Movies

My wife and I movied ourselves out this evening. I'll start with the second one we watched first:

Joy and I rented Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine", which I've been skeptical of seeing for some time after hearing that Mike manipulated how some things appeared through editing and insinuations in his commentary. If this is true, it's sad, because the true point of his documentary didn't need such fabrications, and it only served to hurt his credibility. The right-wing immediately got defensive about this movie, because it had to do with guns. But that wasn't the overall point of the movie (at least, that's not what I got from it). Ultimately, the movie is about fear and its choke-hold on our society. We are a nation that is motivated to act, positively or negatively, by fear.

The movie makes a particular point about the news we watch. Violent crime has been decreasing nationwide for the past 2 decades, yet reporting of violent crime has skyrocketed. I, myself, got to thinking about the nature of advertising. How many of the commercials we watch play to our fears in one way or another? We don't want to stink, get injured in a car wreck, get diseases, or spend more money on another comparable product. Kids attend school out of fear that they'll grow up to be penniless and alone if they don't make good grades. Fear is part of our lives every day.

This also caused me to think back to the other movie that Joy and I saw today: "Saved!" It was good (although I'm of the opinion that Jimmy and I could have written it better... being on the inside and all). But Joy and I were talking about some of the points it made after the movie. At one point, the principal of the Christian school is debating morality with his son, and says something to the effect of there being no moral ambiguity in the Bible on whatever the subject was, and saying, "There is no gray area." To which the son replies, "It's all gray area, dad!"

This is tough for me as a recovering fundamentalist to swallow. I happen to believe that there are "moral absolutes" (altough I don't often draw my lines in the same places as other absolutists). Yet, the direction that I've been going in appears more relativistic.

I believe that this might be because I've come to want for my interactions with others to be governed by love... and love is hard to make black and white. It requires us to do what is best for individual people given individual circumstances, and it's hard to make a formula out of that. But our natural response is to want to make things easier on ourselves by making formulas, rules, black-and-white areas. We are then left with the task of enforcing those. Given that our church doesn't have the muscle of the state behind it anymore, how many times do we resort to using fear to get people to see things our way?

Fear is a great manipulator, I guess. We spend a good deal of time and effort into learning how to get others to do what we want them to do (we call it leadership). Whether it's buying a certain car/home security system/life insurance, getting our news from a certain outlet, or using a certain system of morality, we want people to see things our way.

Yet love doesn't give us a spirit of fear... and it certainly doesn't lead us to hold it over others.

It's something to think about.
posted by Stephen at 10:33 PM | |