Greetings and salutations on this momentous day! It was delightful to behold the technically minded geeks bid their (at times emotional) farewells to analog television last night. Heartwarming stuff… but now we must steel ourselves against the future and find the will to carry on. Shall we?
It was brought home to me this week just how powerful are stories. Good stories can entertain us, move us, and change our minds and outlooks on things. In this day and age, I firmly believe the story has become even more potent. It’s woven into feature films that draw millions and captivate minds for 120 minutes or more. Stories pervade the magazine rack, are readily available on the internet, and even make appearances in 30 second form to advertise nicotine gum. Particularly when it comes to film and television, it’s the story that’s replaced baseball as the national pastime.
We have become one spoiled bunch of folks when it comes to tales, demanding to be told better and sleeker stories if we intend to invest our time being told them. Whole industries have sprung up to chronicle the lives of those writing, producing and acting out the stories. Colleges and trade schools have opened their doors to tell people how to tell better stories via a film script, a radio spot, or the screen of an iPhone. Even we here at Faith & Geekery occasionally offer critiques of the watchability and effectiveness of stories in cinema form.
But where do these stories take us, and what are the goals of the teller? Increasingly, the answer isn’t simply that producers, directors, and writers want to entertain and provide us with a general sense of well being. Books and companion films like The Golden Compass have arrived with their author’s explicit statement that they hoped their works would serve to undermine Christianity.
Perhaps the more noxious approach though, is the one that isn’t as blatant. For instance, what if a colossal preponderance of the folks involved in crafting stories, writing them, producing them, and marketing them posessed a similar worldview? What if they had shared values about families, politics, social justice, and morality?
Perhaps by this point you’re picking up what I’m throwing down. In light of the rigid and unprecedent consistency of the slants we’re going to encounter in the theater and the small screen against faith and traditional values (today’s example), I think it’s terribly important to be careful. We ought to research the stories making waves if we intend to take them in by book or screen. We should try to gather trustworthy info about the message of the work, and also about the folks behind the work if we can. By the by, we don’t always need to park ourselves in front of the latest cinematic or small screen offering just because its expected to gross tens of millions on this particular weekend – or because we know all our friends will be talking about it tomorrow. If the message of the work is bunk – I think we can feel free to adopt a laissez faire approach to seeing it (thank you, France).
So, why extra care and caution? Are you saying we’re infants who need to be led around by the hand, Goose (no disrespect meant to the newborn and toddler crowd)?! No, but we know the power of a good story – power to change minds and hearts. In light of this, we need to know always what we believe and why. We need to know and understand where attacks against our faith are coming from, so we can face a world of stories that at times could understandably be mistaken for a mine field.
Well said.