Review of Saving Mr. Banks
In this episode, Dr. Darrell Bock, Dr. Tim Basselin and Dr. Chip Dickens discuss movies and the family, focusing on Saving Mr. Banks.
Timecodes
- 00:13
- Dr. Basselin shares his background in the media arts
- 03:02
- Dr. Dickens shares his background in psychology
- 05:04
- The significance of relationships in Saving Mr. Banks
- 10:58
- The power of music connects the intellect and emotions
- 15:00
- The power of music evokes emotions in a church context
- 18:20
- Contrasting explicit knowing and implicit knowing
- 22:01
- The significance of the color red in Saving Mr. Banks
- 26:11
- The significance of flashbacks in Saving Mr. Banks
- 27:50
- Reflecting on your family and upbringing
- 28:58
- Aesthetic observations about Heaven is for Real
- 31:35
- Biblical themes in Hollywood movies
Transcript
- Darrell Bock
- Welcome to The Table where we discuss issues of God and culture and today we're doing another set of movie reviews, but we're gonna do it with a twist. The two movies that we're gonna look at are Saving Mr. Banks and Heaven Is For Real, and both of them deal with –at least indirectly– the theme of families. Heaven Is For Real is a little less focused in this direction, but it does relate to family life in America, and of course Saving Mr. Banks –part of the key part of the plot is related to how the father of the key character in the movie impacted her view of life.
So I have two experts here from two different areas. Tim Baslin teaches in our media arts program here at Dallas Theological Seminary, and he's gonna give his background here in a second, and then Chip Dickens directs our counseling department here and has been with us before on issues related to family, so welcome back, Chip and welcome, Tim. We're glad to have you. Tim, tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to be someone who teaches about media and movies.
- Tim Basselin
- Well I grew up in Alabama, and I grew up in a setting where we were not allowed to go to movies. We were not allowed to be involved with culture much at all, secular culture. It was bad, completely bad. That made a disconnect in me between my faith and the real world to the point where I was almost scared of nonbelievers at one point, graduating high school around that time. In college I decided to do a major in English and in Bible, and I think I was seeking to kind of pull those back together and how I started seeing lots of connections between the two, and I continued that on through my masters and then my PhD, which I did at Fuller Seminary in theology and culture, one of the only places that was offering that sort of PhD at the time.
I studied under Rob Johnston who was one of the leading experts in theology in film. He started a lot of the conversation in theology and film, and though I didn't study film, I studied literature, I still gathered a lot from him and his perspective and how to approach film and culture in general.
- Darrell Bock
- Well we may have to psychoanalyze you by the time this is all over listening to that background.
- Tim Basselin
- All right, so I think my part is done.
- Darrell Bock
- I mean that is an interesting twist in the story that we didn't know about, so that's good. We may talk a little bit about that transition that you went through 'cause that actually is part of our topic for today. Chip, tell us about your background.
- Chip Dickens
- Yeah, I grew up in probably the opposite kind of family Tim did. We had lots of culture, not in the highest sense, but not a very Christian home, and my home interestingly was dysfunctional in a lot of ways and probably my own journey of faith and healing really interested me in relationships and really kind of what was going on inside of me, so very interested in psychology, did my masters and PhD in clinical psych at SMU and did a dissertation in child development. And so I have done a lot of work with families and trying to understand some of those issues. So these two movies are gonna be really fascinating to see how those dynamics kind of play out in these stories.
- Darrell Bock
- Well since we're in full disclosure mode, I'll go ahead and give my background. I also did not grow up at least in an explicitly Christian family. My parents both came out of Jewish backgrounds but left Judaism right before I was born, which meant that our family was isolated from the rest of the family after they made that announcement. Then we grew up in what I would say was a moderate Christian church, so I went to church on Sunday and was involved in Sunday school, but it was theologically moderate. And when my mom contracted cancer when I was about 8 years old, she did when I was 14 of cancer, we really almost stopped going to church just because of the logistics.
She was in and out of the hospital several times, six operations in that period, and so just a really difficult, traumatic time for the family. So that's our background. I didn't come to the Lord until I was in college, so I also have a background that doesn't feed into a strong Christian rootage, so you're outnumbered here two to one it looks like. Let's turn our attention to these movies. They do two very different things at the core surface level, but at the more basic level I think they raise some interesting questions. Let's talk first about Saving Mr. Banks, which was the first of these two movies that came out. Just some statistics that's kind of interesting. The budget for Saving Mr. Banks was $35 million.
Movies are never about chump change. They always are very, very expensive to produce. When I go to a movie I watch the credits at the end, usually sit through that as a reminder to me of how much goes into the production of a movie and how many different people have to participate in it, and that's part of what makes it expensive. It grossed $101 million so far and has just moved into DVD sales, which will be a whole other level of the economics of the movie. Tim, what was your take on Saving Mr. Banks? At the surface it's a story that tells kind of the behind-the-scenes of one of the more popular movies when I was growing up, Mary Poppins, and that certainly made it fun for people of my age. I wondered what the under 30's think of it, but anyway, what did you see going on in this movie?
- Tim Basselin
- Well Mrs. Travers, the author, is dealing with her family issues and her issues with her father a lot, and I think what's interesting is the way that she comes to –she has spent her entire life sort of, she comes off as a very curmudgeon older lady. She has written Mary Poppins and then she has tried to protect Mary Poppins, and Walt Disney has been after her for 20 years trying to get the rights to this movie. And she will not give it to them because she doesn't want him to take control and take over, and she's trying to protect this vision she has of Mary Poppins and Mr. Banks.
What I found most interesting is the way that she is able to release that and give it up is through the imagination of the people at Disney, so songs played a really important part in the movie throughout. The major emotional changes in her and in Walt Disney and other characters –they happen in the middle of songs. It's not "Here's the reason why you need to make this jump." It's this song that comes up and she just starts feeling stuff she didn't know was there and it starts to release her to be able to have some freedom and really end up embracing her own history or reimagine it in a new way that allows her to deal with it a lot better.
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah. I think it's a very powerful movie. I think it was an underappreciated movie in a lot of ways, and the thing that struck me about it, Chip is the core of the story is about this almost imaginative world that she has created out of a reaction to her own upbringing, and so the protection isn't so much of the story –if I can say it that way –as it is a certain conception of the world, which her personality is hanging on to because I take it, being an amateur psychologist here, because of the pain of her own experience and the protection that that generates. How common is that?
- Chip Dickens
- I think in the story you get to see this on full display where she's tenacious. I mean she is not gonna let go of this, and not just let go of the script, but really what you're talking about is all the emotion and the relationships, and they've become really significant to her. In fact you see some of the staff even refer to the characters as family; they are. There is a deep, deep attachment to this. Even though you see it displayed beautifully in the movie, I think all of us kind of do that to some extent. We have significant experiences as kids that were at critical moments that have shaped us and we've built or our personalities have been built and our histories have been built on those things, and so it's kind of like a Jenga puzzle. You pull out one of those at the bottom and it endangers everything.
So there's a lot of protectiveness that all of us probably do. Hers was very public or at least part of a scene there or a series of scenes where she really did, she was given the Heisman move to everybody that moved in and tried to threaten any of it and it is interesting to see how she relinquishes it; it's never by a convincing argument. It's as she builds a trusting relationship with this team at Disney, which is really insightful probably for all of us that most of those big transitions where we let go of that protective mode is usually when we start to feel safe, and we build confidence with some other people.
- Tim Basselin
- And part of the reason that Disney is able to pull that out of her is 'cause he has the same story. He has the same connections. He tells a story of his difficult childhood with his father and how he didn't wanna let go of Mickey, and somebody was trying to buy Mickey from him, and he wouldn't do it. So he understood where she was coming from and he was able to create that relationship because of that.
- Chip Dickens
- Tim, that's a great observation 'cause it doesn't have to be the same experience, but she gets the sense that he really understands because he's been through something comparable or similar and he becomes a safe person.
- Darrell Bock
- And I think it's interesting, and I'm gonna almost clinicalize this, which is dangerous, but there's almost head and heart contrast here of what's going on and the way in which music, the role that music plays in reconnecting the two. Can I say it that way? Or allowing the two to relate to one another in a more functional way than in a dysfunctional way. Is that a fair characterization of what's happening in the movie and may also explain, this is not profound but it's an observation, may also explain why musicals like Mary Poppins and shows like that end up being so popular in the culture.
- Chip Dickens
- Yeah. Music is such a, from a psychologist’s perspective, music gives people permission to feel, but it also gives structure to it as opposed to sometimes I don't wanna allow myself to feel something 'cause I don't know what's gonna happen. I don't know how it's gonna affect. Songs and music kind of give parameters for that as well as an invitation to feel things and so they're powerful.
- Tim Basselin
- And it's kind of difficult to sit here and analyze and talk about it rationally, right?
- Darrell Bock
- That's right.
- Tim Basselin
- I mean the point is that you can't, that that's why it's so effective. So at the very beginning when Disney first meets her he says something along the lines of "Your book sparked my imagination, and those embers are still burning." And he's been chasing her for 20 years and those embers are still burning and there's something so powerful about the imagination, which of course he comes back to towards the end when he's talking to her. He has a really great quote. I wrote it down here. When he's convincing her about giving me, your father basically, giving me this story and he says to her that he'll be redeemed through the story if Disney is able to take it, and he says "That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again, over and over and over again." And you can see that in the movie and in the music.
One way of analyzing film, one way that we talk about it is that the quarter point and the halfway point and the three-quarter point are very significant scenes. So I was watching this with a friend on Tuesday, re-watching it, and we went back to the quarter point and the halfway point and the three-quarters point. They were all music scenes, every one of them. The first one is setting up the conflict, and it's the first "Chim-chimeny" song and she's "No, no, no, we're not having music. You're not turning this into a musical" and all that. The second one is when Disney is dealing with how to reach her and it's the song "Toppins are bad." Says a lot to Disney, right?
So he has to move away from – he's been doing this for 20 years and he's not just chasing money trying to get from her. It's something significant for him. And then the last one is the scene where she finally breaks out, and it's "Let's go fly a kite," and she's up and dancing around and the assistant is running to Mr. Disney's office because "She's dancing!" No one can believe she's dancing, and she can't believe it either, and it's the music that got her there.
- Darrell Bock
- And it's amazing to me. Really I thought the last third of the film was incredibly powerful and the "Let's go fly a kite" scene and the way that all played out, I mean something as simple as flying a kite ends up being something that gets to someone, because it reconnects them and gets them to readjust the way they're looking at life. Very, very interesting dimension of things. I hadn't thought about asking this, but in the midst of the conversation it strikes me that this actually has a lot to say about the way churches engage with music and the way in which people feel attached to the music at churches and why music in churches end up being sometimes – you would think we're gonna sing and praise God, and it ends up being a very contentious area.
I don't mean to lay a church on the couch and ask "How long have you been feeling like this?" but there's a sense in which the way we engage in worship is such a personal dimension of how we relate to God, and when I do that corporately and there's a disconnect and how that plays itself out, that actually ends up being very disruptive at a personal level. Does that help to explain why so much emotion is often wrapped up in the way we approach worship in the church?
- Chip Dickens
- Yeah I think so. Obviously there's lots of areas of contention in church life, not just worship, but it is a powerful one. It's evocative. It engages an area of our own experience that sometimes we don't even manage real well, and so it's a really powerful part of what it means to relate to God. Even in the Scriptures –the different genres, whether it be Psalms or even narrative portions in Scripture they evoke emotion. They draw us in in a way that's really powerful. It's hard to kind of just sit on the sideline and be an observer when there's music. It draws you in. It pulls you in and sometimes even when you don't wanna be.
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah. I find myself reacting sometimes to hymns and sometimes I'll go "I don't like that tune", but I'll sometimes say "But the words are terrific." When I'm in my engagement mode of thinking through what I'm actually doing, sometimes I sense this disjunction in my own approach to worship, and then I collect myself and say, you know, we are here to praise God and not to analyze what's going on. But there is this, and it's almost instinctive. I mean if you sat me down and asked, “Why do you not like this tune and why are you so drawn to that song?” I probably couldn't entirely explain what's going on.
- Chip Dickens
- And that's what I love about really this movie with the lead character. You get the sense that there's not a lot of awareness sometimes. It's kind of like an iceberg. It really does kind of bob, and there's awareness and moments, and then she's kind of clueless about her own emotions and her own stuff. I think there's something about that that's terribly human as well and draws us all in and same thing during worship.
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah and the whole thing is brilliantly acted. I mean I really think Emma Thompson just did a marvelous job with the character and fleshing it out. How she didn't manage to get an Academy Award nomination escapes me, but that's a complaint like the complaint I have about him sometimes. What do you think, Tim when it comes to music and media? You're in a program that talks about worship a lot, and you try and help people think through what can be accomplished through the music part of a worship service.
- Tim Basselin
- Well I think one thing that music does in worship is push us into the mystery 'cause it connects those emotions and those desires, those hopes, our imaginations, hopefully with good solid theology, and often we become contentious because people are wanting one side or they're wanting the other instead of trying to find them both coming together and being okay with them both. So some of us tend towards more intellectual and will tend towards wanting those hymns with those incredible, all that theology, and others are saying "I don't feel any emotion with this. It's not moving me. There's no mystery to it."
- Darrell Bock
- Right.
- Tim Basselin
- And then other people are on the other side. They just wanna feel it and say the same words over and over again and it not have a lot of meaning. So I think it's something actually that both of these films deal with quite well is this movement between mystery and our reason and understanding and the hard things of this earth but then this mysterious hope that we can continuously get pushed towards and desire and want. That's why they're powerful for me is that kind of push into mystery.
- Chip Dickens
- As you were talking it reminded me of there's a group of faculty colleagues out of Biola that has been looking at this relationship and psychologist between explicit knowing and implicit knowing even right down to the neuroscience of how our brains are put together, that both are really valuable and they compliment each other, but they don't do what the other one has to do. So explicitly knowing more kind of that propositional truth and data and things of those sorts are really critical, but there's this implicit knowing about life and relationships and who God is and even our earthly relationships that can't necessarily be boiled down into a nice mathematical formula, and both are really critical to have a full experience in faith and growing healthy relationships. So it's interesting as you talk about music that it taps into some of those as well.
- Darrell Bock
- And this character in this movie has this kind of disjunction because on the one hand she's clearly very articulate and thinks through why she expresses herself the way that she does. I mean words really matter to her in a significant way, and we're gonna say it this way, and we're not gonna say it that way, that kind of thing, and then she does it with this beautiful British flare. I don't know what it is about being on an island on the edge of the Atlantic that allows people to have this ability.
So you've got that dimension equation, but as you said when she wrestles with the relational part of what she's dealing, with she just has absolutely at many levels no clue, and the disjunction is so obvious in the Disney character, which in some ways is a more subtle character. The Disney character has some sense of what that combination has the potential to be and is trying to draw her into a recalibration –if I can say it that way– and pushes her in that direction, and what's powerful about the movie of course is that we can identify with the differences in the characters and connect with the struggle that it represents.
- Tim Basselin
- Just one quick sentence: that's why we need artists. In what you're saying with all the stuff underneath that she's not really picking up, let's talk about the color red. When she says "There will be no red in the film, no red", and Disney sees it as just a test, like how can you possibly not – it doesn't make any sense.
- Darrell Bock
- Right.
- Tim Basselin
- So why can there not be red in the film do you think?
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah.
- Tim Basselin
- I'm asking you.
- Darrell Bock
- Oh, you're asking. I have no idea. I am completely not in touch with the color red in this movie.
- Chip Dickens
- Well for me, my observation was that the red was kind of a focal point when her father was dying. It was the blood that he was coughing up, and I don't even know if she realizes how intimately those two concepts are attached because they tried to conceal it, and then she's looking through the window at him on his deathbed and he kind of gets caught not protecting the rag that's just full of blood that he's been coughing up. So I think it's there she realizes this thing is not gonna go well.
- Tim Basselin
- That's interesting 'cause when Disney confronts her about the red, you don't get any sense from her that she knows why necessarily, although I think she knows probably why she doesn’t like pears and why she's gonna throw them into the swimming pool and all that, but –
- Chip Dickens
- And that's an interesting thing just psychologically how, not to get into a bunch of psycho-dynamic theory, but there is just a lot of stuff that influences us that we're not really quite sure how to connect the dots, but there's real powerful emotions that are attached to some of those experiences that we had growing up.
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah and another level of that is that sometimes you're aware of a connection, but you don't know what to do with it. I mean for me, I think we have to go here, for me hospitals are really, really difficult places because I was literally between the ages of 8 and 14 in and out of hospitals watching my mom recover from operation after operation, being in the room and watching her wake up and deal with the pain and that kind of thing. So hospitals for me, I mean they're already difficult places to begin with because people who are there are obviously not doing well, they're not healthy, but to actually identify with my mother's pain and the memories of that, any time I go into a hospital visitation there's like this process that I have to go through to walk through those doors and face what's there. At one level, okay, I get that, but at another level you go, why is this always coming back up?
- Tim Basselin
- It's unreasonable.
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah exactly.
- Tim Basselin
- You should be able to overcome it.
- Darrell Bock
- Exactly right, and you sit there and you go, what's going on here that this has such a hold on me that it ends up being such a difficult step to take? I mean it's so obviously basic to ministering. And the thing is, is that it was something I really didn't become aware of until I was put in a ministry situation in which going to the hospital was gonna be a routine, and yet for me there's nothing routine about going to a hospital, nothing routine about it, and so I think that's a similar kind of process that we're talking about.
- Chip Dickens
- Yeah I totally agree. Like I even described, certain kind of developmental points emotionally, spiritually, the same experience could have a really deeply profound effect on us just developmentally. So you see even with the character in Saving Mr. Banks, she's kind of in that 8 to 11, 12-ish kind of range there, and that's a real critical time. So even for your experience, there's little windows there where neuroscientists would say that our brains are primed to have deep emotional kind of attachments and effect when we go through traumatic experiences or even just life. It doesn't have to be traumatic. It can have a really deeply powerful impact on us as adults.
- Darrell Bock
- And now just to shift a little bit, you said this is why we need artists. The beauty of the way the film does this of course is it does it by this juxtaposition of flashback with where we are in the narrative and giving you insights into what's going on to some degree internally in the person as we're thinking through this. And I think "artist" is actually a very good word here because what you're seeing is someone who is so – the people doing the writing and the filming are so in touch with human responses and emotions and the way they work and the way the interplay works that they have the opportunity to give us insight into the way we think and operate without it being – sorry, Chip – without it being in a psychologist chair where someone sits down and explains it to us.
There it is on a big screen right in front of us, and of course with the imagination not only is the imagination of the film being displayed, but that's triggering our own memory and imagination itself and getting us to reflect and interact with what's happening on the screen in light of our own experiences and boom, all of a sudden you have a film that opens up and gets us to think about life that perhaps we wouldn't think about if we were in a lecture or a classroom or something like that. That is what artistry I think is all about.
- Tim Basselin
- I think that was very well said. I think we need to start doing voice lessons for the Biblical counseling students.
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah. Well I just will say this for people who are watching, and if they haven't seen the movie Saving Mr. Banks, I think it is a movie worth seeing. It does display a variety of important emotions about life and our upbringing, etc. and I think it leads to a reflection for those of us who grew up in the Mary Poppins era, it also evokes all kinds of childhood memories and joy of attending the movie. I mean if you just had that layer of just the enjoyment of Mary Poppins that would be good enough, but it really is at a much more profound level a film that gets you to reflect about the impact of your family and your upbringing on what it is that you do, and as such I think has real value, and I think putting the term "artist" around it is a good way to describe it, and here it is as a mainline film. It's not an independent production by any means and really reflects much of what I think movies have the potential to do for us.
Well let's shift gears and talk about Heaven Is For Real, a completely different movie in some ways and certainly a more independent film in terms of where it comes from, but this wasn't small potatoes either in terms of production. This movie cost $12 million to produce, so obviously not at the level of Saving Mr. Banks but certainly expensive at one level, although probably on the level of films it was a very not economically produced film. At this point it's still in release, and it's at the $67 million mark, so it hasn't done badly. I see enough of these figures and I go, I'm in the wrong profession.
- Chip Dickens
- We should be artists.
- Darrell Bock
- That's exactly right. Well that's probably why we're not. But anyway, it's a completely different film and it evokes a completely different reaction, but the reason I paired it with Saving Mr. Banks was not so much because of the theology of the experience of the child, which obviously garners a lot of attention, but the way in which this film dealt with life and family and the interaction about and around the experience not just with the family but in the community that they were a part of. I thought there were things portrayed in this film that you almost never see in films, and the scene that leaps out at me about this is the point at which the little child has a fever and is on the edge, moving into the experience by which he sees Heaven but he's not there yet.
And we see firemen gathered around praying for the child and different groups of people representing the church prayer chain praying for the child and as we're working through this scene kind of bit-by-bit, group-by-group, I'm going, I can't remember the last time I saw something like that in film. It just kind of, whoa, you know? It almost caught me by surprise. Something that happens very normally in some ways in our everyday churchgoing life that almost never gets portrayed in the public square, and I thought well that's interesting, and there were other dynamics in the film about the way the family worked in a kind of very low-key kind of way, not dramatized significantly that also struck me about the way the film worked. Now that's kind of my take on the aesthetics of the film. You said you enjoyed the film as well?
- Tim Basselin
- I did. Can I ask you a question first?
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah.
- Tim Basselin
- What do you make of that, that this sort of is a cultural moment where there are all these films dealing with – Heaven Is For Real, God Is Not Dead, Noah. There's so many out right now and more coming this fall. There's one gonna be on Cain and Abel I believe, and we've got a couple others.
- Darrell Bock
- Pontius Pilate coming up. I've named it "Pontius Pilatte." You've got one on David and Goliath that's down the road. You've got a remake of Ben Hur. There literally – Niama Lett who was in here doing the first set of reviews that we did on God Is Not Dead and Noah, she said there literally are three years worth. They're in a queue. There are three years worth of these movies. There are two takes on this, and I actually don't think you have to choose between them. The cynical take is, well, Hollywood has discovered there is a whole audience out there that they have generally not been tapping into that they can tap into if they do a good biblically- based movie, and so they're just in it to make the money and obviously Hollywood is in part about making money, so there's that dimension of it.
But I also wonder in the back of my mind if it isn't a – I'll use a biblical word here – if it isn't a groping, a groping after God, an awareness that there's a spiritual side to people that needs to be portrayed, nurtured, studied, pursued, filmed, however you wanna put it, and that these films step into a vacuum that has existed in Hollywood, and the fact that people do connect to them, that they do generate audiences. I mean obviously that helps on the economic side, but it also indicates something that goes on in our culture and films are this odd combination –it strikes me– of what Hollywood wants us to imagine on the one hand, and what people imagine on the other.
There's a lot of marketing that goes into Hollywood that tries to put those two things together, and so I think that's another dimension, which means, just to add some more elements to the response, which means that there are opportunities for conversations in the public square that filling this gap represents that people in the church shouldn't walk away from. They should walk into and be prepared to engage it, which is just, to completely round this out, which is why we have spent time on the podcast walking into this area and engaging it because we think it's an area where the church sometimes is slow to engage, or if it engages it engages poorly. It engages strictly from the standpoint of how does this line up with the Bible or not, when in fact there are life questions and life issues that these films are reflecting that need to be engaged in. Now you asked me a simple question and I gave you a lousy long answer, but anyway, that's my take on it. What do you think is going on here?
- Tim Basselin
- Well I agree with what you're saying. I think to back up what you're saying, you have films that are being created like God Is Not Dead by Christians simply for Christians. It's not attempting a larger audience, and you can from that see that Hollywood is simply, they see it as a place to make money and it is. We've been sort of neglectful of one another so to speak, and the two worlds are kind of colliding the way that you were describing and all these movies are coming out of it, and I think they're along the spectrum.
So you have a movie like God Is Not Dead all the way on one side. You have a movie that's a little bit over, Heaven Is For Real, that it has from an evangelical perspective there's a couple of things in there that you might try to question or wonder about and not really like the theology of it so much, but it's mostly for Christians. It's gonna touch Christians the most, but it also is looking for a wider audience. It's looking beyond that a little bit.
- Darrell Bock
- It's trying to raise questions for people.
- Tim Basselin
- Right, and it's done a little better.
- Darrell Bock
- That's right.
- Tim Basselin
- And then you go more down the line and you have a movie like Noah that is very secular so to speak, but it's dealing with a lot of those same issues. It's dealing with a lot of the questions and biblical imagery and how do we interpret and understand this stuff and how does it affect us. So you have it all along that sort of continuum going on. I think that backs up what you're saying.
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah the Noah movie was an interesting movie from my standpoint. Of course we've already done a full podcast on this movie, but for the choices that the main character found himself backed into a corner to deal with. What were his loyalties in terms of his perception of what his duty was supposed to be versus the senses of interrelationship that the two little children kind of put into his lap that he had a decision to make. That movie juxtaposed what I consider to be an Abraham/Isaac scene into the Noah story and really took a – it was a Biblical theme from another place and injected it into that story, but that didn't bother me because the life choice that was represented in that scene is a tension that we sometimes feel in life and have to negotiate our way through.
- Tim Basselin
- Well not to get totally back into it, but what I kept being struck by in the Noah movie was we talk about our culture being biblically illiterate and not knowing what this stuff means, and he brings up the images over and over and over and over. I mean he just keeps repeating them because people don't know what they are. That's incredible to speak that back into our culture and our culture to be aware of the apple, the snake, the Cain killing Abel and the meaning of those and kind of connecting them to who we are and what our decisions are and that sort of thing.
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah, well again –
- Tim Basselin
- That was powerful.
- Darrell Bock
- – as we have suggested when we did the podcast back then, there's an opportunity here for all kinds of conversation about Biblical themes regardless of how you view how the particular director portrayed it. It's on the table, and it's there for conversation and you can't engage it unless you're familiar with how the director has handled it, how the story has been told, as well as having some sensitivity for how the Bible engages with the story.
About the Contributors

Charles W. Dickens
Prior to joining the faculty Dr. Dickens served as an associate pastor in the areas of marriage ministry and counseling. He has previously served on the faculty of Biola University and has taught seminary and graduate-level courses internationally in Austria, Hong Kong, and Sri Lanka. Dr. Dickens is professionally active in the American Association of Christian Counselors and also serves as a contributing editor for the Journal of Psychology and Theology. He is married to Rebecca and they have two children: Joshua and Jillian. At 6’8, Dr. Dickens loves to play basketball and will gladly dunk a basketball right over your head—in a very gentle, loving way of course.

Darrell L. Bock
Dr. Bock has earned recognition as a Humboldt Scholar (Tübingen University in Germany), is the author of over 40 books, including well-regarded commentaries on Luke and Acts and studies of the historical Jesus, and work in cultural engagement as host of the seminary’s Table Podcasts. He was president of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) from 2000–2001, served as a consulting editor for Christianity Today, and serves on the boards of Wheaton College and Chosen People Ministries. His articles appear in leading publications. He is often an expert for the media on NT issues. Dr. Bock has been a New York Times best-selling author in nonfiction and is elder emeritus at Trinity Fellowship Church in Dallas. When traveling overseas, he will tune into the current game involving his favorite teams from Houston—live—even in the wee hours of the morning. Married for over 40 years to Sally, he is a proud father of two daughters and a son and is also a grandfather.

Timothy J. Basselin
Dr. Basselin taught at multiple colleges throughout the Chicago area before coming to DTS in 2013. With research interests in theology of disability and weakness, as well as the interaction between theology, culture, and literature, he served as the Assistant Professor role in the Department of Media Arts and Worship and was also the director of the Media Arts apprenticeship program at DTS. He is on the editorial board for Christian Scholar’s Review. He and his wife, Robin, have four children and enjoy road trips and camping.