because it was a movie. Gee, they'd never had that in church before. All the old-timers come because it's Sunday night, for prayer meeting. They come.

Okay, so they all come. They see the movie. The movie's over. For the first time in that church, the youth are teaching the adults because they're the only one that got it. They're telling about what the two options are and how it functions and how there are mutants, and those mutants have been rejected, and some of them want to revolt, and others want to work within the system to try to make it better.

So they're talking for ten – half an hour, and then a little old lady, 85-year-old, hunched over, she stands up, and she says, "Can I speak?" And then she says, "I know what it was like to be a mutant." Ooh…

And then for the next period of time, those grandchildren hear their grandparents for the first time talk about their coming to the states and feeling an outsider and feeing unable to be who they are.

Now that's a wonderful conversation that just happened. You didn't have to set it up. You simply showed the movie, asked people to reflect on it, learn from each other, and the sharing became a profound moment.

I don't want to get – I'm trying to avoid doing what we said we weren't gonna do, which is to overanalyze it, but there is a sense in which a good movie experience takes you to places that otherwise you might not be inclined to go and, in doing so, produces avenues for conversation and reflection that you might not otherwise get to.

And the beauty of it, from my standpoint, is in a theater in which you're sitting next to someone who may never darken the door of a church, or have a friend who may never darken the door of a church, now you have a way into a conversation about life issues that is trying to get to the same place you'd love to have a conversation with that person about, but it's coming through a different door.

I personally think that film's – maybe film's chief gift to us is that it allows us a perspective on life that we otherwise might not see. So we're allowed into the shoes of a blind person, or we're allowed to see the struggle of an alcoholic, or whatever, but we can understand, feel, experience in a way that we probably otherwise can't, and that expands our lives. That allows empathy and understanding with other people that we, then, will meet.

Just as when you meet someone who has had a life-changing event – I'll go back to the seven-year-old daughter or son who died – you're a different person for having befriended that person. You look at life differently. You thank God that that wasn't your experience. You feel blessed that somehow you've been spared that pain. You wonder if you could've gotten through that pain. There's all – but you are a fundamentally different person for having had that experience.

Maybe it's different in film, but it – there's a lot of discussion, as you know. There's a lot of theoretical conversation about these second-order experiences and what you're to make of them, but they actually are experiences. They make a difference in who we are.

And my hope would be that the conversation generates some reflection on, perhaps, those who listen to think about films in a different and fresh kind of way, and think about the opportunities that they actually represent, not just for how we engage our culture but also for thinking through what it can mean for us in our own personal reflection about how God is walking with us, through what it draws us to contemplate.

So thank you very much for being a part of this, and we thank you –