Awhile back I talked a little about the trend of marketing movies to Christians — both Christian film directors talking about their faith as well as other films that are being marketed specifically to churches regardless of the intent.
I have to say up front that I knew nothing about the movie The Road or the book it came from before doing a little research. I see it has some great actors and it looks like a good story. It’s getting positive reviews, and is a film that may have Oscar potential. I don’t want to criticize the movie itself, but I would like to question how it’s being marketed to Christians.
Jared Wilson at his blog The Gospel-Driven Church mentions an Entertainment Weekly article (which doesn’t appear to be online, although maybe that will change) that talks a bit about The Road‘s plans. Directly from the article:
[T]he adaptation of . . . McCarthy’s acclaimed novel about a father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) traveling through a bleak wasteland is getting the full pitch to Christian audiences . . . Plans include 15 advance screenings for church leaders nationwide, a website featuring free sermon and discussion guides, and a special trailer with extra scenes underscoring the film’s moral message.
The website in question is here, and you can download a PDF filled with multiple sermons and questionnaires. The studio is using a marketing firm that has marketed to Christians in the past.
Jared sums up his feelings on this in a rather direct manner:
Cutting to the chase: The Road will probably be a good movie. Pastors can reference films (and other artifacts of popular arts and culture) till the cows come home. But this is not about helping pastors preach. This is about getting pastors to help impact a film’s box office. None of these guys have impacting evangelical communities as their motivation: they want evangelical communities to impact their bottom lines. We are a market share, a consumer base.
The rest of his post is just as good, so give it a read. I agree one hundred percent: this may be a good movie, but I don’t want to have movie directors and promoters in the church giving us cue cards for sermons and Bible studies. As mentioned before, movies as diverse as An Inconvenient Truth and Rocky Balboa have also been marketed to Christians in the hopes of sales. The trend has been even more prevalent since The Passion of the Christ, so Christians have become a bigger target for marketers.
Another article from Christian Today talks about the plans:
The Road is not a religious film, let alone a Christian one. But the deep questions raised and the spiritual themes embedded present “a unique entry point for those in the faith community to share the hope of the Gospel in a hopeless world,” said A. Larry Ross, president of A. Larry Ross Communications, the Christian media company that was asked to take the film to the faith-based community.
From a pastor whose church is showing the film:
“We need to look at it as a cultural key to build bridges and start spiritual conversations … about the truth,” Phil Hotsenpiller, teaching pastor at Friends Church in Yorba Linda, Calif., told The Christian Post. “People will see it. You’ll miss the opportunity to have a spiritual conversation … and give a biblical interpretation.”
The problem I have with this thinking is that it sets up an urgency that tells us to immerse ourselves in pop culture or else we’ll be irrelevant, and unless you are relevant to the pop culture you will not be relevant to people around you. The same argument could be made about anything from American Idol to the Saw movies.
But here’s another angle:
“I’m not interested in trying to find just the right bait to get people interested in the Gospel. What not-yet-believers need are far more Christians who are willing to really listen and who are interested in genuine relationships and conversations that don’t hinge on whether they ‘make a decision for Christ.’ I don’t feel a need to be a ‘closer’ when it comes to evangelism, but I do want to be able to engage people in meaningful conversation. And to do that requires that I watch movies, like The Road, that explore truth and meaning from new, and even disturbing, angles.”
Take out the last line and I totally agree. To me, the need to follow-up every good movie movie with a way to turn that into an evangelistic pitch isn’t the best way to show God’s love. If you want to be relevant to your neighbor, love them as you love yourself. If you want to show love to a teenager you don’t understand, listen to him. If you’re trying to demonstrate how to follow Jesus, deny yourself. This is a way everyone can be relevant, especially those who may not have $10 for a movie ticket to keep up.
Having read the book that the movie is based on, I really have a hard time understanding this one. The book is beyond bleak, it was so darn depressing that the holocaust novel I read afterwards seemed cheerful in comparison. Besides being bleak, it had some extremely disturbing moments of violence (think of a scene from Saw). I’m not quite sure how that translates into “Perfect for the Christian Market!” Yeah the characters are noble and sacrificing, blah, blah blah, but basically they’re just trying to survive in a world without food, shelter, or the slightest bit of hope.
As far as how Christians should react to this whole thing, I’ve sat through a few sermons here and there based on movies (one totally based on The Matrix is coming to mind), and I think it can be one of many tools available to teach about deeper truths. It doesn’t mean every movie has to be turned into an allegory, of course, because that would be silly. Maybe just enjoying them and occasionally pulling pieces from them to illustrate a point.
No one should be fooled though – the movie studios are aiming for Christians as a market share, not because they want to spread the gospel. Still, it isn’t all bad. It means Christians have spoken up enough that studios are aware of their existence.
Who else besides me is tired of the moniker “Christian film?”
What does that even mean? What CAN it mean?
Seriously, if this isn’t about niche marketing, then it’s not about anything at all. There are any number of spiritual parallels, both positive and negative, to be found in films that I have enjoyed throughout my many long years, but this smacks of the same flavor of “gigantic outreach opportunity” that regrettably accompanied Mel’s “PotC.”
Why not simply let a film be a film? Revel in the filmcraft, and discuss the particulars during and after. I can think of several spiritual points in the Spider-Man films, but I’m not about to run out of the end-zone and into the parking lot ala Forrest Gump to grab someone by the collar and ham-handedly “evangelize” them with it.
Let’s not reach so far that we dislocate our arms.