What do we pay for when we go to the
cinema, buy or download a movie? Obviously we like to be entertained,
amused, frightened and moved. But
literature – and movies are one stream of literature – also informs, reinforces
and sometimes challenges our moral attitudes.
Our values.
So I wonder what values we value most when
we choose a movie. Not how well we
were entertained by them, but how the values they embodied or implied echoed our own values, even if that echo is
below the threshold of our conscious hearing.
I am more interested in exploring these
embedded values than I am in sorting out the genres, the science fiction from
the fantasy, the war movies from the domestic dramas, the romantic from the
cynical, the trivial from the profound or the tawdry from the high quality
(while also excepting Aristotle’s
teaching that quality is itself a
virtue.
One
way to look at this is to approach this is to look at the top grossing movies
in the West and consider the values they
throw up onto the screen. The British
Film Institute (BFI) has recently published a list of the movies that have
grossing over a billion dollars. (The
Chinese and Bollywood industries are not considered of course!) They may provide a rough guide to our moral
preferences.
1 Avatar 2009 $2.8b
Titanic 1997 $2.2b
Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
2015 $2.1b
Jurassic World 2015 $1.8b
Avengers 2012 $1.5b
Fast & Furious 7. 2015 $1.5b
Avengers: Age of Ultron 2015 $1.4b
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
P2 2011 $1.3b
Frozen 2013 $1.3b
Iron Man 3 2013 $1.2b
Minions 2015 $1.2b
Captain America 2016 $1.1b
Transformers; Dark Side of the Moon 2011 $1.1b
Lord of the Rings; Return of the King 2003 $1.1b
Skyfall 2012 $1.1b
Transformers: Age of the
Extinction 2014 $1.1b
The Dark Knight Rises 2012 $1.1b
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. 2006 $1.1b
Toy Story 3 2010 $1.1b
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides ’11 $1.0b
Jurassic Park 1993 $1.0b
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace 1999 $1.0b
Alice In Wonderland 2010 $1.0b
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 2012 $1.0b
The Dark Knight 2008 $1.0b
. Zootopia 2016 $1.0b
We, western audiences, have spent at least
$34 billion dollar-equivalent to watch
them. As I have rounded all the figures
down to the nearest $100 million I guess the real figure is close to $40
billion.
Avatar is of course a deeply ecological movie, positing the interconnected ness and
inter-dependence of all living things.
In so doing Cameron reflected the
teaching of Canadian First Nation communities, hunters who honour the prey they
hunt, offer gifts of thanksgiving to
creatures they need to kill in order to live, be they salmon or deer, and then utilize every part of that
creature’s body. To waste it would be to
insult it, to undervalue the gift of the life they have taken.
Avatar is a violent film, but the violence of the invading exploiters is
condemned, the voices of those Pandorans who seek violent vengeance are
out-voted, and the desperate violence of those who fight for survival is
tempered. The defeated humans are
allowed to live. I also notice that
the undeserving species here is human, not alien. Of course there are obvious Christian themes here, most explicitly in Jake’s
‘incarnation’ as a Pandoran, and the
death and resurrection of Doctor Grace Augustine (Grace? Augustine?
How blatant can Cameron
be?). You may question the word
‘resurrection’, the spirit of Grace is
absorbed by, incorporated into the biosphere, represented by the Tree of
Life. However, I am looking at Christian theology here, but
at non-denominational, even secular,
ethics.
So this ‘top movie’ seems to speak to the
best in us, to encourage a deeply ecological awareness and a proper humility in
the face of our human greed, xenophobia, violent and arrogance. The Pandorans show us that we can be better
than our present behavior.
Next comes Titanic. Could a film by
the same writer/producer/director be more different? And yet. Of course this is a love story, but what
role does love play here? First of
all it overcomes class differences.
Jack and Rose come from very different backgrounds. They should not meet, and if they do they
should not come close enough to generate a spark. But Rose is adventurous and Jack has qualities lacking in Rose’s
‘intended’, the playboy Cal Hockley, who
is, as it happens, greedy, violent, arrogant and in his snobbishness
xenophobic. They are encouraged in
their love by Molly Brown, a woman who has seen through the falsity of her
society, and recognizes the integrity of the young couple’s relationship. So love itself has value. We see the structural vices of class
distinction become deadly when the ‘steerage’ classes are locked below decks so
that the ‘superior’ moneyed passengers
can get to the life-boats.
And in the end we see that love is stronger
than death. This simple assertion
almost sounds banal, but it is not.
Love does not lose its value or die when the beloved dies. Their death does not stop us from loving
them, even if loving them now has no utility.
I have conducted something like 700 funerals in my time, and being an Anglican
parish priest most of them were for families who did not come to church, had
only a vague connection with Christianity and a loose attachment to ‘Christian
hope’. But just about all of them
understood and found solace in the human conviction that their love for the
departed endured their loss. In Titanic Jack dies, but Rose love for him
endures. This simple message was
presented with hugely expensive special effects - this was a James Cameron
movie - but maybe it did not need them to appeal to so many people, enough of
them to put it second on our list.
Spielberg’s Jurassic World and Jurassic
Park warn us against our scientific and technological arrogance. Both of these Jurassic movies told us that
we do not in fact dominate nature. We
are not as clever as we think we are.
And Michael Crichton, who had qualified as a Medical Doctor before he
became a script-writer, made the
implicit point that the Jurassic monsters were not monstrous. They were simply
being themselves, dinosaurs being
dinosaurs. They are not responsible
for their natural actions, the fault lay not in them but in ourselves, creating
them as Victor Frankenstein created a being he saw as monstrous too.
These ethical insights must surely inform and challenge our
attitudes to how we treat nature and evaluate our scientific/technological
progress.
So what do we value in the Avengers
franchise, apart from the gifted cast, sky- high production values, amazing
special effects, self-referential and often self-effacing humour? Well, they have also become a saga in a
proper sense of the word – a series of epic adventures. We are familiar with the characters, and
may have our favourites among them. We
enjoy their interplay and we get the jokes.
But what values do they promote?
I do not think that these are obvious and simple does not stop them
being important.
First of all they are not actually avengers, they are protectors.
Their violence is not aggressive, but defensive. They are not presented as flawless. They wrestle with their guilt, failures and
faults, and with the responsibility that
their power gives them and the
collateral damage they cause. This is
very ethically significant after a series of wars in which the military may
regret ‘collateral damage’ but have not
allowed it to restrain them. The ends
have justified the means. Among the
Avengers these struggles are not easily
resolved. In the latest movie they
causes a ‘civil war’ between them.
But most of all the Avengers manage (most of the time ) to overcome
their differences and to assemble, to
come together, to work together and when
necessary to fight together. They are,
of course, willing to die if that is what it takes. But it is not only their individual heroism that matters. It is their united heroism that matters most . That unity is in itself a heroic and often
vulnerable achievement. So maybe these
comic book characters are more important than they seem. The on-screen avengers are of course
adapted for the big screen from the Marvel comics by Joss Whedon. Joss wrote and directed the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Firefly TV series, the Firefly
based film Serenity, as well as the first Toy Story, Alien Resurrection, and a modern retelling of Much Ado About Nothing.
I have never seen any of the Fast & Furious movies, nor the Transformers, and so have nothing to say
about them.
The Harry
Potter movies have many attractive qualities. They also have a profoundly Christian denouement, but over the years before that was revealed I
had to spend a lot of time talking with some Christian parents who had been (mis)taught that the Bible
condemned witches and the Potter books were therefor evil, if not Satanic. These parents usually resisted the assurance
that the ‘Witch of Endor’ condemned in 1 Samuel 28 as in fact a necromancer, closer to a modern
spiritualist medium than to the pointy hatted figures of tradition. Nor were they discomforted when I pointed out
that the commandment in Exodus 22, that you shall not let a witch live is close
to other commandments saying that if you strike your mother or father you shall
be put to death, 21. 15. Or indeed it you curse them.
Not knowing the ending I had to point out
that Harry did not win his ongoing battles with evil by because he was a more
powerful magician, but because his friend Hermione did her homework and he was
supported by Ron’s courage and loyalty.
Beyond the storytelling genius of J K Rowling (a much better storyteller
than writer of prose I think) and the
skill of the productions I believe that these were the core values that
attracted children, and then their more thoughtful parents. The strongest magic proved to be the Old
Magic, the magic any parents can give their child, that of love. Voldemort was ultimately powerless before
it. Children did not have to be magical
to be like Harry, Hermione or Ron.
Lord of the Rings trilogy has inspired generations, and the films held true to the
virtues of the book. I am sure we do
not need to rehearse the moral qualities of the protagonists or the corruption
of the antagonists. However, it has
been said that many of the characters match each other in a Jungian/Toaist
manner, that each creature of light has a corresponding creature of darkness –
or that within some of them there is at least a struggle between light and dark.
Gollum of course most poignantly displays this ongoing struggle, and I
find it interesting that people seem to instinctively sympathize with him in
ways they do not with the corrupted Suraman.
Of course the true heroes are not the highborn and powerful, the magical
and mighty, but the lowly Hobbits. Courage, fidelity, integrity and
self-sacrifice win the day. The battles
are merely side shows to the main event,
the journey, almost a pilgrimage, that finally destroys the binding Ring
of Power.
