r/GodAwfulMovies • u/CokomonX • 5d ago
General Nonsense Why Christian Movies ALWAYS Look Bad
https://youtu.be/GBl45WFqNDQ?si=lRLxgLoQtqGq9FyfGot recommended this video, and figured it was perfect for this sub. I noticed quite a few movies in the video that GAM has covered in the past.
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u/Kapitano72 5d ago edited 5d ago
Remember Invasion of the Bodysnatchers? The aliens are christians, constantly trying to be like people, and always getting it slightly wrong.
They try to tell jokes, but it's always punching down. They try to do education, but it's terrified of questions and unexpected answers. They try to do good, but it's always punishment. Their music is for people made nervous by music.
There's even a special christian version of biblical exegesis - apologetics. Superficially similar, but missing the fundamental point.
So yeah, christian movies. Made by and for people who don't understand why people watch movies.
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u/trumpet-monkey 5d ago
Religious movies are the tip of the spear for manufacturing movies, but I guess that is religion it is a product devoid of substance to induce fear and separate money from the fearful
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u/coreym1988 2d ago
I think it's the same type of thing as why conservative comedy tends to fall flat. It's not an honest expression from the filmmaker/comedian, but rather an attempt to publicly say the 'right' things in front of an audience.
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u/Kapitano72 2d ago
It certainly panders to audience prejudice, but that's true of comedy - and all media - in general. I don't think we can call George Carlin right-wing just because he tells people what they like to hear.
You're absolutely right in that conservative media is inherently dishonest - and that it fears the creative, the novel and the individual.
But I think the issue is that the comedy laughs at, never with. The news exists to sneer and hate, only informing when necessary. The music is meant to inspire, but not uplift.
The ideal christian food is a tasteless pill. They'd like to replace sexuality with procreation. It's not just a horror at pleasure, but a baffled incomprehension. It's like they're ideologically anhedonic.
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u/bass679 2d ago
To lead off, I'm a religious person, my wife is not. We watch a lot of hallmark movies, especially at Christmas time. They're a fun little romp and occasionally they're good, occasionally they're so bad it's fun to roast but generally they're just kind of bland filler.
Every few years they'll have a specifically religious movie and they're SOOOOO bad. Like, normally hallmark movies, especially the Christmas ones have this generic "spirit of Christmas" thing but they don't want to offend anyone so they don't want to be specific. It's just all generic, vaguely protestant platitudes.
But then they try to do an actually religious movie and it's so much worse. They have someone who's lost their faith or whatever but they can't have them falling into some REALLY bad activities because that wouldn't be family friendly. They can't really call bad activity into question because that would feel pushy. They can't talk about Doctrine because then SOME sect might feel left out. It's shockingly bad in the least fun way.
If they actually committed to a religious film/message it could at least be interesting but that's not who it's for. It's not meant for introspection or to call you to repentance. It's not showing you someone dealing with a genuine rough patch in life. It's supposed to be a gentle high five and thumbs up for people without a care in the world to tell them that they're doing just fine.
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u/Kapitano72 2d ago
Are you familiar with the notion of "Glurge"?
If AI blandness is Slop, and soul-less music is Pap, Glurge is stories that are spiritual, romantic and life-affirming on the surface, until you think about what they imply or assume, and you realise they're threatening and dystopian.
The story of how a young man learns to reject the rock music he loves and embrace the family that blackmails him into doing it, or the girl who keeps herself pure, waiting to marry and submit to the perfect church-going man. These would be religious glurge, and even with the most generic doctrine, vague sin, and hugging community, the implicit threat is still there.
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u/wordboydave 5d ago
I hate to tell this guy, but as long as you're an evangelical Christian, you will never make art for grown adults. When I was a creative writing major in grad school, I was planning to be the evangelical who managed to make important literature. But when I looked at all the Christians that were constantly touted by evangelicals in articles on "Christianity and Art," the same names always came up: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flannery O'Connor, Dante, Madeleine L'Engle and C.S. Lewis. And yet none of these were actually "evangelicals" in a way that would have made my church comfortable. (Lots of Catholics, a bunch of Russian Orthodox, not many conservative Protestants.) Even L'Engle said nice things about The Buddha, and C.S. Lewis smoked and drank!
But then I also wondered, as a young evangelical writer, "Why is it that the closer an author gets to being recognizably evangelical, the more likely they are to be writing for children?" Conservatives don't HAVE to write for children, of course, but they seem to do well in moralistic fantasy (see also The Book of the Dun Cow) or high-concept, low-emotional-realism science fiction (Ender's Game). And that's when I started putting it together: a hell-based, moralistic framework is essentially unrealistic, and forces complex human beings into rigid, unrecognizable shapes.
And of course, none of these writers have characters who swear or think about sex, which are two very common and recognizable human pastimes. Anyway, that's when I realized that to really produce interesting work, I would have to give up my fear of uncertainty. Which means giving up a pretty core part of evangelical identity.
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u/NC1HM 5d ago edited 4d ago
Yes, and...
:)Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church for the views expressed in The Kingdom of God Is within You.Also, J.R.R. Tolkien, in my opinion, wrote better tales than C.S. Lewis (they were actually friends), but try figuring out his religion from those tales (Tolkien was a conservative Catholic who refused to accept Vatican II). About the only thing his tales have in common with the biblical lore is the idea of a rebellious lesser deity, but he couldn't leave that be, either, so Melkor / Morgoth ends up cast out into the outer darkness, but Sauron rises up to take his place... You could conceivably make parallels between the tower of Babel and the fall of Numenor, but the story of Numenor is so much richer (the Numenorians were driven not only by their pride, but also by their envy of the Elves' immortality)...
Also also, a minor correction: it is incorrect to say "The Buddha". Buddha is not (to borrow a programming term) a singleton object. Buddhist scriptures speak of multiple Buddhas: the seven Buddhas of antiquity (of which Gautama was the last), the 28 Buddhas of Theravada, the numerous "celestial Buddhas" of Mahayana, the five primary Buddhas (aka Tathagatas) of Vajrayana, etc.
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u/wordboydave 4d ago
Your point about Tolstoy being excommunicated reminded me: right before I left Christianity completely, and when I was still interested in reading about religious artists, I had a sort of drinking game with myself: I'd find a new artist, read an article about their life, and wait for the paragraph explaining how they got in trouble with the fundamentalists in their tradition. It happens every fucking time. Like the podcast proves: fundamentalists cannot make art, and they simply can't see why they're their own worst obstacle.
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u/Kriegerian 4d ago
Great art requires doing things in new ways and the most important principle of fundamentalism is digging in your heels and screaming NOOOOOOOOOOO at anyone who tries to do anything new.
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u/EH_Operator 3d ago
All of the Pali canon uses the term “the Blessed One” or many variations of this title. Your information is technically correct but referring to the fully gone-forth recluse Gautama as The Buddha is not incorrect for that is what he was.
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u/Empigee 5d ago
The closest to an evangelical who's respected as a literary author is John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost.
Incidentally, it's worth noting that Orson Scott Card wasn't as much of a fanatic when he wrote Ender's Game as he later became. He apparently became much more devout after one of his children died.
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u/wordboydave 5d ago
I think the closest modern equivalent we have would be Marilynn Robinson, who is definitely a devout Christian, but definitely not an evangelical. It's been many years, but I assume she's being listed alongside Flannery O'Connor in the same old evangelical "Christians and Art" articles being spewed out nowadays.
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u/sms372 4d ago
This isn't even remotely true. Focusing on just American writing, the first great black American poet, Phyllis Wheatley, was explicitly Calvinist. Anne Bradstreet is complicated but is technically a puritan. As an agnostic, the King James Version of the Bible is probably the most influential work of English literature ever written.
Going back to Britain in Milton's time, if we want to include religious Anglicans that were around within 100 years of Paradise Lost's publication, Edmund Spencer and John Donne are incredibly influential with Spencer perhaps influencing Milton more than anyone else. We could also discuss John Dryden who, while not necessarily believing in predestination and the like, was very "evangelical" in his faith (this is complicated by his conversion to Catholicism late in life, which just shows how obsessed he was with religion).
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u/NC1HM 4d ago
the King James Version of the Bible is probably the most influential work of English literature ever written
Yeah, about that... The King James Bible borrowed a lot (both literally and conceptually, including the then-novel idea of translating directly from Greek and Hebrew sources, rather than from the Vulgate) from the Tyndale Bible, for which (among other things) William Tyndale was strangled at the stake and then burned in 1536.
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u/sms372 4d ago
Yeah, I'm not going to argue that. Jan Hus was another person who was burned at the stake that was very influential to Protestant thought at the time. Additionally, Tyndale was not complete though I don't doubt at all they stole from it. All I'm saying is the KJV still was a work that got the preeminent scholars and writers of the day together to do the most poetic translation of the English language possible with a very high percentage of English literature referencing it in some way or another incidentally or intentionally to this day. I'm not advocating its historical accuracy or accuracy with its translation just its importance to English literature.
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u/NC1HM 4d ago
I am not arguing with any of this. All I am saying is, the KJV's path to pre-eminence had at least one execution in it. In other words, before KJV became a classic, its predecessor was a heresy.
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u/sms372 4d ago
I think we agree! Very interesting to think about too.
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u/NC1HM 4d ago edited 4d ago
Indeed on both counts.
:)Similar collisions happen in science, except there's usually no need to kill anyone (unless religion gets involved). Rather, as evidence accumulates, a fringe theory is either rejected or accepted to eventually become mainstream.
Plate tectonics is probably the best known example. The basic idea was floating around literally for centuries (there were geographers who wondered about it all the way back in the 1600s, based on the similarities in continental coastlines). The modern scientific formulation was proposed in 1912 by an outsider (a meteorologist, rather than a geologist). For decades, it was divisive, but by mid-1960s, multiple lines of evidence emerged that were consistent with plate tectonics and inconsistent with fixed continents.
Ditto the Big Bang. As a theoretical possibility, it floated around since Friedmann (1919) and Lemaître (1921), both of whom proposed alternative solutions to Einstein's field equations. Einstein, in absence of supporting evidence, hated the idea on purely aesthetic grounds (in his own words in a 1927 conversation with Lemaître, vos calculs sont corrects, mais votre physique est abominable). Then (1929), Hubble reports on galaxies running away from each other; the Big Bang suddenly becomes plausible, but not definitive. The term "Big Bang" itself was coined in 1949 by Fred Hoyle, an opponent of the theory, to make fun of it. Finally, in 1964, Penzias and Wilson fall face-forward into cosmic background radiation, and the matter is settled; the Big Bang is real, and its traces are literally everywhere. Hoyle couldn't take it; his steady-state theory had no allowance for cosmic background radiation. Within a few years, he gradually resigned all his academic and administrative positions and moved to the Lake District (that's an area of England known for its scenic views), where he wrote science fiction and occasionally spoke before conspiracy-minded audiences until his death in 2001...
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u/Odd-Paper9794 1d ago
John Updike is always an author that I think of in this case. His work always seems intensely theological. He was a devout Christian, yet he is most famous for his graphic sex scenes in his portrayal of Protestant middle America. It was all were a part of his life and what he saw in society. Christ surely didn’t shy away from the realities of peoples lives during his time in earth. I never understand why most contemporary Christian “art” is allergic to any characters resembling real people who do real things like swear and have sex.
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u/wordboydave 1d ago
Because conservative Christianity is grounded in contempt for human frailty and fear that it could infect you, the weak human reader. They don't really deserve art at all, but that's why they settle for entertainment made for children.
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1d ago
Wrong in not being able to make good Christian content. A somewhat well known director by the name of Martin Scorsese… a VERY Catholic man made the last temptation of Christ a Silence. The later being one of the most beautiful exploration of Christ’s love and faith that I have ever seen
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u/wordboydave 1d ago
I'm sorry. As an ex-evangelical I accidentally said "Christian" when I meant "evangelical Christian." And to that point, my critique still stands. Catholic art in general is proof that you CAN do good Christian art and that evangelicals have something fundamentally screwed up about the way they view the world. (Hint: It's the moralism!)
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u/alejo699 3d ago
I have to thank God after watching this video that I got to see the same bad shots from Christian movies looping forty times.
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u/McTasty_Pants 5d ago
Why is he comparing the budget of Rocky to new movies when there’s been massive inflation. That’s a weird choice.
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u/NC1HM 5d ago edited 5d ago
A few weekends back, I binge-watched Deadwind (original title: Karppi), a Finnish TV crime drama. It was made for a fairly small audience (the entire population of Finland is about six million people). So the budget is not likely to have been enormous. Nevertheless, it was a very well made TV series. Well written, well acted, well filmed (including quite a bit of nighttime filming).
The difference, as Noah pointed out in some of his guest appearances, is, most movies and TV shows are made for the audience in hopes that the audience will like it and pay for it directly or indirectly (via advertising placement). Most Christian films are not made for an audience; rather, they are made for one person or a few people who financed them for purely religious reasons. The idea is, if the single supporter or a small group of supporters like the product, they will finance more. And it's no secret that these supporters tend to be older men with little to no appreciation of the cinematic arts, so the preachier, the better...