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The Hidden Dangers of the Cinema
By Steve Lansingh
In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America started to place ratings on films. People had been complaining about the amount of profanity in films since Clark Gable uttered his four-letter word in "Gone With the Wind" in 1939. The public outcry against violence began with D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" back in 1916, and the protests against scandalous sexuality dates back to the one-minute shorts 100 years ago with "The Kiss." Audiences wanted to know what kind of offensive material to expect when they entered the theater, and the MPAA was happy to oblige.
Now, more than 30 years later, I wonder if the rating system hasn't begun to backfire. I'm not even talking about the directors who add swear words to their movies to avoid the dreaded G rating, or the ones who trim a few seconds of an NC-17 film and earn the commercially viable R. I'm talking about the fact that many Christians use the MPAA ratings as instruction in how to think about movies. It seems that most Christians believe that sex, violence, and profanity are the most harmful elements of cinema. Unintentionally, these ratings might be distracting us from an even greater, and more fundamental, danger: its fantasy world.
The cinematic medium mirrors our life, but the world of movies is more exciting and visceral than our own. When we begin to confuse the worlds or expect them to operate the same, we run the risk of creating unrealistic — and perhaps harmful — expectations for ourselves.
For all the danger that sex, violence, and profanity bring to moviegoers, at least viewers are aware of it. When watching a sexual scene, we can guard our minds against it. If there's a lot of violence, we can recognize it for its shock value without assuming that violence is acceptable. As humans with free will, we can choose not to mimic the profane language. But the fantasy world is a danger that we rarely talk about, something we rarely consider. It may, in fact, be more dangerous because we have not built any defenses against it. A "clean" G-rated film can have just as many negative effects as a violent R-rated one — perhaps even more, since we are unaware of how we are being manipulated. A steady diet of films that reinforce romanticized love, materialism, or stereotyping — negative attitudes already within American culture that are reinforced subconsciously — can change the way we think, the way we act toward others, and even how we perceive God. They are the hidden dangers of the cinema.
The cinema's greatest danger lies not in the content of the films but in the medium itself. Film creates a fantasy world, a world that sucks us in and entices us. We want to see stories about the unusual or extraordinary, not three hours of some guy watching TV in his underpants, which happens in reality. (Andy Warhol's "Sleep" is an eight-hour long film of a man sleeping, which perhaps most closely reflects real life, but is still set apart from reality because the director has chosen who the actor is and where to point the camera and direct our attention.) Film usually gets rid of the small, quiet moments of life and concentrates on the crisis and drama. It creates a world that is visceral — it must because it communicates with only two of the five senses. Film intensifies its images and sound in order to overwhelm the whole viewer. This fantasy world of the cinema moves faster, looks prettier, sounds better, and is more exciting than ours.
But what is the danger of a fantasy world? If we ask the average person on the street whether movies are like real life, chances are he or she will say "Of course not." From a rational standpoint, moviegoers are likely to distinguish between reality and fiction. But the fantasy becomes dangerous when we start to wish that our world were more like the movies, or when the movie reinforces a harmful value that is held in the real world as well.
The first step in avoiding these dangers is to be aware of what they are, since ignorance inhibits progress. I've divided the potentially harmful effects of the cinematic fantasy world into five subject areas:
The Happy-Ending Syndrome
Happy endings are not bad in and of themselves. But a steady diet of happy endings without proper reflection can cause us to expect happy endings in real life. We expect things to go our way and get upset when they don't. M. Scott Peck says in "A Road Less Traveled": "Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. ... Once we truly know that life is difficult — once we truly know and accept it — then life is no longer difficult." In a fallen world, the belief that life is supposed to end in triumph is a dangerous attitude to take because it leads to cynicism.
Even if these films do not lead us to expect happiness, they can lead us to view happiness as the goal to be attained. Even our Declaration of Independence states that the pursuit of happiness is our right. But the happiness doctrine is not what the Bible commands. "If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also" (Matthew 5:39) is not supposed to make us happy but to help us show love.
A second danger of the happy-ending syndrome stems from its assumption that justice prevails. Bad guys get what's coming to them. Good people are redeemed from their problems. Whether it is in court ("A Few Good Men," "The Ghosts of Mississippi") or through street justice ("Batman," "A Time to Kill"), the movies show us that people get what they deserve. But in reality, bad things happen to good people and others get away with murder. Harold Kushner says in "When Bad Things Happen to Good People": "The misfortunes of good people ... are a problem to everyone who wants to believe in a just and fair and livable world. They inevitably raise questions about the goodness, the kindness, and even the existence of God." Perhaps one reason people believe so strongly in a fair world is because they see an alternate world humans have created via the movies, where justice does prevail, and they can't understand why God would create a universe different from the one we would create. This can hinder our understanding of God.
Love, Marriage, and Sex
But it's not just sex that suffers from idealization; it's love in general. The idea of love at first sight is perpetuated by the movies, because the audience knows that the two stars are ultimately going to fall in love. (One exception to that rule is Rob Reiner's "A Few Good Men," in which Tom Cruise and Demi Moore merely flirted. In a television interview on E!, Reiner said he cut their romantic escapade from the original script. The film's producers responded, he said, by asking why Moore's character remained a woman.) The idea that each person has someone for whom he or she is destined can undermine a truly loving relationship that has occasional fights and disagreements. Movies simplify relationships and do not prepare viewers for the nuances, doubts, and ups and downs that real relationships have.
Likewise, marriage is depicted in many films ("While You Were Sleeping") as the happy ending to life. This is especially dangerous in cartoons like "Sleeping Beauty," "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," and "Cinderella." The idea of a man rescuing a woman from obscurity, poverty, or danger and living "happily ever after" is potentially harmful to children who do not realize this is make-believe. Adults, too, have a hard time accepting that marriage is more work than fun sometimes. We've bred unrealistic expectations in ourselves and are nurturing them in the next generation.
Stereotyping
But even more dangerous are the stereotypes that are developed about people in our own country. By its nature, storytelling promotes stereotyping because, with the exception of its main characters, a story doesn't have enough time to develop a complete, dynamic, intricate human being. Therefore every lawyer is either a crusading idealist or a money-grubbing crook. Prostitutes have hearts of gold. Catholics wear their faith on their sleeves. Old people are useless. Small-town sheriffs are pushover morons. Women are better with children and should take care of them. Doctors are rich and don't care about patients. Evangelists are abrasive manipulators.
Basically, characters are caricatures. Writers consider it shorthand to put an old Jewish woman or a young black man into a scene because you expect the two to act in certain ways. How characters look and what they wear conjures up stereotypes, and the writer has created instant expectations he or she can work with — or against.
But using these stereotypes tends to reinforce them. We have ideas about ethnic groups, men, women, children, and the elderly that are all affected in some part by the films and television we watch. We say "Children are naive," "Women are emotional," or "Italians are hot-tempered." Even if these generalizations are true sometimes, we have to unlearn our habit of expecting people to behave in a certain way based on how they look. When we do this, we shortchange another person's humanity.
Shiny, Happy People
This practice, of course, perpetuates the myth we hold about beauty. We tend to believe that the lives of beautiful people are more exciting and that everything works out for them in the end. If we're not careful, this can lead to envy and dissatisfaction with our own bodies and faces. Even the so-called "normal" people can skew our view. When was the last time you saw an actor with a zit on his face or an actress with noticeable lip hair? Unless we are conscious of it, this perfectionism can start to erode our self-esteem.
Another danger of the focus on beauty is the tendency to treat people like objects. Even if a film has no nudity or sex scenes, it might still flaunt the bodies of its actors and actresses. Movies will often dress sexy actors or actresses in clothes that show off their bodies; we are taught to stare and ogle rather than seeing people as real humans. Titillation sells, and Hollywood knows it. But audiences often neglect the fact that being sexually excited tends to dehumanize others when we carry these attitudes out of the theater and into real life. We carry the potential for harm. These attitudes are most dangerous when we think, "I don't look on the opposite gender as sex objects," since we cannot combat what we do not admit.
The American Dream
The sports theme is reflected in every area of life. In "Working Girl," climbing the corporate ladder is the ultimate goal, at any cost. In "The Paper," Michael Keaton's character risks his job, his marriage, and his life in order to get a story right. In "Star Wars," the Rebel Alliance loves Luke Skywalker because of what he accomplishes against the Death Star. Certainly we should aspire to succeed. For example, nobody goes through years of schooling to learn how to lose accounts or misdiagnose patients. But when we begin to expect success as regularly as we see it in the movies, we run the risk of damaging our self-esteem and thinking we're not good enough. We forget what makes us valuable as people.
The success syndrome can have effects on our loved ones as well. If we tend to think that only the successful deserve our respect and love, then we place pressure on one another to be successful and unblemished. Since we are human and we fail, we often try to appear perfect instead, hiding the flawed and sinful side of ourselves from people. We keep secrets and we tell lies in order to protect our image before others. If we cannot know one another in our full humanness, however, then we know one another incompletely and unlovingly. We can't forgive wrongs we don't know about. We cannot minister to the areas of people's lives that they have not disclosed. Relationships grow stronger when we love each other despite our failings and imperfections, not when we ignore them. If we do not recognize the trap of successfulness, then we cheat ourselves out of deeper and more fulfilling relationships.
A second danger of the American dream is its promotion of materialism. We often determine people's value by how many things they can afford, where they live, or what type of clothes or car they can buy. Janeane Garofalo's apartment in "The Truth about Cats and Dogs" is much nicer than she could afford as a radio talk show host, but giving her a roomier apartment makes her seem more successful. In "Metro," Eddie Murphy's hotshot cop protests the fact that he has to drive a truck instead of a sports car. Similar to stereotyping, we size up people and judge their value by their possessions. This causes us to place a high value on material things that don't last, which conflicts with the Matthew 6:20 command to treasure the spiritual.
So now what? With our newfound awareness of cinema's dangers, should we run and hide at the mention of Blockbuster?
Let's remember that the fantasy world has its benefits, too. It's the reason that we go to movies in the first place — to enter another world so that we can see ours more clearly, to experience another's story so that we listen more carefully to our own. Leland Ryken, in "The Christian Imagination," puts it this way: "The imagination is the human faculty that allows us to create something new, to see or feel something familiar in a fresh way, to express an old truth in a new manner, to make a new application of truth to life."
Clearly, we should not stop visiting our fantasy worlds just because there's some danger involved, just as we can't stop ministering to the lost because it's threatening to us. In both cases, I think the answer is clear, even if we don't like to hear it: We have to wrestle and struggle with it day in and day out.
The good news is that you've just taken a giant leap in that struggle by reading this article: You are armed with awareness. The most powerful weapon we have in fighting deceit is knowing the truth. In "Religion and Literature," T.S. Eliot wrote, "So long as we are conscious of the gulf between ourselves and [art], we are more or less protected from being harmed by it, and are in a position to extract what good it has to offer us."
We must face these cinematic dangers the same way we face sex, violence, and profanity: We remain conscious of them, periodically reminding ourselves that the values in the movies and the values in America are not necessarily our own. We take stock of our lives and look for areas where we are affected. We slowly mend and knit our lives back together in accordance with God's will.
The textbook "Media Ethics" says the purpose of moral reasoning is this: "Our values are often honestly held, but having them periodically challenged leads to maturity." That's what makes it worthwhile, to me, to keep attending films even though there's danger involved. The world of film speaks to how we live our lives, and in watching films we are often led to challenge our values — whether it be as overt as "Dead Man Walking" or as subtle as "Rudy" or "Cinderella." Hopefully, this examination of our values leads to maturity as Christians.
Americans love happy endings. Most of the tragedies in our movie library come from other cultures and eras (from "Hamlet" to "Frankenstein"). Studios often slap a happy ending on famous tragedies, like when "Cyrano de Bergerac" became "Roxanne" and when Disney animated "The Little Mermaid" and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." Even movies that end with the hero's death are seen as happy endings: Thelma and Louise commit suicide, but they die free; John Proctor of "The Crucible" lets himself be hanged, but in the name of truth. Only rarely does Hollywood produce a modern-day tragedy, like "Seven" or "Leaving Las Vegas."
I once read an Ann Landers column in which a reader asked why sex is never like it is in the movies. Landers had to carefully explain that movies are not real life. Even more dangerous than the depiction of sex on screen, it seems, is how sex is shown: romantic, kinetic, shared, flawless, with mutual orgasms. Because we get more casual information about sex from movies than any other source, this skewing of reality can create harmful expectations in us. In "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," Ferris says that his friend Cameron has built up sex as the "end-all and be-all of human existence," which seems to be an appropriate summation of our unrealistic expectations of sex.
One of film's benefits is that it takes us places we've never been and lets us meet people we've never met. But we often forget they aren't real. We form impressions of countries and people simply because of what we've seen in the movies. And, since more of the American movies that take place in other countries are period pieces, our concept of the rest of the world is mostly pre-industrial (just one more factor that adds to our ethnocentrism).
Americans like attractive people. Even though we know better, we think beautiful people are somehow better and more exciting than everyone else. We give beautiful people respect, admiration, acceptance and love more readily than ordinary or ugly people. This is why Americans will pay to see a beautiful person star in a movie (Tom Cruise, Michelle Pfeiffer, Brad Putt, Julia Roberts). The background characters are often populated by odd-lookers (Steve Buscemi, Randy Quaid, Linda Hunt, M. Emmet Walsh), but the lead roles are usually filled by sexy actors and actresses, and — since Hollywood is always looking for the next big star — many of the supporting roles go to sexy performers, too.
Movies often uphold the ideal known as the American dream: success as the result of hard work. Working hard is a biblical value (1 Thessalonians 5:12). But success is achieved so often in film that the movies create an unbalanced portrait of reality. Movies from "The Karate Kid" and "The Mighty Ducks" to "Rudy" and "Major League" perpetuate the idea that if we work hard enough, or our heart is in the right place, then success will come our way. Movies like "Rocky" and "Hoop Dreams," which show that making an effort is important despite the outcome, are rarer.