Religious Story Lines Increasing in Movies, TV

Conventional wisdom among politicians and pastors holds that Hollywood and entertainment are the antithesis of religion. How many times after the Columbine massacre did you hear from either the phrase “godless

Hollywood”? It’s an accusation that is only partially correct.

Granted, many of the goals and methods of entertainment are not those of religion. Entertainment is ephemeral and the viewer is a spectator, while religion is transcendent and seeks to transform the spectator into a participant. And much of what is visualized on the screen in front of us is not exactly what the biblical prophetic visions had in mind.

But the ‘90s have been a decade in which this disparity between religion and entertainment has been narrowing. Both TV and cinema have increasingly been probing religious topics.

Television began the trend in mid-decade with a rash of programs featuring realistic portrayals of clergy lives, including “Nothing Sacred,” a drama about the private doubts and public work of an unconventional Catholic priest, and “7th Heaven,” which portrays the family life of a Protestant minister. Neither of these was a major hit, but “Touched by an Angel” certainly has been, because it deals with more substantive spiritual matters, albeit with a New Age flavor.

And it was that New Age lens that was employed by cinema when it produced its own films with religious themes. “What Dreams May Come,” starring Robin Williams, portrayed heaven as a kind of carpet of waterlilies with Renoir-like hues, and assured us that on sheer willpower one could literally descend from heaven to pluck out his beloved from eternity in hell. “Meet Joe Black” presented a debonair, if fatigued, Angel of Death in the human personification of Brad Pitt. In “Contact,” when Jodie Foster scanned the heavens for communication with whatever’s out there, she found it, with a psychedelic trip to a heavenly beachfront where ultimate truths were revealed.

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It is only on the eve of the millennium that movie moguls have begun to mine actual biblical passages for their entertainment value. The logical magnets are the passages in the Hebrew and Christian Bible that forecast Armageddon and the apocalypse. An initial foray, promoted from outside mainstream Hollywood, was immediately successful. “The Omega Code” popularized biblical mysteries with suspense, exotic locations and attractive stars, and was produced by Christian fundamentalists.

And now commercial Hollywood is climbing on the bandwagon with two films that popularize Armageddon with a visual immediacy that the confusing, biblical apocalyptic texts of Daniel and Revelations cannot match. How can one compare Daniel’s imagery of the mythic beasts to the human horsepower of Arnold Schwarzenegger in “End of Days” as he is drawn into a supernatural game of cat and mouse with the ultimate personification of evil as we count down the last days of Earth? Nor do the hysterical rantings of Revelations persuade with the intensity of a Winona Ryder in the coming “Lost Souls” as she struggles to convince the public that as the century ends, the devil has returned in human form to walk the Earth.

Does this mean that Hollywood, portrayed for so long by conservative critics as godless and valueless, is finally getting religion? Not exactly. It is still punctuating the exotic, fringe, secondary and sensationalistic aspects of religion. Or using methods that are satiric and scatological, as in the clever, controversial “Dogma.” Even what was arguably the decade’s best film of this genre, “The Apostle,” starring Robert Duvall as a seriously flawed but charismatic preacher who could both commit murder and save souls, focused on evangelical religion--an important segment, but still unrepresentative of much of mainstream American religion.

How about one sophisticated blockbuster movie entitled, say, “American Epiphany,” directed by Sam Mendes, and starring Kevin Spacey as an upper-middle-class architect living in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, happily married to a relaxed and mellow Annette Bening, with Thora Birch as their virginal and respectful teenage daughter? As the protagonist listens to the conventional and soporific sermon of his minister at the obligatory Christmas service in his Presbyterian Church, he has nothing better to do than leaf through the Bible in front of him. He fixates on a passage. Wham! He is suddenly transformed by an epiphany to a more profound religious plane, deciding to pray daily, to tithe and to utilize his vacations by volunteering to design cheap housing for new Mexican immigrants in Laredo, Texas.

Boring story line, you say? Maybe, but it would be more illustrative of the actual way that classic religions might seriously impact average folk, and certainly more indicative that Hollywood is finally getting what real faith is all about.

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Gerald L. Zelizer is rabbi of Congregation Neve Shalom in Metuchen, N.J. He can be reached at GLZEL@aol.com.