Ted Baehr, founder and publisher of Movieguide
and chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission, in his book How to Succeed in Hollywood (Without Losing
Your Soul), confirms our preferences. He cites the noted singer and actor
Pat Boone, who recalls the clean movies of yesteryear, in “the heyday of the
film business,” when “families used to go together at least once a week to see
a good movie in the neighborhood cinema.” “You could always count on it being a
happy family experience…movies that don’t offend a large portion of their
audience tend to make more money,” he adds, than those that “purposely insert
foul language and other offensive material.”[1]
When
he was very young, Bill remembers his mother, who was a young working girl
during the depression, loved to watch the Maisie movies whenever they would
come on television. Bill would enjoy how
much his mom would enjoy them, breaking in to tell him stories about her own
experiences that paralleled Maisie’s.
The heroine (played by the versatile Ann Sothern) was a type of “Rosie
the Riveter” with a strong moral center. Maisie was always aggressive,
forthright, sober, and moral. Her prototype, Rosie the Riveter, was the symbol
for World War II women who worked in the factories creating the equipment for
the war effort. Rosie the Riveter had a strong work ethic with a solid moral
center.
When
the war ended, however, so did Rosie – and Maisie. They were replaced in the 1950s by “Blondie,”
who was now limited to homemaking and sending the incompetent Dagwood to work.
The message was that women were needed to step back and vacate jobs for
returning male veterans. Had Rosie/Maisie been preserved, husband and wife
could have split full-time jobs and secured more family time.
And what about the classic Casablanca? Could such a movie have been
made today? Wikipedia notes that “during
scriptwriting, the possibility was discussed of Laszlo being killed in
Casablanca, allowing Rick and Ilsa to leave together,” but was rejected so that
Ilsa and Victor could “carry on with the work that in these days is far more
important than the love of two little people,” as scriptwriter Casey Robinson
explained to producer Hal Wallis. Further,
“it was certainly impossible for Ilsa to leave Laszlo for Rick, as the
production code forbade showing a woman leaving her husband for another man.”[2]
Today, however, we have no such restriction. Instead
of welcoming the iconic film that it became, would today’s audiences have
preferred the discussed ending? The Nineteen Forties’ context and code guided
the filmmakers to choose the moral sacrifice, which took the film to a deeper
level. The question for us, of course is - which ending would audiences choose
today: the Christ sacrifice or the self-centered abandonment of virtue and
loyalty for self-gratification?
In
his book, Ted Baehr contrasts a “pagan” and a Christian “theology” of art. Steeped in pluralistic relativism, the
current secularist has lost the Christian moral center so “they have
reinterpreted sin to mean politically incorrect speech, and carefully removed
any burden of guilt from the family destroying sins of adultery and
sodomy.” He cites Noam Chomsky,
reputedly among the six most quoted historical thinkers, observing, “The United
States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the
system of ideological control – ‘indoctrination,’ we might say – exercised through
the mass media.”[3]
A
long-time friend of ours, Arch Davis of Davis Systems in Princeton, New Jersey,
was once asked by an Afghan delegate to the United Nations where in the Bible
Jesus condoned adultery. Our friend was
surprised and assured him that could be found nowhere, since Jesus completely
opposed adultery. The delegate was
shocked. He explained that in Moslem
countries the public voice is one. The
media reflects the government, which reflects the religion. Then he asked our
friend why he supposed that the young zealots with all their lives ahead of
them were willing to give up those lives as suicide bombers. He explained their sacrifice was to keep what
they perceived to be the “pollution” of Christianity out of their
countries. The Afghans and those like
them assumed that all the adultery, violence, promoted dishonesty, disrespect,
and moral laxity routinely served up as staples in United States’ films and
fictional television shows is indicative of the values of our government, our
people, our culture, and our religion.
We sow the wind of degradation and are shocked when we reap the
whirlwind of extermination.
Ted
Baehr, however, contrasts a Christian theology of the arts in “The Christian
World View of Art and Communication,” a document whose forging he co-chaired
for the Coalition on Revival. The Art
and Communications Committee identified “God” as “the Author of creation and
communication,” Jesus Christ as Lord over “all art and communication,” art as susceptible to “good and evil,” and
needing to be harnessed as “expressions of God’s creativity” in human
communication, and, thus, intended to “glorify God,” reflecting “the mind of
Christ,” who “is the standard of excellence,” and, therefore, Christians in the
arts should use their “great influence” to help our culture and its people
shape a “view of reality,” submitted to “the lordship of Jesus Christ in
accordance with His Word.”[4]
All
of us know that no era in the fallen world is ever perfect, including the
1940s. But, as Ted Baehr and Pat Boone
remind us, enough of the moral center was still apparent in films and radio
stories of times like this to make many of us long for the type of morality
promoted in these war time expressions of cinema art during the late 1930s
through much of the 1940s.
What
did Maisie and Rosie have that we have lost?
A moral center that portrayed them as independent, generous, and strong,
matching hammer blow for hammer blow with the men at the front, while, at the
same time, sober and serious, not jumping into bed with any man they dated,
but, certainly in Maisie’s case, preserving sex strictly for marriage, her
constant ideal in each of her nine movies.
What
a Christian moral center teaches is that all of us are created by the one God
who made all things “very good” (Genesis 1:27-28, 31). And we were created to steward this earth
together, women with men. This is
reality, so we need to ask ourselves some serious questions about the way we
portray reality: Do we reflect God’s
good intentions in our movies for men and for women? Do we create and support
movies with moral centers? Do we reflect faith/virtue in our media? And, if
not, how do we recapture our moral center in media, bringing this all under the
lordship of Christ, who is our standard of excellence?
The
Apostle Paul encouraged the Philippian church to think about “everything that
is true, everything that is honorable, everything that is just, everything that
is pure, everything that is pleasing, everything that is auspicious—if anything
is virtuous and if anything is praiseworthy” (Phil. 4:8 Aida’s translation). Those are the ideals we need to take with us
to the multiplex.
Bill
and Aida
[1] Ted
Baehr, How to Succeed in Hollywood
(Without Losing Your Soul) (Washington, D.C.: WorldNetDaily, 2011), xxv.
[2]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca_(film)#Initialresponse, accessed 26 August
2013.
[3] Ted
Baehr, How to Succeed in Hollywood, 16.
[4] Ted Baehr,
How to Succeed in Hollywood,
13-14.
