Reviews

The following two movie reviews are presented partly as a change of pace from HeRB's usual book and article reviews. They also affirm the fact that theology and culture are inexorably intertwined by showing how two "secular" Western movies contribute to Christian theological reflection as they call upon Christian categories to tell their tales. I have used two websites for background information and reviews of both of these movies; they are: the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) and Rottentomattoes.Com (www.rottentomatoes.com).

In one sense these two movies have little to do with the Thai church, but at the same time they do raise at least two questions that may be relevant to the church here. First, what is effective evangelism? I have no idea what motivated the producers of each of these films, but one can view them and other movies like them collectively as an effective medium for Christian evangelism—so long as we do not expect evangelism to demand formal conversion from one religious institutional and ideological system to another. They convey basic Christian insights without the trappings of the institution, which trappings "turn off" so many people today. Many thousands of people, most of them not Christians, for example, went to see "Bruce Almighty" here in Thailand. In the course of watching the film, they received covert instruction in (Western) Christian thinking. No one asked them to sign a card, kneel in prayer, or join a cell group, and the message was not tied to the institutional agendas of paid or volunteer Christian evangelists. Is this evangelism? Is it effective? Did seeing the movie allow people here to "make sense" of Christian theological categories in a way that will help them live better lives? Was "Bruce Almighty" an effective medium for quietly subverting acquisitive secular values of self-aggrandizement? Did it help people of other faiths see the Christian God in a new, more positive and comprehensible light?

A second question raised by these movies is that of the role of the church. In "Bruce Almighty," again, God is very much present in the film while in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy Christ is more subtly present. The church is entirely missing in both of them. Does this mean that 21st century Christianity can do without the church and can communicate its message through entirely non-ecclesiastical agencies? If so,

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Movie Review One: "Bruce Almighty" (2003, directed by Tom Shadyac)

"Bruce Almighty" is an apparently light-hearted movie starring Jim Carey as Bruce, Jennifer Aniston as Bruce's girl friend, and Morgan Freeman as God. Bruce is a self-involved down-on-his-luck TV reporter for whom nothing goes right. He blames God. And God calls him to account in a bemusing fashion. God gives Bruce divine powers and tells him he is in charge of things, the idea being that if Bruce doesn't like the way God does the Lord of Heavens & Earth shtick, Bruce can just do the job himself. God is going on a vacation.. Bruce, in the course of things, goes overboard, using his divine powers to amuse himself, get back at a rival reporter at his TV station, and turn himself into a renowned reporter in his own right. He deals with prayers, of which he has to answer millions and millions, by computerizing them and, eventually, just answering "yes" to all of them—to save himself time. God told Bruce that one of the things he could not do was "mess with free-will," and it is on this score that our self-important god-for-a-day finally takes a tumble. For all of his divine powers, he can't win the heart of his live-in girl friend. He is Bruce Almighty, but she still leaves him because he is interested finally only in himself. Her heart is broken. He dies, having decided to fall on his knees in prayer on a busy highway. In the end, of course, Bruce learns humility and love, gets his life back, gets his girl, and lives happily ever after without recourse to divine power.

Sounds dumb. Personally, I'd rate the movie as a comedy at only about 6.0 or 6.5 at best on a scale of 1 to 10. Not all that funny actually. (As the reviews and ratings show: Rottentomatoes.Com counted 154 reviews of "Bruce Almighty," the majority of which gave it a negative review. Rottentomatoes.com itself gives the movie a 5.9 rating on a scale of 10; the IMDb "user rating" gave it an only slightly better rating of 6.4).

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As theology, however, "Bruce Almighty" scores much higher, something above an 8.0 on that same scale of 10. The film teaches a number of key theological points including: first, the source of much of our unhappiness is self-absorption, a fixation with our own wants, needs, and goals. This blind self-absorption affects our relationship with God; it causes us to blame God for the things that go wrong in life. Second, power is not the path to salvation. Self-absorption corrupts even divine power. The more Bruce uses his divine powers the more he messes up the world, causing natural disasters and fostering urban rioting. Bruce, the divine reporter, "just happens" thus to be on the scene when a huge meteor strikes the Earth—an event he himself caused—and files an exclusive report that greatly enhances his career. That same meteor (inexplicably) disrupts electrical power, thus causing chaos. Having divine power, in any event, does not bring Bruce happiness or salvation. Third, Bruce Almighty finds out that if he answers all human prayers positively he causes even more chaos because people pray for selfish things, silly things, and things that shouldn't be. If everybody's prayers are answered, the world will fall apart. Fourth, God doesn't "mess with free will," and that's a good thing. Bruce tries to force his girl friend to love him, which only causes her to feel more alienated from him. Throughout the movie, God reappears from time to time to offer Bruce advice, sympathy, and wisdom. In the end, finally, Bruce only wins his girl, achieves professional excellence as a reporter, and becomes reconciled with God after he loses his divine powers and, more importantly, his selfish orientation to life.

The movie is better theology than it is comedy, and the fact that it is better theology may be why it doesn't work all that well as comedy. The fascinating things about "Bruce Almighty" is the manner in which it packages patently Christian theological reflection in the medium of a popular, "secular" movie culture. While not one of the great hits of all or any time, still millions of people around the world have viewed this theological film, which teaches that the way to happiness and fulfillment is by reorienting one's life away from self, towards others, and in harmony with God. God, as played by Morgan Freeman, is a wise, insightful, engaging, and quietly humble Individual who visibly (and visually!) embodies divine patience with and suffering over the limitations of humanity. God is the very antithesis of Bruce, and Bruce only gains a meaningful life as he learns selfless, divine wisdom.

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Movie Review Two: "The Lord of the Rings" (2001, 2002, 2003, directed by Peter Jackson)

In September 1970, I had just moved to Washington, D.C. to look for a job that would constitute a year long "secular internship" at Princeton Seminary. I pounded the pavement in "our nation's capital" fairly seriously looking for that job, and it so happened one afternoon I walked by a book store that had a display of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings in the shop window. I didn't have a television and had been counting my pennies very carefully but decided that I could afford cheap copies of all three volumes. In the 34 years since that brisk, darkening September afternoon in D. C., I have read and re-read Tolkien's trilogy along with his stand-alone prequel, The Hobbit and never tire of the bitter-sweet story of Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, and Tolkien's cast of thousands. That makes me, I suppose, an addict, although I do not eat, sleep, and dream hobbits and orcs as, evidently, do some of the truly hardcore smitten do. The strange thing is that, other than Tolkien's stories about hobbits, I've never met a fantasy story that I like. My pleasure reading is divided between science fiction and history, which for me represent two sides of the same coin—historians make educated, not rarely well-researched guesses at what the past was like and scifi authors tell educated, sometimes elaborately researched stories at what the future might be like.

Lord of the Rings, the trilogy, has the marks of both good scifi and good history. It is very well written. It creates a world that is textured, complex, and entirely believable once the reader accepts the premise that such a world could exist or, at least, "makes sense" in and of itself. Tolkien obviously did his research.

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The movie trilogy, sadly but inevitably, simply does not compare to the books. That is not to say that the three movies are "bad" theater; they certainly are not. The cinematic trilogy, however, all but entirely fails to capture the very human side of Tolkien's saga, which focuses on relationships and adventures rather than on war and battles. The massive battle scenes that dominate especially "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King" do not dominate the trilogy although they are obviously an important part of it. The movies also entirely omit some of the best scenes and characters in the books. One profoundly misses Tom Bombadil in the beginning of the story, a happy go-lucky figure who stands outside of time and for whom the Ring has no meaning or terror. At the end of the trilogy, one misses even more the "scouring of the Shire" and the last battle of the epic, which was a small one fought only with knives and pitchforks in the Shire itself. There is, however, no sense beating up on the movie for not being as good as the book. The producers produced a set of movies that would sell and still capture something of the spirit of the books, if only in part and superficially.

The movies have captured something of the "essence" of Tolkien in several ways. In spite of all of the big screen battles, the three films taken together are about Gollum and Sam more than anyone else. In a book full of heroes, these two figures in very different ways are the two greatest heroes. In the books and the movies, Frodo failed to complete his mission. Gollum had to complete it for him. In the books and the movies, Frodo would never have even reached Mt. Doom without Sam, a gardener by trade who had none of the markings of greatness until forced to cope with and conquer a series of impossibly dangerous challenges. Both the books and the movies are about heroism, and both carry the message that the true heroes are "little" people who simply muddle through what needs muddling through. More largely, the movies do retain the central threads of Tolkien's trilogy, sometimes majestically, and the ending in "The Return of the King" is as powerfully bittersweet as it is in the final chapters of the books.

The movie trilogy, moreover, is as much a work of covert Christian theology as are the books. They portray evil as a dangerous, powerful reality, which entices

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Building on this vision of the power of evil, the movies portray reality as an unending struggle between good and evil, and even where good does prevail it is only with a price. While there is no Christ-figure as such, the Christian theological motif of the suffering servant is prevalent; it obviously dominates the journey into darkness of Frodo and Sam, but all of the other key "good guys and gals" also suffer as they seek to do good. And like Christian theology, Tolkien affirms the power of good over evil, affirms the reality and power of hope in the face of despair. Sacrifice has meaning, even the ultimate and redeeming sacrifices of Boromir and of King Théoden of Rohan, who both transcended their own dark experiences of temptation, evil, and despair. Frodo, however, provides the clearest example of the theme of sacrifice at the very end of the "Return of the King" when it becomes clear that he (along with Sam and Gollum) saved Middle Earth by destroying the Ring, but he did not share in that salvation. He did not physically die, but he truly did give his life for the sake of others in a clear, if covert recalling of Christ's own ultimate sacrifice. The books and movies, finally, also embody a clear Christian understanding of greatness and salvation, namely that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Greatness is not a matter of power and salvation is not won, finally, by the "usual" military and political means. The path of true salvation is away from the direction that the world usually considers the "right path" to greatness.

Christian themes are less overt in the Tolkien trilogy, but they are no less powerful; and where Carey's Bruce Almighty was an almighty flop, "Lord of the

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It seems to me that we really do not know very much about how theological reflection outside of academic settings (or even in the, for that matter) actually takes place. The church, in particular, I suspect has shied away from what is becoming the commonplace understanding of human cognition generally, that is that the way we think is "socially constructed." A nifty little epigram of the late twentieth century refers to the "social construction of reality." We should also refer to the "social construction of theology," which means that what we early twenty-first century Christians believe about God is not "essentially" biblical but rather "essentially" social. "Bruce Almighty" and the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy embody that truth in celluloid, communicating each in their own way a social, general, unecclesiastical Western understanding of certain religious truths. Theological reflection, to state the matter somewhat differently, is (in important part) a shared, public act that suffuses the way people think about ultimate realities. Unless one stops using her mother tongue, stops all contact with the media, and cuts himself off from all but the most superficial social contact, no person can escape the influence of shared, public theology on their thinking.

It is possible to reject public theology as being superficial and merely the reflection of "culture religion," meaning that it corrupts or, at best, fails to capture the "true" meaning of "real" theology. Karl Barth and Paul Tillich wrote "real" theology; or, to put matters in an Asian context, C. S. Song and Kosake Koyama are "real" theologians. Yet, Koyama, at least got his start in Asian theology because of his encounter with northern Thai village theology, which he at times calls "kitchen theology." Barth, Tillich, and any other "real" theologian one cares to name, when studied in their own time and place also prove to have built their theologies out of the linguistic, philosophical, ideological, and other cultural tools provided for them by public discourse and social reflection. We need, I think, to pay more attention to the powerful place public theology has in our societies and to understand that it has its

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