William Wilberforce stands as the single person most responsible for changing England’s attitude toward slavery and the slave trade; however, in America the single person who most powerfully touched and changed our attitudes regarding this issue was an artist, a novelist named Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the second-best selling book of the 19th century, outsold only by the Bible.
When we speak of the opportunity to create culturally renewing art, we know from history that it can be done. And it has been done with movies. In the turbulent nineteen sixties, movies like Lilies of the Field and To Kill A Mockingbird helped Americans to understand and to begin to accept the dramatic social changes happening around them. In the backwash of Vietnam, movies like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now opened up discussion of that war and engendered a belated compassion for its veterans.
This powerful art of storytelling through film is becoming more and more important as we look to our future. As we move more deeply into a postmodern, post-literate age, ideas communicated in the time-honored ways using propositional truth, civil discourse, and an appeal to rational thought fall on deaf ears and cold hearts.
We have seen the role that film, television and music can play in our time to subtly (and not so subtly) weave doubt and even destruction into the fabric of our families and society as they change a life or even a commonly held cultural belief — sneaking in, as it were, while the lights are out and the images are larger than life, or the sitcom is so clever, or the song about suicide has such a good beat and a haunting melody.
But this entry to the hearts of men (and women and children) does not have to be a bad thing.
J.R.R. Tolkien discovered a key to the human heart in the last century:
There are truths that man knows exist, but they cannot be seen – they are immaterial, but no less real, to us. We remember the poem, a painting, a song, or a story precisely because when we first experienced them, they changed our way of perceiving the world, and our feelings about life. The imaginative experience modifies our sense of reality, and satisfies our deep need.
Tolkien had only a glimpse of what the future might hold. He had no idea that one day powerful cinematic characters and images taken from his Lord of the Rings trilogy would expose the Ipod culture to nobility, sacrifice, and heroism in a way not otherwise possible. His friend and colleague C.S. Lewis did not dream that the Narnia films would speak to millions around the world. But it has escaped no one’s attention after the fact that these films have been enormously popular (and profitable) at the box office and on DVD and other media.
Can only epic fantasies renew culture? No, so can stories of ordinary people with struggles and joys and trials who make choices, fail, find hope, laughter, despair and redemption. Stories like this teach the world not in a pedantic way but shoulder-to-shoulder, using circumstances that are familiar but with a startling transcendence. Jesus knew this. “There was man who had two sons…”
Is the Entertainment Industry only that? Or does it now also serve as a shaper of values, a teacher, a grand network of peers who are polled for life’s decisions while books, parental advice, and logical discussion fade to the perimeter? Art that is True and derives its life from an objective realty is vital and authentic. It is not a slave to the passing fancy of the age, but a servant of real personal freedom and redemption.
The difficulty of gaining a fair hearing in our current political and academic arenas stands in sharp contrast to the power of art to change, hopefully to ennoble people today, working in the deep places of the heart. We must take advantage of the tremendous opportunity and challenge afforded by storytelling in film (and television and music) to shine light and hope and wonder into the gray shadows and withering remnants of civilization.
“Those who tell the stories rule society.” — Plato
“In America today it is quite clear who the storytellers are: the filmmakers.” — James Spiegel (philosophy professor at Taylor University)
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