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2008-01-22 issue:

Watch for worldviews

Mediaculture

by Gordon Houser

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Worldview (weltanschauung): a comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world, esp. from a specific standpoint.—Webster’s Dictionary



When we pay our money and spend a couple of hours in front of a movie, we enter another world and encounter a worldview that we may or—often—may not share. We should at least be aware of this interaction.

We often like movies that share our worldview, or at least we like ones that don’t challenge our views too much. But the medium of film is subtle and powerful. We easily find ourselves identifying with characters we normally wouldn’t like. In The Gospel According to Hollywood, Greg Garrett points out that Alfred Hitchcock “even contrived to implicate us in the evil his villains commit.”

Too often we enter the theater looking merely to be entertained and don’t think about the world we’re entering or even our own worldview. We end up rooting for the hero to take revenge on the bad guy, even though we confess we believe in Jesus’ way of forgiveness.

Or we may simply ignore films altogether, which is fine. But for those who watch them, and there are many of us, let’s at least think about this interaction of worldviews.

Art often takes us places we would not choose to go—perhaps do not want to go. For example, the film No Country for Old Men presents a world of evil and violence, focusing on a psychopathic killer hunting a man who took $2 million in drug money he found in the Texas desert. It’s difficult to watch, partly because the filmmakers present so well the details of the terrible acts and present them so realistically, without the myth of the western, in which the good guys defeat the bad guys. The film captures the sense many of us feel, that things keep getting worse, out of hand. As the sheriff in the story says, “It all started going downhill when people stopped saying sir and madam.”

This film dramatizes a stark truth, that evil exists and is not always punished. It also includes moral characters who, like most of us, want to live quiet, peaceful lives. And it ends with an image that hints at transcendence, at some meaning beyond death.

But while No Country for Old Men is disturbing, it is fiction. These events did not take place. On the other hand, the documentary No End in Sight is more disturbing, or should be, because it recounts events that did take place—the stupid decisions leading up to and implementing the war in Iraq, decisions that have cost many lives.

At the other end of the spectrum is another documentary, Into Great Silence, which takes viewers into a Carthusian monastery in the French Alps. Its worldview includes a life given to prayer and the worship of God. With no score, voice-over or archival footage, this mesmerizing film immerses viewers in the silence and slow pace of monastic life. No other film I saw in the last year affected me more. It not only showed me a different way of living and challenged my own fast pace but drew me into its own pace and literally slowed me down.

The art of film is judged by the way it brings together image and sound (or silence) in a form—usually a narrative—that communicates some kind of meaning. Every filmmaker presents his or her work from a particular worldview. But in well-made films, that worldview does not dominate the story being told.

Christians tend to like stories with messages, as long as they agree with the message. We often read the Bible the same way—to reinforce our own beliefs. But the Bible and good films can challenge us and help us see the world—and ourselves—in new ways, if we let them.

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