When the Oscar nominees were counted up, and it didn’t look promising. First, Brokeback Mountain, the film that normalized homosexual behavior through the American western genre, led the pack with four nominations. And Felicity Huffman was up for best actress for her transgender performance in TransAmerica.
Recall that last year the Academy gave Oscar awards to two films that promote euthanasia — Best Picture for Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby and Best Foreign Picture for The Sea Inside.
Motion pictures aren’t just what we talk about around the water cooler. They shape who we are and what we believe.
Movie theaters have been described as the modern-day temples. They are the new place for Americans to congregate — not on Sunday morning, but on Friday or Saturday evenings. While those in Hollywood like to say, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union,” these films “preach” a homily that often goes against the very things that we value most. Of course, when the message is passed off as “art,” then it’s deemed permissible.
Pope John Paul II in his World Peace Day message of 2001, wrote about “a phenomenon of vast proportions, sustained by powerful media campaigns and designed to propagate lifestyles, social and economic programs and, in the last analysis, a comprehensive world-view which erodes from within other estimable cultures and civilizations.”
He warned that “Western cultural models are enticing and alluring because of their remarkable scientific and technical cast, but regrettably there is growing evidence of their deepening human, spiritual and moral impoverishment. The culture which produces such models is marked by the fatal attempt to secure the good of humanity by eliminating God, the Supreme Good.”
He’s right.
As British author and convert G.K. Chesterton often remarked, to the abnormal, it is only the normal that looks most grotesque.
Hollywood’s products are powerful indeed. When stellar cinematography brings us attractive actors and actresses, film-goers are much more likely to believe the worldview being passed to them.
What exactly is that worldview?
It’s okay to abandon your family for personal fulfillment.
One of the cornerstones of this worldview is that individualistic happiness trumps everything else, including one’s spouse, family obligations, and children. Seldom are we shown the value of sacrificing one’s own personal desires for one’s family.
This message was most apparent in last year’s largely forgettable, The Door in the Floor (2004), and in the 2002 films, Far from Heaven and The Hours, which won a best actress Oscar award for Nicole Kidman. All of these films ignore the human wreckage that follows the pain of divorce.
Abortion is compassion.
Films such as last year’s Academy Award-nominated film, Vera Drake, and 1999’s The Cider House Rules, which won a best supporting actor award for Michael Caine, tell powerful stories meant to tell the audience that abortion is a compassionate act rather than a life-ending tragedy.
Where are the films for the women of Silent No More? That’s one of the groups for women struggling with post-abortion stress. Rachel’s Vineyard retreat-goers will tell you that the pain lasts for decades after the abortion.
Where are the films that explore the value of the weak? In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the elf-queen Galadriel says to Frodo, “Even the smallest person can change the future.” It’s a shame that so few films explore that possibility.
Casual sex isn’t harmful.
Casual sex has been rampant in Hollywood motion pictures for decades, but last year seemed to encourage it with a new gusto. These included Closer, Garden State, Alfie and Sideways. Los Angeles-based Act One executive director Barbara Nicolosi aptly described Closer as “four narcissists with potty mouths commit moral sin.”
Of the four films, only Alfie explored any potential downside to the consequences of casual sex. But apart from the emotional wreckage, none of the films even tackled the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases.
Homosexual behavior is normal. Those who say otherwise are villains.
The common media approach to handle those who oppose homosexual behavior is to caricature and vilify them, rather than showing them intelligently working through the complexities of the issue. American Beauty, the 1999 Academy Award winner for Best Picture did this. Last year’s Academy-nominated Kinsey went even further, attempting to prop up the infamous “sex” researcher Alfred Kinsey as a hero, meanwhile ignoring his flawed research and personal perversions. By doing so, such films subvert right and wrong, in the hopes that viewers might embrace that which is both unnatural and immoral.
Three is a family.
If individualistic happiness trumps all considerations, and sexual morality isn’t what we thought it was, then three adults, no matter their gender, can make a “family.” Films are already trying to use stories to prove this thesis. It is was the basis for last year’s film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Home at the End of the World, about a sexually ambiguous young man in love with both his homosexual best friend and a woman. In addition, Head in the Clouds, The Dreamers and the documentary Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family, all handled this myth in one way or another.
Motion picture representations of traditional healthy families — a mother, father and children — however, are few and far between.
The Church is Sadistic.
When the Church is portrayed in motion pictures, it’s usually a harmless plot device. But when the film focuses on a clerical or religious character, he’s often a sadistic, twisted menace. That was certainly the case with films such as Stigmata and The Magdalene Sisters. We can expect even more when The DaVinci Code and the film on Pope Pius XII rear their ugly heads.
The scandals have made their own contribution to this worldview. Last year’s Bad Education and the documentary Twist of Faith gave us abusive priests.
Very rarely is the Church shown doing good, or making intelligent, reasoned pronouncements on the subjects that affect individual’s daily lives.
It has been said that entertainment is merely a reflection of who we are. Yet, when I consider such films I don’t see lessons that remind me of anyone that I know or of experiences that I have had personally. Perhaps such films are reflecting a “reality” that exists in the culture of Hollywood — or only within the mind of the writer.
The answer to all of this? It can’t be to hide — that will only make matters worse. After all, one of the reasons Christ came was to change the worldview of humanity when it was far from him. In order to do his work, we’ll have to do the same. Starting with our own children.
Tim Drake is a staff writer with the National Catholic Register, and author of the book Young and Catholic: The Face of Tomorrow’s Church (Sophia Institute Press, 2004). He writes from Saint Joseph, Minnesota.
This article has been re-published with written authorization of Catholic Match, LLC.
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