The Taliban, Hollywood, and The Ten Commandments

Middle America recognizes agenda driven art. Though hillbilly incest has put our eyes on the sides of our heads, and the gap in our teeth makes us unintelligible, we somehow manage to see the subtle advocating of causes in movies and television programming. We drag our knuckles across the shag carpeting in our living rooms, ignore the broken console television on the floor and reach for the 19 inch Magnavox sitting on top, adjust the rabbit ears, maybe add some hangers or foil, and hope we can find a program where we don’t need to see a guys fat naked back side as he slogs out of the shower and back into bed with his mistress.

For the past three decades the box office has become more and more “progressive”. Edgy fare makes the writers feel like they are still in the campus coffee shop smoking a clove cigarette and accusing Baptists of being worse than the Taliban. Meanwhile John Q. Public stopped taking his family to see racy films and chose to visit the cinema on the occasion of the twice per year Disney film.

After a statistically significant amount of time it became obvious that more family friendly entertainment outperformed the sex and gore stuff by leaps and bounds. The figures don’t lie. Folks started to talk about it. I thought Hollywood was just in denial. Then came The Passion of The Christ. It was going to fail. It was going to fracture the country. It would traumatize citizens young and old and there would be a secular backlash unprecedented in strength and duration. Hundreds of millions of dollars later, and no sign of a backlash, most consider that argument settled. Yet Hollywood persists.

Weekly, studios report what films reap at the box office. That gives the false impression that these are businesses with a profit motive. Brokeback Mountain makes a few million dollars and is revered in those clove cigarette-clouded venues. Praise for the art is showered and academy award nominations abound. But it really didn’t make a lot of money. These cannot be real businesses. The people making movies are the ones complaining about Exxon’s profits while seeing to it their own companies don’t have that same problem.

Then April 2006 rolled around and I thought someone somewhere caught a snap. ABC actually produced a remake of “The Ten Commandments”. Prime time family friendly programming, with an epic Bible story to boot; I gathered the kids and popcorn and sat back to enjoy. I’m no movie critic by profession (I stayed at the Holiday Inn Express though), but within 15 minutes I realized something was amiss. It was like the junior TV folks got a little play time, a third string effort. Maybe someday it will look good on their resumes but it was awful on TV. The story was disjointed, the acting horrible, and an opportunity was lost. Imagine what could have been accomplished with this story.

With Hollywood executives struggling to find new and unusual stories to tell, they over look the dusty leather bound book in their parent’s living room. The Bible is packed with one epic after another. The stories have plenty of sex, adultery, crime, evil, and enough violence to satisfy the gore lust in anyone. But there is a fear in Hollywood that people may go and see those movies. They may even have a positive impact on culture, and that would be bad. Why else, with today’s special effects, would you leave David and Goliath, Noah’s Ark, Jericho, and countless other exciting stories untold on the big screen?

Television and Hollywood largely dictate our cultural moral compass. Many choose to not avail themselves to the entertainment available in the main stream. But the unspoken frustration is that when television or a movie studio takes up a religious project, it is done with second or third-rate actors, a very low budget, a lame dialog, and if Biblically based, enough editing to make the Biblical origin unrecognizable. We like good stuff too guys. Family friendly does not need to equal low quality.

I propose that 25 extremely well made movies, some religious and others simply positive message family films, made with the highest quality production and actors Hollywood can muster, could literally shift our culture. Over a two-year period, a constant trickle of these kinds of movies and messages would set people thinking. Some would even experience a change of heart, regardless if they became religious converts or not. Hollywood would cringe at the thought of this potential metamorphosis in mores.

At the same time they tell us their movies are simply art, a form of escape, just entertainment. Hollywood rejects the notion that their products affect people. But every single indicator of a wholesome society continues to fall, and movies get more and more base. Movies and culture reflect one another but it is not a chicken and egg dilemma.

They cannot have it both ways. Either movies impact culture or they don’t. But they are accustomed to having things two ways. They are afraid to encourage those Baptists. Their ranks may grow. That may lead to a form of American Taliban, and Yale only has a limited number of openings.