Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture

EYES

WIDE

OPEN

EYES

WIDE

OPEN

LOOKING FOR GOD IN POPULAR CULTURE

Revised and Expanded Edition

William D. Romanowski

© 2007 by William D. Romanowski

Published by Brazos Press

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.brazospress.com

First edition © 2001 by William D. Romanowski

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Romanowski, William D.

Eyes wide open / William D. Romanowski.—Rev. and expanded ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 10: 1-58743-201-3 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-1-58743-201-9 (pbk.)

1. Popular culture—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Popular culture—United

States. I. Title

BR526.R646 2007

261.0973—dc22    2006021101

Unless otherwise noted, scripture is taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Photos were supplied by Photofest, New York, New York.

To my sister and brother

—Kim and Michael—

and for the next generation

Michael, Lucy, Nellie, Tara,

Nora, Sam, Claire, Max, Spencer,

Abraham, and Molly

CONTENTS

Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition

Introduction

Part One

1. State of the Art: Worldly Amusements No More

2. The Smoke Goes Upwards: Faith and Culture

3. Terms of the Trade: Studying Popular Art and Culture

Part Two

4. Close Encounters of the High, Low, and Divine Kind: Reimagining the Popular Arts

5. Mapping Reality: Popular Art and Culture

6. Measuring Christian Distinction: Moral, Ideological, and Theological Approaches

7. Popular Art as Art: Marking the Aesthetic

Part Three

8. Cultural Landscape: Toward a Christian Framework

9. The American Melodramatic Way: Individualism, Religion, and Materialism

10. The Message in the Bottle: Love, Sex, and Gender Stereotypes

11. A History of Violence: Charting the Terrain

Conclusion

Appendix: A Matrix for Analysis

Relevant Readings

Notes

PREFACE TO THE REVISED

AND EXPANDED EDITION

One of the challenges in writing about popular art and culture is its constant movement: films are out of theaters and on DVD in a matter of months, television shows cancelled, and a CD can move up (and down) the Billboard charts with a bullet. For this second edition, I’ve updated a number of the illustrations but retained many others that have proven to have legs. My own personal tastes and preferences will become obvious. I like Bruce Springsteen’s music, for example, and use it to model the kind of analysis that a reader can do likewise with a favorite artist. Since my teaching and research interests are in film studies, I rely on movies for many illustrations. But it is also the case that popular films like Pretty Woman or Titanic (though not personal favorites) have an advantage as illustrations because so many people have seen them, unlike television programs and music that reach more specialized audiences based on age or genre. Also, examining the same artwork in different contexts can show that there are multiple ways of thinking about a film, television program, or music video.

Language is another issue. For convenience, I sometimes use Hollywood as a generic term to refer to the entertainment media, and not just the film industry. Since my original writing, the term Christian has acquired a measure of ambiguity. It has been used in reference to the music of Amy Grant, Jars of Clay, and U2; Christian romance, Anne Lamott books, and the Tim LaHaye/Jerry B. Jenkins Left Behind series; films like The Omega Code and those of Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese. As an adjective, Christian has taken on multiple meanings—both positive and pejorative—depending on the source and audience. In thinking about this I found talking about faith perspectives and a cultural orientation more useful and descriptive in most contexts. Even so, I still use the adjective Christian to refer to popular art and cultural orientations that resonate with basic beliefs and assumptions that people claiming the Christian faith adhere to.

Categories that mark social, religious, and cultural distinctions have also been politicized to a great extent. Analyses of a society marked by diversity and the existence of subcultures need to be able to distinguish dominant and subordinate cultures, for example. I read recently that some evangelical Christians with a for us or against us mentality have added mainstream media to a list of terms like liberal and secular humanist that they use to divide groups of people into hard and fast categories of good and evil. It is only realistic to draw observable distinctions where they exist between ideals, beliefs, and assumptions valued by members of a particular Christian subculture, for example, and those of the broader (mainstream) culture. And so I still make use of mainstream to refer to the entertainment industry or the dominant American culture. Marking these differences does not mean that I share the hostile attitudes of any particular group or even their polarized mind-set. I have also tried as much as possible to be specific in naming particular Christian groups like evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics.

For this second edition I recast the original material to situate it amidst contemporary events and trends and also for a more specific audience. I have added new chapters, reworked, expanded, and updated others keeping in mind those people who are using this study in educational settings, especially liberal arts courses in film, media, and popular culture. Supportive material and documentation has been included so that readers so inclined can follow up these sources as part of their own research and investigation. I refer to critics regularly not just to glean insights into particular artworks but also to show how we can benefit from critical reviews and to demonstrate different kinds of criticism.

Finally, I took this revision as an opportunity to advance an approach to popular art as art. This edition, like the first, is meant to be exploratory and suggestive. I write in that spirit. A reader does not necessarily have to accept my particular faith-informed cultural orientation in order to find something of value in the prospective model presented here. You will have to judge for yourself the viability of my critique of the popular artworks treated in these pages and the cultural perspective they represent. Our society benefits from having people of various faith persuasions participating honestly and intelligently in the cultural conversation. I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of people. Rodney Clapp, for his editorial support and friendship, and Rebecca Cooper, Bobbi Jo Heyboer, and the Brazos team for their good and diligent work on this project. My thanks to Robert Woods for his helpful suggestions toward this second edition, my neighbors (and co-workers) Rick and Michelle Zomer, and my colleagues at Calvin College and especially in the Communication Arts & Sciences department. The Calvin Media Foundation supported production of a three-part video/DVD series based on Eyes Wide Open for classroom use. Reworking the material for a different medium enhanced my own understanding of popular art. The Calvin College McGregor program provides opportunities for a faculty member and student to work together on a research project during the months of summer. Jennifer VanderHeide worked tirelessly with me on this revised edition. She did outstanding work, dazzling me with her reading, research, and editing skills. Jen, I can’t say thanks enough. Donna, Michael, and Tara—I love you.

INTRODUCTION

Individuals differ in their capacity to handle challenges to their faith, but each of us in our own way should endeavour to be both distinctive and culturally engaged.

John Coffey, Cambridge Papers

One of the favorites at the Museum of Modern Art’s 2003 film series, The Hidden God: Film and Faith, was Groundhog Day (1993). It tells the story of Phil Connors (Bill Murray), an obnoxious Pittsburgh weatherman who is trapped by a Pennsylvania blizzard while covering the annual appearance of Punxsutawney Phil, a groundhog whose sight of his shadow predicts more winter to come. The next morning Connors wakes to the clock radio and Sonny and Cher singing I Got You Babe. He discovers that it’s February 2nd again. This happens again the next day, and the next, until he learns his lesson, wins the heart of his producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell), and is released from the eternal cycle of repetition, as one reporter put it, adding, Of course, this being an American film, he not only attains spiritual release but also gets the producer into bed.1

People from different faith groups all laid claim to Groundhog Day as representing their teachings. One scholar said the film perfectly illustrates the Buddhist notion of samsara, the continuing cycle of rebirth that Buddhists regard as suffering that humans must try to escape. A rabbi saw the film as an allegory, finding Jewish resonance in the fact that Mr. Murray’s character is rewarded by being returned to earth to perform more mitzvahs—good deeds—rather than gaining a place in heaven, which is the Christian reward, or achieving nirvana, the Buddhist reward. A film critic for a Jewish publication read it differently. He said, The groundhog is clearly the resurrected Christ, the ever hopeful renewal of life at springtime, at a time of pagan-Christian holidays. And when I say that the groundhog is Jesus, I say that with great respect. A Catholic scholar argued it was "a stunning allegory of moral, intellectual, and even religious excellence in the face of postmodern decay, a sort of Christian-Aristotelian Pilgrim’s Progress for those lost in the contemporary cosmos. On the other hand, an evangelical in Punxsutawney (the film’s setting and shooting location) said her organization did not use the film as an educational tool: We stick pretty much to Scripture."2

This is a book about popular art and culture. As the Groundhog Day illustration suggests, it is more specifically a book about the interaction of faith, perspective, popular art, and culture. Time film critic Lance Morrow once likened the philosophical emanations of a movie to gases that may enter undetected and start to affect the brain. He recommended that we should each carry a canary into darkened movie theaters. If the canary starts to gasp and keel over, we should run for our lives.3 Morrow’s assertion of the importance of critical engagement contrasts with those who maintain, It’s only a movie. You can’t take it so seriously.

Before a church service one Sunday morning, I was having a conversation with two friends. Jonathan said he loved a movie he’d seen the night before. That script could only be written by someone coming out of a Calvinist background, he said. This surprised Nancy because she had also seen it with some of her friends, and they hated it. Jonathan responded quickly: Well, it’s not a happy movie. The conversation continued as they debated the merits of the film.

People participate in popular art and culture for many reasons. We all need different kinds of recreation. People like to be entertained and enjoy creativity and storytelling, a catchy chorus in a song, the humor in a TV sitcom, and so forth. Going to a movie with friends is a fun social activity. Curling up in a chair to watch a favorite television program or listening to music can be relaxing, a diversion from the cares and concerns of life. At the same time, these experiences can also serve as a celebration of common values and even life itself. They can enlarge our sense of the world and our place in it and increase our sympathies and understanding of other people and cultures.

While much popular art can be enjoyed with little intellectual effort, this does not mean that it must or should be enjoyed in this way or that the arts cannot be provocative and make people think. Moreover, developing good critical skills and practices need not diminish our enjoyment of popular art. Instead it promises to enhance the experience and make it more rewarding, especially as we become better at it.

Developing a critical approach helps us reach conclusions about the meaning and value of particular artworks. It can sharpen our judgments and increase our awareness and understanding of both art and life. The critic’s quest is to arrive at a place of wakefulness and clarity, as one scholar put it.4 The best criticism sends the reader back to the artwork with a new understanding or with fresh ways of looking at it. I suggest that much aesthetic delight can come from intentional involvement that is informed by one’s faith perspective.

However, rather than make faith the issue—turning popular art and criticism into religious propaganda—I propose instead to think of faith as providing the context for artistic engagement. This counters the widely held belief that subject matter is what makes a popular artwork Christian by putting the emphasis instead on artistic qualities and the perspective brought to bear on that subject. This approach affirms the essentially artistic character of popular art while recognizing the many roles and purposes it fulfills in serving our neighbor.

Movies, television, music, and videos provide a common experience for many people by addressing widespread concerns, fears, and prejudices and nurturing aspirations. They can give us a sense of belonging to a larger community and affirm important myths and heroic adventures. These forms of entertainment media can provide general knowledge, stimulate our thinking, and get us to look at things in new and different ways. They might explore challenging political, moral, economic, or religious issues by questioning gender relations or pointing a finger at sexism, racism, elitism, homophobia, and social or economic injustices. In short, the popular arts can comfort and affirm, challenge and provoke.

The realm of popular culture can be seen as an arena for argument or debate in which different ideas and perspectives find voice in stories, videos, songs, and pictures. Artists often mine tensions and conflicts for dramatic or comedic purposes and explore contradictions in what people believe and how they live. When Col. Nathan R. Jessep (Jack Nicholson) thunders, You can’t handle the truth! in A Few Good Men (1992), he points to the ambiguous reality that the need for a military contradicts the values of the civilization it must protect. And the general would rather not be questioned about the methods he uses to train soldiers to be able to kill.

Artists live in and find inspiration from the real world. They give us maps of reality—symbolic representations (i.e., re-presentions) of life in sounds, stories, and images—that suggest the meaning of things. Determining meaning is a matter of perspective and interpretation. There is a close relationship, then, between the arts and life perspectives: the latter shape the former as much as if not more than the other way around.

It is only to be expected that artists, scholars, and critics have employed various approaches centered on the contribution of faith to the popular art enterprise. This concern with a faith distinction, or a specifically Christian distinction, is worthwhile and valuable if only because perspectives can and do make a vital contribution to the artistic experience.

Faith-Informed Perspectives

The authors of The Transforming Vision wrote, Faith is an essential part of human life. Humans are confessing, believing and trusting creatures.5 That’s also how I see it. The relationship between faith and culture is creational, part of our humanness. To be God’s image bearer is to be human, and to be human is to be a cultural agent carrying on God’s creative work by fashioning ways of life that promote love, creativity, kindness, mercy, justice, truth, and stewardship.

Cultural activity is a creational given, but after the human fall in sin, culture is oriented away from God’s intentions for it. Some Christians take this to mean that God requires minimal cultural engagement. I disagree. I believe Christians should be studying, discerning positive and negative aspects, and working to redeem culture.

I approach the popular arts, then, as part of the historical cultivation of God’s creation carried on from generation to generation. The popular arts are not outside God’s judgment—or beyond God’s redemption. The challenge is to discover what it means for us to be faithful to God and responsible to our neighbor through these media.

The Christian tradition is diverse, and there is no single Christian view on any subject. Actually, there are probably as many different Christian perspectives on the media as there are critics who label their work as such. They might not all agree on what Christian means for media criticism, but they nevertheless conduct their work based on pre-existing beliefs drawn from a certain understanding of scripture. By my way of seeing it—to speak only of the Christian tradition—whether a critic writes for The Christian Century (mainline Protestant), Christianity Today (mainline evangelical), Commonweal (Catholic), or Focus on the Family’s Plugge-dIn (conservative evangelical), their work qualifies as faith-informed, a phrase historian George Marsden suggested to refer to belief systems built around organized religious faith.6

My own faith-informed perspective affirms commitments to a certain Christian set of beliefs and also represents particular assumptions about the relationship between faith and culture. I make no apology for working out of a particular tradition. It is not as though in our postmodern culture an individual or community cannot stand on some perspectival ground for thought and action. From these beliefs and assumptions comes a certain attitude, one that recognizes and values diverse perspectives while also maintaining the importance of one’s own in thinking critically about popular art and culture.

The relationship between religious groups and the entertainment media has over time been characterized by a variety of attitudes coalescing around concerns with the communicative power of these popular art forms and their ability to influence. A range of approaches exist; the one presented here finds its way among extremes. On one side are those reactionary Christians who might regard popular art as hostile to people of faith or even an apostate cultural form; on the other are those who simply shrug it off as mere amusement. Somewhere in between are those who judge an artwork solely on its accord with their own moral or ideological position and others who think it necessary to resist making any judgment at all in order to respect an artist’s vision and take an artwork on its own terms. While TV programs might represent beliefs and values that are not consistent with my own, I do not see that as reason for complete dismissal of them, just a fair and thoughtful critical appraisal. And movies can be fun, delightful, and entertaining, but they can also communicate perspectives that I think deserve our careful consideration. Admittedly, it can be a difficult course to navigate at times, trying to avoid the imposition of a particular perspective while also thinking of the popular arts as exploratory. That can be a challenge, but it can also make watching movies and TV and listening to music more enjoyable and enriching. Ultimately, I hope my own analysis plays itself out along the borders between conviction and humility.

Popular artworks look at life in a fallen world that is at once hostile to and also in search of God. People of whatever faith persuasion have the capacity for truthfulness and sinful conduct and can offer artistic insight into life in God’s good but fallen world. We can appreciate and evaluate these efforts by asking what kind of perspective this artwork offers on the matters of life it addresses. Viewers can try to come to terms with an artist’s position by weighing the viability of her message, trying her perspective on for size, so to speak, even as they might render judgments about whether they find it true or false. This attitude not only respects the artist’s right to express ideas but also calls for people to take those ideas as seriously as they would like others to consider theirs. Christians who would dismiss a film or television program because it does not affirm their viewpoint on a given issue still want those with opposing viewpoints to take seriously Christian perspectives in the media. Why do they expect others to be fair and open, but think they do not have to tolerate what they perceive as non-Christian beliefs in popular art?

It is often in the sphere of entertainment, as Margaret Miles observed, that values are formulated, circulated, resisted, and negotiated.7 We live in a media-saturated society where popular artworks enter into our cultural discourse regularly. I argue that we need to act as people of faith discerning perspectives in these representations of life in God’s world.

Popular Art Is Art

The critical approach presented here is concerned with faithful cultural engagement. What distinguishes this approach is its locus, animated as it is by a certain understanding of how the popular arts serve as art.

Art needs no justification, the late art historian Hans Rookmaaker once wrote. Its justification is its being a God-given possibility.8 In other words, creating positive works of culture is a legitimate and worthy endeavor in and of itself. While the arts serve many purposes and are understood in terms of those purposes, they should not be identified simply by their usefulness. Art is not a means to an end, it is not a function of something else, philosopher Calvin Seerveld maintained. "Art stands or falls on its own artistic contribution in God’s world."9 A critical approach to popular art has to focus on popular artworks as popular art. Otherwise, it is not popular art criticism.

Recognizing its communicative power, I think of popular art as art that embodies meaning for people and contributes to one’s cultural orientation. We can understand television, movies, music, and videos as popular art forms that function in society, communicating and criticizing cultural values, providing social unity, and contributing to our collective memory. But we cannot forget that popular artworks are the products of a profit-driven commercial enterprise, made in a crucible of entangled concerns. Since popular art is multidimensional, it is profitable for us to think about it not exclusively in terms of inherent aesthetic properties, but as a complex phenomenon including aesthetic, moral, social, political, industrial, technological, and other dimensions. Young people especially can benefit from learning to think critically as well about the cult of hyperbole, sensation, consumption, and mass identification that the media propagates.

I have met many people who have told me that they don’t really know how to discuss a movie or television show very deeply or talk about the latest CD. They think their faith should matter when it comes to popular art, but in the absence of a workable critical approach, they simply defer to vague personal tastes and preferences. People like or dislike particular movies, concerts, or TV shows, but are not always sure why. As we would expect, there are people who are uncertain about what they are experiencing and what effect it might be having.

There is no doubt the popular arts have some kind of effect. But what is the nature of that effect? The persuasive power of the popular arts comes from their roles and capacities as art. As representations of life, popular art can influence behavior, shape attitudes and opinions, and inform perspectives.

One of the most frequently debated questions is whether the entertainment media reflects or shapes society. To argue that it reflects society is to oversimplify what is really a complex process. Popular artworks are a reflection of society insofar as they address contemporary issues and treat them in ways consistent with current perspectives. But the popular arts are never merely a reflection. By portraying our lives and culture, the popular arts popularize and glamorize ideals, values, attitudes, and beliefs that exist. In this way, the popular arts contribute to the power of culture to shape lives. The popular arts reflect a culture they help to create.

In that regard, and to some extent as a requirement for popularity, the entertainment media is more likely to affirm people’s beliefs than to introduce new ones. People want to be entertained while also being affirmed in what they already believe—witness the different audiences in 2004 for The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11, for example.

Studies also show that whatever impact the popular media has is not universal but particular to individuals and, in some sense, communities, and is mediated by a host of variables. We might have very different reactions to popular artworks based on age, personal temperament, viewing skills, gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, family and neighborhood, education, community standards, political perspective, or social and economic status. And it is the cumulative effect of viewing the world portrayed in these media that has the power to persuade—over time and with the influence of many films, TV shows, and CDs.10 And so all people of goodwill ought to be concerned with the cumulative impact of a steady diet of American movies that often exalt self-interest as the supreme human value, glorify violent resolutions to problems, make finding the perfect mate one’s primary vocation and highest destiny, and offer material prosperity as the most reliable source of meaning and satisfaction in this life. Such a value system arguably runs against the grain of most religious traditions.

It is important, then, to be able to understand and think critically about the dominant themes in popular art. More often than not, Christian appraisals are variously entangled in the dominant American mythology. We need instead an engaged, critical, and productive involvement with the popular arts grounded in a faith vision that encompasses all of life and culture.

People understandably like those artworks that affirm their view of life. But a good faith-informed criticism should not simply be a matter of applauding artworks that advocate a certain moral or ideological position (on abortion or capital punishment, for example) or contain recognizable theological themes (tales of redemption). Would it not be of greater value to direct our energies toward developing an approach that considers the significance and quality of artistic endeavors, and the extent to which various artworks deepen our understanding of God’s world? Such an approach will not simply forewarn people of potentially offensive material or ideas they may not agree with. Instead it will help us distinguish redemptive aspects, determine appropriate participation, and develop tools for constructive criticism. This in turn will illuminate art, ideas, and visions of life in ways that can be a significant blessing to us all.

Considering a Cultural Landscape

The focus in this study is on the intersection of popular art and faith perspective. As Andrew Greeley observed, the correlation of religion with creativity is largely because both are metaphor-making, meaning-bestowing processes.11 In other words, imagining is part of the way we construct meaning; we imagine the way the world is and ought to be. One theologian talked about imagination as the general sense of the way people give shape to their world, in particular through the images and practices that express this shape.12

Scholars have been preoccupied with the relationship between faith and imagination for a long time. Such is our nature, that we cannot think of things invisible, without a degree of imagination, Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards wrote. I dare appeal to any man, of the greatest powers of mind, whether he is able to fix his thoughts on God, or Christ, or the things of another world, without imaginary ideas attending his meditations?13 Imagination is necessary to faith and cultural activity. The capacity of popular art to create imaginative worlds has been a source of controversy in the church for generations