Friday 24 June 2016

Top grossing movies and what they say to us. Part 1



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. 


Top grossing movies and what they say to us. Part 2


I am a fan of Skyfall  for all sorts of reasons.    I find it amusing that Neal Purvis and Robert Wade wrote not only the new Bond movies together but also the two parodic Johnny English films.  Before they started on the six Bond movies they had written  Let Him Have It,   the dark and tragic story of  Derek Bentley,  a man hanged for a crime who very probably had ‘diminished responsibility’ for.    As the Bond movies have progressed they have I think – and with some exceptions – become more emotionally and morally complex,  revealing Bonds emotional vulnerability and existential doubts about his trade.   Patriotism alone is no longer  enough to justify the actions of those who the State has  ‘licensed to kill’.    The original Fleming chauvinism and sexism have moved slowly away.    M became a woman (as had happened in the real Security Services) and Bond has fallen in love with two women - even if I found  this deeply unconvincing in SPECTRE.  I do remember the 1969 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service of course,  but that was  hardly typical of the genre a the time.

Throughout literature and the movies there runs a long line of ‘heroic’ figures whose morality is not binary.     They are not ‘white hats’ fighting the ‘black hats’.    They invite us to consider the greys.     And none more so than Batman,  The Dark Knight. 

In this film good people do bad things, sometimes to the people they love and for what they think are good reasons.  They do bad things or they allow someone else do them.  Is this the good cop, bad cop thing? asks the prisoner in the interrogation room. Not exactly says the good cop, leaving his partner to do his worst.   The prisoner is the Joker, the cop’s partner is the Batman.    In the same scene the Joker taunts the Batman, saying  you have nothing to threaten me with; nothing you can do with all your strength. In the shadow of 9/11 and 7/7 we in the mighty West know the futility of our nuclear and conventional strength when opposed by the suicide bomber or the terrorist with a weapon of mass destruction in a suitcase.    He also asks why ‘the violent death of an innocent civilian on our streets is given more moral and tragic weight than the deaths of half a dozen of our soldiers in a war zone’. Is it, as he suggests, because the soldier’s lives and deaths are part of the plan, the inevitable consequences of our deliberate political and military actions? Is that why we accept these deaths, daily, with regret but not outrage?    Torture is also a tendentious question. Does it make moral sense to torture one person in order to save the lives of many? If we choose not to use all the means available to us to extract the information needed to save them are they simply paying for our moral scruples, to salve our consciences?      We are even reminded that when Rome suspended its constitution to give temporary war-time power to Caesar he betrayed that trust by taking it for life.    The Batman develops a massive monitoring system using mobile phones in order to track The Joker. I have to find this man he tells Lucius Fox, his friend and technical wizard. At what cost? asks Lucius.   This is unethical and dangerous. This is too much power for one man to have. Too much power for any government we might surmise in the light of later revelations about British and American spying agencies being given  access to similar monitoring of their own civilians. 

The Dark Knight searches the human heart and finds hope there.   It is not easy to find it amid the pessimism and despair but the hope lies in this; we are not perfect and the battle with our own moral greyness will go on, but despite our corruptibility and self-delusion, despite our moral uncertainty, despite our habit of creating and depending on heroes - and then scapegoating them - in the end we have no one else to trust but ourselves.   We are not perfect, but we are good enough. So the white search-light eventually says trust the people. Perhaps there is a message here for our guardians, elected and self-appointed.   Guardians need power, and power tends to corrupt.   Guardians, even with the best on intentions, mislead and even lie to those they are guarding - for the good of the people of course.   But we should not lie to those we are responsible to. We should not lie to those who ought to be able to trust us. We should not lie to those we trust. Trust the people.   For a longer consideration of this movie you could go to Rays of Light In The Dark Knight  posted in this blog in   August 2011, after Jesus The Lion King  and Beowulf: a two dimensional hero?

Toy Story 3 obviously it built on its popular predecessors - but it pushed its audience’s emotional limits in new ways.    Peril is one thing, and very common in successful movies, but as the Toys were pushed towards their destruction here the audiences emotion were really stretched.     The prime value they displayed was togetherness.   They would face death together.     I think it was hugely brave of Pixar to expect its audience to rise to the emotional challenge.  

With Tim Burton’s underwhelming 2010 Alice In Wonderland in there I am disappointed not to see any of the excellent Pixar movies included.   I will not comment on Frozen  (other than to say that it is not Pixarlated enough for me), but I have long seen the Pixar movies providing a good moral and social education for any child, or adult.

 You may be interested in the movies that took the highest gross takings until superceded by the next.  They are:



I think Toy Story 3 (2010) followed, and then the list reverts to that above.  However I am sure these gross takings are  governed by the inflation of ticket prices, and do not reflect bums-on-seats, especially as concessionary prices were not given for many blockbuster/3D movies on first release.   


If you  are interested in a list of 100 ‘Movies That Help Us Live Better’ according to a Christian site you can go to Movies & Meaning.com.