Ask a Southerner about the portrait of the South on television and in movies some time. Ask an African American about the roles of dark skinned people on screen. (Anyone noticing how few black marriages there are in prime time, how many are interracial? Makes you wonder, don't it?) (Anyone notice how Disney animations obey the old rule that the darker the skin, the more evil the character, and how they do this even in Mulan and the one about the frog?) When you find a stereotype stuck to you, like gum on your shoe, you tend to notice more than the bystander.
If you live in the category depicted by Hollywood, you notice all its errors. (This is sloppy language I will correct.) So it is that Christians and fundamentalists wail about how "godless Hollywood" is.
Below the bonk, I will try to prove to your satisfaction that,
1. Hollywood actually is godless, but
2. It doesn't matter if it is or isn't.
Everything, though, depends on understanding what it means to be in a category that gets depicted on screen. There are two very, very different sorts, aren't there?
Being a bird watcher is voluntary. Being a hacker with mad skillz yo is voluntary. Spending vast amounts of time and passion on an endeavor entails a substantial personal investment. It isn't a "hobby," because it becomes a way of life. This is why hackers can be outraged at the Hollywood depiction of hacking. It's why I, as a punk rock musician, have a full hate-on over Hollywood depictions of punks, punk rock, punk rock venues, and everything related to our moment in time.
Being gay or black or southern, on the other hand, is a category that one does not choose. In fact, it is a category that society chooses for you. "Homosexual" is a recent invention, in that this idea that there are men who are exclusively and life long same-sex oriented is a concept and exception that dates to the 19th century. "Lesbian" is ancient, in one sense, but even newer in another, as the concept is still unstable. (Quick: "A dyke is __?" The stereotype is weak and unstable, which is a point to celebrate.) "Southern" is historical and cultural, rather obviously. If you are from Miami, you are probably not a southerner. If you are from Baltimore, you probably are. "Black" is genetically meaningless, anthropologically bankrupt, and yet culturally and ethnically alive because people are shoved into a category with expectations, regardless of themselves.
If you are gay, and you see an insulting portrait of gays in film, is that different from being a hacker and seeing a 'stupid' portrait of hackers? Well, we have Christians and Christians in this argument, fundamentalists and believers, and we have reality vs. fantasy.
Bonk follows, and then the showing of how media truly is godless and why it doesn't much matter.
So, first, is Hollywood godless, really?
Afraid so, but not for insidious reasons necessarily.
I need to tell you that I use the term "Hollywood" not to refer to a place, but to a business model. A film like "SLC Punk" could be made inside Hollywood and not be a Hollywood movie, while the New Zealand "The Lord of the Rings" definitely was. "Hollywood" refers to a system whereby a movie studio finances a film by gathering investment capital that is expected to be paid a return on investment, complete with insurance policies, union contracts, and maximum profit projections. It is a business. The stories it tells, the stars it creates, and the box office numbers it posts are incidental to this core business.
Keep that in mind, and the rest makes sense:
1. Whose god would they show?
Hollywood is about return on investment, and that means overseas markets and DVD sales more than it does the ephemeral opening weekend. (They are so going to try to own the Internet pipeline.) So, when you see a movie like "The Witches of Eastwick," and you notice that Jack Nicholson plays Satan, and there is all sorts of evil, and the women are looking for something/anything to help them get away from him, you wonder why, given the fact that the author of the novel was Christian, there was no God to object to Satan walking the earth. You see any one of ten thousand possession/Satan-comes-to-the-Suburbs movies, and there are demons spewing fluids everywhere, and the people are shooting bullets and taking crash courses in Latin, but... no God.
Well, the reason is that the mythos that gives Hollywood its demons is either Judeo-Christian or Muslim, and either one has very definite views on the limited power of demons in the face of the divine. However, if a movie put in characters going to church and praying sincerely and getting divine aid, that film would endorse a specific religion. More, because all that mumbling in Latin is from the monastic past, the film is already endorsing the Roman Catholic Church, but only metonymically. They rip the ritual from the faith and hope no one associates the rest of the story with the recitation.
Foreign box office disappears if a film seems to be a Baptist film or a Catholic film or a Jewish film or an Islamic film, because it then goes only to like audiences. (Yeah, yeah, Mel Gibson....)
2. The consequences of being wrong . . . or right?
Hollywood also doesn't want to bring God into any narrative if possible, because there is too much at stake. There was a period when "wholesome" television had God on screen for a while. "Highway to Heaven" was the most explicit, but "Touched by an Angel" and then "Joan of Arcadia" offered their own views. Notice, though, that each one was extremely vague. None of them had Jesus or Mohammed mentioned, some praised Buddha, and they would do everything possible to present a sort of oatmeal Deism.
Why? Once you fictionalize God or God's will, you must stick to what everyone agrees with. Innovation is anathema. Even if you were right, you would be wrong, because Hollywood does not instruct. Instructing is a low return on investment.
3. The narrative problem.
I will let an anonymous student of mine from the University of Georgia in the 1980's show you the problem, here:
"God is an important character in the poem, as lines 3-7 demonstrate."
If the divine is in your story, then there is no impediment and no drama. When "Star Trek: The Next Generation" came on, it had no enemies. With superior firepower, no wars at home, no diseases, they just went to the holodeck to play-act problems until the ship broke. Every seven year old play acting figures this out, "Well, I'm Superman, and I can't be hurt by anything" gets quite boring. Game designers always make the monsters just a bit more powerful than your power-ups.
In fact, the presence of the divine in a Believer's life does not solve all problems, and access to the divine does not make magical rainbows appear. As Patty Griffin sang, in "Mother of God,"
"Something as simple as boys and girls
Gets tossed around and lost in the world
Something as hard as a prayer on your back
Can wait a long time/ For an answer."
Real religious life is complicated, but in Hollywood, narrative demands that every prayer is answered. Failure to answer a character's prayer means atheism. Thus anyone making a show with God in it would quickly come across the problem of theodicy: why God allows evil to exist and allows free will.
Hollywood today: blandly godless or strangely godless
The result of Hollywood's silence is that either we get very denatured visions of "Just be nice, y'all" commandments or places where the world is painted like a Bogomil nightmare. It's "E.T.," where the little critter enacts the Christ story and gives universal love and peace, or it's "Priest" or "Hellraiser," where no one even thinks of God, except as an expletive. I've been a fan of the show "Supernatural" on the CW. I respected the courage of it, if nothing else, because they would go there. However, even though they would have angels, talk of "Enochian script," and talk about heaven, they had to have a clockmaker God and, every time narrative logic forced the issue, show more creativity ducking the issue than getting their heroes out of trouble.
The result of modern Hollywood's obsession with evil that comes from religion and complete silence on goodness is a clear message: evil has power and desire, but good is either actually evil or impotent.
* *
If you are a believer and you watch movies or television, then you notice these absences. You can hardly fail to feel them. However, you are also aware that society has a stereotype for you as a believer, and unless you want to be one of Them, you should keep your voice down about it.
* *
Why reality does not matter: the other category
I'm certain that you have all heard about the Hays Office. If you haven't, clickety-click. You see, Hollywood was a moral cess pit. It was degrading morals way back then. The Fatty Arbuckle scandal, "Night Nurse," much later the Black Dahlia -- all of those horrible movies that depicted immoral behavior -- mostly made by immigrants -- were poison to the clean, American bloodstream.
Father Coughlin liked to rail against Hollywood, and so did Amy Semple Macpherson. At the very time that the opulent studio productions, "The Robe" and "The Ten Commandments" were being made, people were complaining that films were too racy. (If you are wondering about today, take a look at the top box office and how many have had any nudity. Bare breasts and bottoms are not allowed in American films anymore, because they get R-ratings.) Those idiotic "washing machine sized" statues of the ten commandments that caused such a ruckus with Judge Roy Moore and others, by the way, were not put up by Pilgrim Fathers or by Moses of Dothan, Alabama. They were produced as marketing materials for the movie of the same name.
The Washington Post has become a shadow of a newspaper, and two years ago they published an editorial by Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, entitled "Secular Saboteurs." It's one of the most illogical, ridiculous things ever written. If you didn't read it when it was new, and you want something to make you scream, check it out.
He is certain that all the things that offend the reader, from nipple slips at a football game to what a neighbor said she saw on a soap opera to what your nephew is playing on the X-box, is a plot to attack the Catholic Church, and the only way to fight back is to give him money. Bill Donohue joins Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell in this . . . and Jim Bakker. These three Protestants, along with the ever-noxious James Dobson, got their start by attacking the obscenity of Hollywood, and the new "FamIly Leather" that Republicans are signing onto is also going after the pornography that is presumably everywhere.
This is that other sort of category. These are people who elect themselves to a category that they themselves define, of "guardians of morality" and "media watchdogs." They go on television to say that television is corrupt to its core. They write newspaper editorials to say that the newspapers lie. They get radio shows to say that nothing may be trusted.
They have always said that Hollywood is godless, because that is how they define themselves. They are not defining themselves as believers in Jesus or God, but as believers in a negative, in sin. Curiously, they are agreeing with the picture of the world that Hollywood is inadvertently producing: they believe eeeeeevil is everywhere. Only when Hollywood is godless can they be pointing it out, and only when the olden days were good old can they contrast the degradation of today to it.
So my point is?
My point is simple. We should keep an eye out for God and the divine in Hollywood. It would be nice to even encourage some sane and loving expressions of the divine. However, we should recognize the difference between the fact and the charge, the category of believer and the category of prig. Wouldn't it be great to affirm a good rather than always evil, to tell ourselves about love, rather than how vile the others are?