Mining Minds: How Can Movies Help You Understand Your Times?
If you had lived 150 or 200 years ago, your familiarity with the popular opinions and philosophy of your day would largely have depended on the scope of your library and your access to popular journals. But in our day, wittingly or unwittingly, most Americans develop their worldview from the news and entertainment programs on TV, the music in their iPods, and the images on the silver screen. We can bemoan the loss of literacy another time…. The fact is, that in order to understand your times, you must engage to some degree or another with “The Media.” If we are going to watch movies, we need to learn to watch them biblically.
When Paul preached his sermon on Mar’s Hill, he could have begun with “You’re all a bunch of superstitious Greek pagans, see… and you’re all going to hell unless you believe in Jesus!” This statement would have been true, but it probably would have disengaged his audience. Instead, he included two pieces of popular Greek culture: a quotation from one of their own poets, and an allusion to a specific “idol to an unknown god.” He starts his sermon with the latter, immediately informing the Greek listener that he had taken the time to familiarize himself with what Greeks considered important and noteworthy. Paul began with what his audience already knew from Greek culture; he then used this knowledge to lead them to their need for Christ.
We can take a cue from this. If we watch movies with a discerning mind, we can use them to understand our times [think like “Men of Issachar” in 1 Chronicles 12:32]. Rather than giving our culture a forgettable call to a general need for Christ, we can tell unbelievers just how badly they need Christ. We can show them that their movies and art are crying out for Christ, like idols to an unknown god.
Consider the movie, Batman: The Dark Knight, written by director Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan. One would think this movie, at first viewing, to be a smartly-written, well-directed action movie: engaging and fun, but surely not philosophical. But looking a little closer, we see that, at its heart, it displays a fractured and empty neo-existentialism struggling and failing to find a sure foundation for justice.
From the beginning of the movie, an extremely realistic case is made for the depravity of man. The Joker is basically the protagonist of the movie, stealing the show, largely proving his single philosophical premise: that humans are all basically evil. Most of the Joker’s social experiments prove his point decisively, and for the most part, the movie seems very natural and unforced in its exposition of the innate depravity of man.
But, the screenwriters could not leave it at that. Joker could not win, could he? Thus begins a futile foray into fantasy land to create the most pivotal and, at the same time, the most unbelievable moment of the movie: a group of convicts on a doomed ferry vote to sacrifice their own lives for the cause of a non-pragmatic conviction of “transcendent” morality. This scene makes no sense at all. The movie was building a believable and logically coherent view of the world: “There is none who does good, no, not even one.”
Even Batman is a morally ambiguous figure: a vigilante dispensing justice outside the law… a “Dark” Knight. In this environment, where can one turn for a sure foundation for justice? After the movie had already established that men are predictably self-serving, it then expects us to believe that men (and criminals at that) are basically good? After the ferry scene, the movie’s logic continues to deteriorate, proving again and again that the Nolan brothers are grasping at straws, desperately attempting to escape a conclusion that the movie has already established beyond a doubt: that a merely human justice is impossible.
They justify their sudden e-brake turn into fantasy land with some voice-over commentary from Batman: “Sometimes the truth is not good enough. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.” In other words, “Reality may deny our confidence in men, but we must still have faith, though it may be a futile faith without any real object. Because without this empty faith, our existence would be completely meaningless.”
Had the Nolan brothers followed the logical arc of their own creation to its natural conclusion, they would have had only two choices: seek justice beyond humans in the decrees of a transcendent God, OR deny the possibility of justice altogether and succumb to the tyranny of evil. They didn’t want to do either. They instead embraced a contradictory Platonic Existentialism Frankenstein monster. They attempted the simultaneous belief in both the intrinsic goodness of man and the futility and vainglory of human attempts at an objective standard of ethics—an irrational conclusion untenable in reality, possible only in the carefully manicured fantasy world of their movie.
Sorry, Nolan brothers… but the truth is good enough, and it is all we really have. The Dark Knight, then, is a cry for help. It longs for the satisfaction of Christ and belies the fact that all of its answers cannot satisfy the very real problems it so expertly exposes to the audience. As such, it is excellent material for evangelistic discussions in spite of the fact that its message, when all is said and done, is anti-Christian.
By mining the mind of this and other movies, we can better understand our times—its needs, longings, and contradictions—in order to engage this culture, in order to show compassion for the position of the lost, in order to reach them where they are with the hope and truth of Christ.
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