Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Movies and theology, take two (and a tale about a beaver)

Last week, I linked to a couple of blogs where people were addressing movies and theology. Today I got an e-mail steering me to Divine Comedy at the Cineplex, an article at ChristianityToday.com by Craig Detweiler.

The thumbnail bio at the bottom of the article says "Craig Detweiler directs the Film/TV/Radio program at Biola University. He is co-author of A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture and screenwriter of the (virtually) unseen comedies, The Duke and Extreme Days." The subtitle for the article is "We all love movies that make us laugh, even in the worst of times -- and from Annie Hall to Blazing Saddles to The Big Lebowski, there's good theology behind that."

From the article:

Ten classic comedies were screened at the recent City of the Angels Film Festival. A broad coalition including Fuller Seminary, InterVarsity, and Catholics in Media offer this annual event as a gift to the city, a celebration of theology and film.

For a history of the City of the Angels Film Festival (aka CAFF), go here. The first CAFF was held in 1994.

So, if you like to ponder theology and film, I guess you have lots of company.

I generally prefer to enjoy my entertainment without trying to find hidden meanings, myself. Or, if meaning seems to be there and begs to be discussed, I generally confine my discussions to talks with my husband or a few close friends. The idea of going somewhere to hash out spiritual meaning in popular culture with a bunch of strangers doesn't appeal to me at all. (With the exception of limited engagement, carefully delineated, in the blogosphere, of course ;-) But, if it appeals to you, now you know somewhere else you can go to find others who also like it. Just promise me you won't let anybody lead you too far astray in the process, all right? Amateur theologians can get pretty big on their own theories, you know?

Some background might be in order. I think film festivals like this might be good, might even be very good -- but I also worry that they might go bad, even very bad. And here's why. You get a lot of people together trying to be as meaning-full as the next person, and things can go strange in a hurry, in my experience.

Let me give you one example.

When I was in college, I wrote a short story about a beaver that got into building dams and wound up building so many that he couldn't properly keep up with maintenance and so one washed out and took the others out, too. It was a pretty plain story, in more ways than one. All it was meant as was a gentle reminder to not let oneself get spread too thin. The professor gathered up all our short stories, which he then presented to the class anonymously for discussion. My simple, humorous little tale came up, and one student saw the marks of social injustice in it or something, and the next thing I knew there were at least twenty otherwise intelligent people saying that this story had proven to them that the Idaho Power Company was evil and should be stopped, or maybe taken over by the government, and maybe hydroelectric power was a bad thing overall.

Excuse me?

I nervously raised my hand, and when called upon suggested that it wasn't about that at all, but was simply a tale about a beaver that got overambitious, couldn't keep up, neglected what shouldn't have been neglected, and wound up paying for it. It was, in short, just a basic non-Aesop Aesop's Fable. That suggestion was met with derision, and a chorus of "What do you know?" So I owned up to being the author. In a sane world, this would have given me some authority in saying what the story was and what it wasn't, but this was a college classroom in full what-is-the-meaning-of-the-universe mode, not at all interested in common sense. That sorry little episode ended with me being branded simultaneously as someone who wrote wise tales about the evils of corporations (especially public utilities) and as an idiot for not seeing how I'd proved their viewpoint.

I've seen similar things happen when grown people get together specifically to talk about "philosophy." It's astonishing the "truths" people can conjure up when they're trying to be "deep."

Sigh.

I think I'll change the subject now...

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