Editors' Note: Kieth Merrill took our call on his cell phone in a parking lot one day on his way to a meeting. “Kieth, would you be willing to be the film editor of a start-up Internet Magazine for Latter-day Saints that has no audience and no reach. It's really cool.” He said yes! This was the first piece Kieth published and was on that very first issue on Friday, February 12, 1999.
Since God is omnipresent, why is it so difficult to find him in the movies?
I learned first-hand about this glaring absence when Ozarks, Legacy and Legend, an Imax-format film I created for the theater in Branson, Missouri went to the world-wide market and the distributor cut fourteen minutes. The edit was a blatant attempt to extricate all references to God and religion. The film is the story of five generations in the Ozark mountains. True to history, the characters are God-fearing Christians for whom faith and religion are a fundamental part of life. The cuts confirmed in a painful and personal way the notion that positive impressions of God and religion are being excluded by people we never meet for reasons we can only assume. The scenes condemned to "death by edit" in Legacy and Legend included a little girl reading the Christmas story from Luke 2 on Christmas Eve, a minister's reference to Jesus Christ in performing an old-fashioned marriage in a grove of trees, and a prayer of a husband at the bedside of his sick wife. Other narrative references to God were likewise marked for deletion.
My outrage, expressed in no uncertain terms, salvaged some of the scenes critical to the story, but left me stunned that intelligent people could be so put off by references to faith and religion in the context of a story. Their argument: "We don't want to offend our audience." Ironically, people like these who won't allow God's name to be mentioned in a film with reverence feel free to create characters who liberally take the Lord's name in vain.
While religion was edited out of my film, in the creation of most movies no one even considers putting it in. In fact, movie-goers longing for an affirmation of faith, or a glimpse of God at 24 frames per second are half a century too late.
We might, however, say that we get the movies we deserve. Movies are made to make money. The people who make them argue that they reflect the interests, tastes and morality of the people who pay to see them. We should worry when movies with moral messages open quietly and close quickly in the shadow of summer blockbusters, holiday hits, and the ever-irresistible " Hollywood package" stuffed with stars we pay to see whatever the degree of drivel.
Show business is as heavy on the business as it is on the show. Money, not the affect a film will have on the viewers' morality or mindset, is what drives producers who ultimately make the decisions about what films get created. These producers can't help but notice that of the top 50 grossing films of all time, only two might be considered as having any sort of religious theme. Sound of Music , released in 1965, takes us behind the sheltering walls of the abby and the unabashed faith, hope, and prayers of women devoted to the holy order. Exorcist offers an inverted glimpse of faith, but did little or nothing to attest the power of God.
A well-known screenwriter pinned this to his bulletin board: "If you want to send a message, use Western Union ." Ironically, of course, that same writer infuses his work with his perspective of ethics, mores, politics, and morality. Movies send messages even when they pretend not to. God, when allowed to make a cameo appearance, is a reflection of the writer's own world-view. Very few of Hollywood 's power elite claim a religious perspective, an orientation toward family or traditional values. If today's films feel like a romp through the telestial kingdom, it's because those focused on making a buck at the expense of other realities are the ones teaching us their lessons.
Sometimes faith and religion are not just absent in today's box office hits . Michael Medved suggests producers go "out of their way to affront the religious sensibilities of ordinary Americans." Religious characters are often depicted as fanatics, crooks, or killers. The corrupted priest with a rotten underbelly beneath his righteous facade has almost become a stock character. Where is the good-hearted priest who holds life together for his parishioners like Bing Crosby used to play in movies like The Bells of St. Mary's? Characters like him are gone with the wind. The disdain heaped upon religious characters seems to reflect the ire that those with a moral foundation and fixed standards are sometimes given in our larger society.
Many would argue there is an increasing number of Hollywood films dealing with religion and then cite Contact, City of Angels, and What Dreams May Come as examples. From a religious perspective these can only be classed as missed opportunities. In Contact for instance, with its flawed interpretation of a spirit world, the director lost a chance to get me to buy another ticket. I wanted Jodi's Mom to show up and imply that families are forever.
For most of us who are LDS, our theological predisposition will keep us from ever finding the God we know and understand in popular motion pictures. Shadowlands , the film portraying C.S. Lewis's life and marriage, may be as close as we come. What is worrisome, however, is that for two hours in a theater, we give ourselves to the world the director spins for us as if it were reality, allowing ourselves to be enchanted and transported on larger-than-life journeys that seem to depict "the way things are." The concern is not just that God and his reality are absent in the movies, but that we might take as reality instead what is given us in oversized, dazzling images in our local theater. That celluloid world does not give us a picture of faith, or characters who live in a moral landscape and struggle to progress, or of people who acknowledge God, let alone have a relationship with Him that seems to matter. Despite our tendency to let film become our reality for two hours in the dark, thank heaven, it is not.
