Why watch a Christian movie? Why go to a Christian play? I mean, either one is going to be awful, right?
Well … right. And that’s the problem.
When our culture was Christian, our art was Christian. Shakespeare’s plays are the best example of profound dramatic art written from a Christian (indeed a Catholic) perspective.
But our culture is no longer Christian. And so the dramatic art of our day that’s interesting and engaging and well done usually has a secular point of view or one that is only accidentally Christian, or only marginally Christian, and most typically anti-Christian.
This means that Christian groups often produce dramatic art for the Christian Ghetto, my term for the self-consciously Christian among us, who entertain one another with movies, for instance, produced with bad actors on low budgets with horrendous writing and poor direction. The Ghetto is such a limited market that the producers do not have the resources to do better, and the consumers are so desperate that they don’t complain. I have written about this at length.
This has a chilling effect on evangelization.
For example, I’ve been moderately pleased with the movies Facing the Giants and Fireproof, both of which were produced by a Protestant group from the South, and, although they contain amateur actors and a few “prosperity gospel” plot elements, are not all that bad for “Christian movies”.
But that’s the problem. “Christian movies” take the risk of being limited from their inception by the Ghetto’s protective notion of what something “Christian” should and should not be about (a squeamishness not shared by Christ, who ate with prostitutes, blessed the smelly poor and died on a cross). Flannery O’Connor says somewhere something to the effect that a book written by a Catholic is a Catholic book, and certainly O’Connor’s stories, which are profoundly Catholic, are also profoundly disturbing and difficult to read. And yet more real and honest than stuff like Facing the Giants and Fireproof. As any Christian knows, there is nothing that Christ cannot address, engage and redeem – but Christian film-makers and film-goers are a little afraid to admit that.
For, well-intentioned as movies like Facing the Giants and Fireproof are, it takes a special kind of desire to want to see them – knowing the artificiality of the genre. In fact, Sunday my wife Karen told me that she wanted to watch “on-demand” the latest movie from this production company, one called Courageous that’s all about Faith helping guys through tough times.
Well, great.
But I talked her into The Muppets instead.
Then on Monday, which was Karen’s birthday, she wanted to go see October Baby in the theater. This birthday thing means I couldn’t say no. But I wanted to.
After all, October Baby is another “Christian movie”. Yes, my friend and Theater of the Word actress Emily Lunsford had written a glowing review of the movie, which was filmed in Emily’s home town of Birmingham, one of my favorite places; and yes, my friend Fr. Brian Harrison of the Oblates of Wisdom and St. Mary of Victories church in St. Louis had emailed all of his parishioners raving about the movie and strongly encouraging us to go see it; but this is not only a Christian movie, but a pro-life Christian movie.
I mean, if you remember all of the fuss over Bella, you recall much ado about a pretty good movie but not the sort of movie you’d really make much of an effort to see again. A few notches above Facing the Giants / Fireproof, but, frankly, not as good as The Muppets.
Now I know you can’t compare a feel-good family comedy like The Muppets to Bella, except you really can. Wildly differing as their goals are as films, they are both simply movies – and as a movie, The Muppets is far more clever, entertaining, and well-made than Bella.
I say this with great admiration for the people behind Bella and the message they were struggling to convey.
But I say this with the reservation that Bella succeeded to the extent it did in the same way Facing the Giants / Fireproof succeeded, in the same way that the film Therese succeeded. All of these were pretty good movies that played to a very specific audience – all of these were moderately well-done works that pleased the denizens of the Ghetto. They were supported by film-goers who bought their tickets in order to support Christian cinematic art. Without that element of patronage, one wonders how successful these movies would have been.
Having said all of this, and being fully aware that everything I say applies as well to the stuff we produce here at the Theater of the Word Incorporated, I can affirm at least one thing:
October Baby is a spectacular movie. (For once I was glad I listened to my wife!)
This is a movie that is good even outside the Ghetto.
It is well acted, well directed, and above all well-written.
Perhaps nothing hurts a movie more than a bad screenplay, and frankly the most noticeable weakness shared by all of the films mentioned above (other than The Muppets) was lackluster writing – not particularly bad writing, but rather weak writing.
October Baby, on the other hand, has a story that holds your interest from the beginning. It has three-dimensional and believable characters, well crafted conflict and structure, and above all comedy. There are wonderful comic moments in this film, the sort of thing that self-consciously Christian films lack, moments that let the viewer know that this is a film with a heart, a story that sees humanity in all its foibles and flaws, and therefore a story that is not therefore preachy in any way.
But the thing that really destroys you in the theater is the witness of the actress who plays the birth mother, a real life witness that occurs at the end as the credits are about to run. This is the most effective meeting of fiction and reality that I have ever seen in a movie or in life.
Thank God for this film and thank God that the film-makers get it. Emily Lunsford points out that producer Jon Erwin told christiancinema.com, “I think that’s where we differ philosophically from other Christian filmmakers. We’ve been part of the secular industry for so long that I’ve grown to really love people who work in entertainment. They’re messed-up people who have a lot of needs, but I don’t want to isolate myself with Christian people making Christian movies. I’d rather engage the secular industry and not shy away from what I believe.”
With this kind of attitude there is hope.
And with a movie as beautiful as this, there is hope.
It is a movie that is true to man, to Christ, and to Protestants and Catholic alike. In short, it is true to life. It is a well-made film and the first of what I hope will be a true revolution in the culture of cinema.
And finally – the main character in this film (played beautifully by Rachel Hendrix) is the “October Baby” of the title, born October 7, 1991.
October 7 is the Feast of St. Mary of Victories.
Our Lady, under this title, was dear to St. Therese (subject of the film Therese), was the patroness of the Christian victory over Islam at Lepanto (immortalized in verse by G. K. Chesterton), is the patroness of the beautiful church housing the aforementioned Fr. Harrison and the Oblates of Wisdom, and is very dear to me for many reasons.
She is, unbeknownst to the film-makers, present in this movie in a very pervasive way. And it is the message of the Mother of Our Lord, who carried the unborn savior, and to whom all martyrs of the womb are precious – it is the message of this lady, whose heart was pierced by many pangs of sorrow – it is the message of the virgin whose unborn infant Jesus made the unborn infant John leap with joy in Elizabeth’s womb – it is the message of this holy disciple of Christ – that even in the midst of a world that eats its young, a world that grinds and destroys the most innocent among us, a world that hates life and longs for death – it is the message that even in such a world, there is Victory, there is hope.
Go see October Baby. Not because it’s pro-life, not because it’s Christian, not because it’s your wife’s birthday and you have to.
Go see it because it’s good.
Kevin O’Brien: While I agree with you about “Christian movies”, in reading this and other posts by you about entertainment, I find myself wondering where all these great products of the secular movie industry are. Am I missing something? Not only can’t I think of five movies in the last couple of years coming out of the multi-billion dollar Hollywood industry that I like, I just can’t think of five that anyone with an appreciation of Chesterton–or a brain–could possibly like! (The Muppets Movie is obviously an exception.) And the problem with the Hollywood movies is just that which you identify with the Christian movies: the scripts. The Hollywood script-writers are no doubt very bright boys, but they deliberately appeal to the lowest common denominator, and to our lowest desires. But more, with the loss of so much of our Christian heritage from popular culture, I’m not sure it is capable of producing great works of art. Since to produce great stories, you need a profound conception of creation, and of human nature.
So while our Christian movies aren’t great, I don’t think they are anything to be ashamed of either. Nor should Christian film-makers who are not geniuses, and have limited budgets, despair of having something worthwhile to offer. Bella was indeed not a great movie, but it was a whole lot better than commercial successes than the Twilight movies, or Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, or Avatar!
I occasionally mirror these posts over on my own blog, and a rather spirited comment appeared regarding this post over there, which I thought I’d share, along with my response.
Lee Gilbert wrote …
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I wanted to respond to your comments about the script-writing in Therese, for one thing, and what I take to be hyper-criticism of Bella for another. This I
originally published on Yahoo shortly after the opening weekend of Therese in October of 2004:
Considering the impact the arts can have on the spirituality of a society, I personally am thrilled that out of 113 movies showing last weekend (its opening weekend) Therese came in 20th. It gets better. “Vanity Fair,” which came in 22nd, made $317,000, but it showed on 317 screens, whereas Therese only showed on 32 screens and took in $357,000. This looks pretty respectable to me.
I hope the Catholic people will take heart from these numbers and promote this film to the max. It has real box office possibilities. I’ll admit to being saddened by comments made to the effect that the film was overly sentimental and saccharine. To me this seems grossly unfair for two reasons. First of all, this isn’t a bio of Al Capone, after all. No car chases, no shoot’em ups, no bar room brawls or fistfights. No explosions. Nor were there any of the typical teenage tantrum scenes. No real quarrels. No shouting. No “partial nudity” or “sexual situations” so common on the screen today.
Everything was very sedate, for this was after all the home of Mr. and Mrs. Martin, one of those saintly couples for whom we wish canonization, do we not? They knew how to keep a prayerful, peaceful, joyful home. And they knew how to form saintly, loving daughters. So if we wish to quarrel with anyone, it should be with them, and not with the screen writer. After all, Mrs. Defillipis could only work with what the Martin family actually presented her- a peaceful, loving, thoroughly Catholic family. This is bad?
As for sentimentality, we are not the bourgoisie of 19th century France and probably have no concept how sentimental they actually were- even having seen the movie, we who think that we are being extremely florid when we write, “Dear Bill”, cross it out and write, “Hi Bill,” and finally cross *that* out and write, “Bill…”The entire age was sentimental, and probably nowhere moreso than in France.
Nevertheless, I knew the film was in trouble when Mr. Martin called Therese, “My queen.” “This isn’t going to fly,” I thought to myself. Nevertheless, that is what he did call her, whether we have trouble stomaching it or not. And it may very well have been part of the brew that so wonderfully nourished the heart of Therese Martin and made her a saint.
At least let us do the Defillipises the courtesy of not insisting that their film be anachronistic and frame the whole story in terms of our emotional and spiritual impoverishment. Viewing that film is probably as close as we can get to being in the bosom of that family in those years, the English language excepted of course, just as viewing “The Passion of Christ” put us on the scene in Jerusalem. These are both exceptionally well done, and I for one plan to go again and again till “Therese” goes away.
We cannot change the culture without changing the art, and we cannot get good films on Catholic themes by adopting an attitude of hypercriticism toward the few films that come our way. If we support Leonardo Defillipis today, he will be in a position to produce a better effort tomorrow. If it isn’t up to your mark, at least concede it is a first film, and possibly the first of a large, influential and impressive body of work…if we support these fledgling efforts today.Rivers of vocations can come from such work, the conversions of many families, the reform of their homes and etc. The lives of the saints are powerful enough to do all this and more. “A Man For all Seasons”; “The Mission”; “The Passion of the Christ”; “Therese”- Four Catholic movies in forty years! If we want more, then we have got to support this one to the max. For me this is very easy to do. It’s a great film.
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I replied …
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Thanks, Lee. Good comment. But …
While it’s true that Defilipis had a challenge before him – namely, how do you dramatize a life that consists mostly of interior struggles – my criticism of “Therese” (in passing) was anything but “hyper criticism”.
Your argument seems to be that we have to accept Catholic films with a kind of indulgence that secular films would never warrant. Well, this is fine for the Ghetto, but if, say, “The Muppets” were boring and flat, there’s no reason to expect the audience to say, “Oh, they haven’t made a movie for a while. Let’s give them a chance. After all, there can’t be sex and violence in a Muppet movie, so they’re at a disadvantage go begin with”. Word would get out and the audience would simply not see it – and rightly so.
A thing worth doing is worth doing badly, but a thing done badly is not worth consuming.
The fact is that as Catholic film-makers and dramatists we are doing this for the glory of God; and no patronizing pats on the head will come from the secular world if our work is bad, so why should they come from our own captive audience? “Therese” was not a bad movie, especially considering the insurmountable difficulty of dramatizing a life that was very dramatic interiorly but not exteriorly. “Bella” was not bad, and neither were the other Christian films I mentioned.
But “October Baby” is much, much better than all of them. It is a film that stands on its own and does not call for our indulgence or for avuncular “atta boys”.
Meanwhile, the pro-abortion crowd will crucify this film. It’s already begun. They’re calling it “anti-woman”, I am told. It’s good enough that it’s going to make them very very mad.
So you and I are in agreement on this – even mediocre Christian films, especially those that attack the culture of death, should be supported. Much more so excellent ones
Check out Lorraine’s post, which stands in irony next to yours.
I had a novel refused by a Catholic publisher because (are you ready?) it contained a prostitute and it referred to “marital intimacy” (she called it), which, so said the publisher’s reader, was “inappropriate for Catholic readers.”
Andrew, I agree completely.
“Midnight in Paris” was a joke, and not a funny one. Even the award winning “King’s Speech”, though “well made” had some serious philosophical problems, which I go into here – https://staustinreview.org/ink_desk/archives/teleprompter_us_rex
And, Dena, I have heard your kind of story from a number of writers who are submitting fiction to Catholic publishers. Apparently there is a squeamishness that is more appropriate for Pharisees than Christians. It is quite a shame.
Kevin and Dena–
Speaking as a young woman brought up in what might be described as a Catholic ghetto … and as a fiction writer and occasional actress … I find it VERY difficult to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate treatments of “dangerous” topics. To take literary examples, I can sniff when a treatment is pretty much OK (Shakespeare, Flannery O’Connor) or pretty rotten (D.H. Lawrence, Stephen King)–but what does one do with the in-betweens? How does one avoid prurience and prudishness, and walk the line of purity? It’s very, very hard, especially with the culture as rotten as it is. And oftentimes the easiest thing to do as an artist or a consumer–I won’t say the wisest or the best–is to avoid the “danger zone” altogether.
Of course, art without any element of danger isn’t much art.
*end rant*
Any suggestions on one discerns these things?????
Sophia,
I think the discernment comes from getting a sense of the purpose of the “danger zone” in a work of art.
For example, there’s plenty of blood and gore in “Hamlet”, but it’s all there for a higher purpose. That’s true for the Old Testament as well! We often forget that the depiction of sin is not the endorsement of sin.
But sometimes it is. For example, I was a big fan (believe it or not) of the John Travolta film “Saturday Night Fever” when it came out, many years ago. But one of my high school English teachers at the time saw the movie and felt that the film was depicting the sins of the main character in order to titilate the audience; that the character’s redemption in the end was not a valid reason to include the sometimes graphic depictions of his sinful behavior throughout the movie. (He did not use these terms, but this in essence is what he said).
I had a similar reaction to the movie “Elephant Man”. All the women I knew who saw it thought it was a sensitive depiction of a poor disfigured man; but it was clear to me that it was a “freak show”. The sympathy for the title character was more an excuse for showing his disfigurement than it was the point of the story.
So, again, I’d focus on what is the point of the “danger zone”? In Chesterton’s play “The Surprise”, he shows two men getting drunk. EWTN was skittish about filming and airing this, since their audiences object to getting drunk. But the point of that scene in the play is certainly not the endorsement of that behavior, nor is the purpose to titilate the audience with the depiction of that behavior. The point is to show the weakness of the main character, a human and somewhat humorous weakness, but a weakness that served the main theme and without which the play would have been compromised.
So, like all discernment, things can get tricky. But focus on the purpose.
Either way, when an editor says, “You can’t have prostitutes or references to the marital act in a Catholic novel,” that editor is a Pharisee. Dena should have stormed out with a “Get thee behind me, Satan!”
Perhaps she did.
To Sophia:
You said, “I can sniff when a treatment is pretty much OK” So, to answer your question of how to discern, I would say, Trust your sniffer. (And I like certain reviewers, as well, mainly because they save me money and time.)
The novel in question, by the way (Treason, a historical novel set in Elizabethan England) will come out late this year or early next. If you should happen to read it, you’ll find the objections beyond absurd.
But I have just this very morning finished a second novel, The Lion’s Heart. It’s a modern love story between two men (yes,really). And yet, I promise you, it’s as Catholic as a Gregorian chant. On the off-chance it ever gets published, and the further off-chance that you ever read it, you would, I promise you, agree.
I trust honest sniffers. I have a fully operational one myself. Cut-out templates (like the one employed by the reader I mentioned) are for people who have no sense of smell. They are English teachers who go through an essay looking for a comma splice so they can put an F on it without having to read it.
Don’t do as you say (avoid ‘danger zones’ altogether). It will keep you from reading some really great authors, not just Shakespeare, et al, but also guys like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Kevin O’Brien: Further on Hollywood screenplays, I heard a few years ago a rather darkly humorous story that might interest you, involving the Australian actor Geoffrey Rush. He is best known in America I guess for hamming it up as Captain Barbossa in the “Pirates” movies, but here in Australia he has long been a stalwart of the classic theatre scene, and he’s a very clever and sophisticated fellow. Anyway, he was giving an interview on the release of the second “Pirates” film, and the interviewer noted that this one was far less witty and intelligent than the first film (which was indeed quite a clever film). Rush totally agreed, and gave an explanation. Apparently those behind the first movie were disappointed that it made only 500 million dollars (this figure is not exact, but it made a lot of money). So they did some audience testing, and found that the audiences didn’t appreciate having to follow the smart and complex dialogue–it distracted them from throwing popcorn on their friends, or spilling their Coke, or something. Therefore the producers DELIBERATELY made the sequel less intelligent and witty, and added more action and special effects sequences. It went on to make more than 800 million at the box office.
THAT, concludeded Rush cynically, is Hollywood. And THAT is why, despite the talented people involved, Hollywood screenplays are so dismal. I would hope this story would be of some comfort to you, Kevin, as you go about the no doubt difficult task of writing and producing Christian drama. For, bad as things might be, at least you don’t have to cut out the best lines you write because they might put some teenager off their popcorn!
Incidentally, I looked up your comments on “The King’s Speech”, and found them, like all your writng, excellent.
To Andrew:
That’s because Hollywood is an industry, profit-oriented like any other industry. If I were in the Hollywood business, I’d do the same. I wouldn’t expect the principles of production, marketing, etc., to be set aside for me because I believe that what I’m *selling* (book, film, etc.) is “art” and somehow above such the laws of free enterprise.
Any writer, actor, artist, musician/composer must first ask himself very early on, Why am I doing this? What do I want from it? and then produce accordingly.
When we don’t acknowledge our purpose, when we keep it a secret from ourselves, we are inevitably disappointed–and likely to blame others for our disappointment.
To Andrew:
You said, “The notion that in any area of life the goals of profit and the free market can free us from our moral obligations–”
Heavens! I do hope a cautionary word about having realistic expectations in order to avoid disappointment doesn’t amount to “freeing us from our moral obligations”. I’m not sure I can see how such an interpretation was made.
There are many areas of life, not just the one under discussion, in which it is advisable to ask oneself, Why am I doing this? What do I hope to gain? Sometimes, the answer will be, Not for any gain at all….
To Dena Hunt:
Though I am very far from being an expert on moral/theological questions, I must say your position does strike me as a bit suspect. The notion that in any area of life the goals of profit and the free market can free us from our moral obligations–including the moral obligation to produce as beautiful work as possible, if we are artists–seems to me contrary to Catholic social teaching. However, I do not want to try the patience of StAR contibutors too far on these matters in Holy Week, and anyway I have been somewhat exaggerating my disdain for Hollywood, since I obviously consume a fair few of their products. Hollywood has always managed to turn up amazing figures who have the knack of combining an ability to “work the system” with “the common touch” and artistic integrity. People like John Huston, Frank Capra (Catholic), John Ford (Catholic), Woody Allen circa “Broadway Danny Rose”, and the early Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola. Scorsese and Peter Jackson seem to be continuing this tradition today to some extent, along with Mel Gibson, before he lost the plot. I will pray today that Mel regains the plot, that God sends us more such people, and that they be Catholic!
Good job