We watched this movie on the inaugural night of our vacation, and while on the one hand it lived up to its billing as a dumb and fun Jack Black vehicle, on the other hand I found in it some connections to my understanding of The Way the World Really Is (see my forthcoming post on The Meaning of Everything). If you haven’t seen this movie yet and intend to, be warned – spoilers ahead.
Danny Glover plays Mr Fletcher, a down-on-his-luck owner of a corner video store that only stocks VHS and rents for a dollar a day. Facing the reality of losing his building he leaves to get advice from some friends and entrusts his adopted son Mike (Mos Def) with the running of the store in his absence. However when Mike’s slightly off-center friend Jerry (Jack Black, playing Jack Black) unintentionally erases all the tapes on the shelves the two come up with the plan of covering up the disaster by recording over all the erased movies with their own remakes using Mike’s camera and plenty of aluminum foil and cardboard. Instead of obviously exposing the mistake, however, the bootleg versions become a neighborhood sensation, with people lining up around the block to request them.
But besides being a comedy based on a single gag (which I suppose you could apply to either the idea of the remakes or to Jack Black himself), the movie subtly develops the theme of community through the solidarity of the main characters around the history and preservation of their building and the phenomenon of the remade films (or “sweded”, as Sweden is far away and therefore more expensive) which gathers the diverse neighborhood and enlivens it. Being an avid fan of Mr. Alfred Yankovic’s magnum opus UHF, which features a parallel plot of a group of friends trying to save a failing enterprise by creating a sensation and rallying the community in its own support, and having ingested enough Hollywood happy endings, I was expecting this movie to build to an inspiring-sports-movie sort of finale where the contributions of the neighborhood add up to just enough pennies to save Mr. Fletcher’s building and send the corporate cronies off with their tails between their legs while our heroes are lifted on the shoulders of the cheering crowd.
This however was not the case, much to my surprise and ponderment, if that were a word.
On the night of the demolition, Mike, Jerry and friends hold a screening of their final and most thorough effort yet, an original and entirely fictitious production on the life of Fats Waller and his historical ties with their own condemned building, with enthusiastic participation by the entire community of some 30 or 50 people who have been caught up in the sweded phenomenon. As they file in to the store they drop change in a collections bucket labeled with the invitation “please contribute as much as you can”. And yet somehow it begins to seem that these pennies may not be enough.
Through a series of mistakes and lucky breaks the film ends up being projected onto a sheet spread across the storefront glass window, and when the lights go down and the projector illuminates, the hush and the magic of cinema envelops the room as people laugh and point at the things they and their friends have created. And it’s here that the film pauses just a little too long and the strings get just a little too insistent on the in-case-you-haven’t-figured-it-out utter emotional profundity of what you are watching. But what happens next is the striking part. At the film’s climax cheers from outside the shop betray a second audience: an impromptu assembly of strangers and other members of the larger community, as well as the demolition crew that has been tapping its feet outside all evening, watching the film in reverse image from the outside of the store and sharing in the same magic as the folks inside. And once again the delivery is a bit heavy-handed in favor of the significance of the moment; but then, with a slow crane shot up into the night, the movie is over. No mention is made of the money collected, no reprieve on the demolition is implied by the city officials, and no further significance is attached to the efforts of Mike and his friends except that they brought people together.
And this I think is the part that I related to most in the movie, the tie-in with The Way the World Really Is. If Be Kind Rewind is to be believed, bringing people together is what life is all about – the joy and other relational impact on the people involved in the shop’s efforts outweighs the community impact of the building’s demolition; the success and satisfaction of completing and enjoying their film outweighs the circumstantial success of saving the building, and somehow even the benefits Mr. Fletcher and Mike receive from their role in it all outweigh the personal effects of leaving their jobs and their home. It’s a strange and entirely counterintuitive view of life and happiness. In the end, life is about relationship more than it’s about success, progress, or money – or even the hope of things going right, as with Mr. Fletcher’s shop. It’s about people coming together and having a good time collaborating to create something bigger than themselves, and celebrating community in the process.
So while on the one hand the film was a little too long, the comedy occasionally vapid, and the final emotional message delivered in a Spielbergian spoon-feeding, on the other hand the atmosphere of creativity engendered by the enthused movie-making crowd where any everyday object or location is fair game for their art, and the unexpected resolution with its subtle avoidance of the everything-turns-out-great Hollywood myth left me thinking a little further into life than many movies have in some time.
We could argue for a long time about the poorly-conceived efforts of self-proclaimed Christians to “take back the culture for Jesus” in a militaristic us-vs.-them mentality. See some of my thoughts on the matter here and here. I think occasionally of a flip side of this question though – what it might look like for people of faith to speak into and contribute to pop culture in a way that is neither propagandist nor disingenuous to their journey of faith. It is perhaps easy to just back away from the question, to assume that pop culture is inherently opposed to the point of view of Christian faith and the authentic voices of faith will be by and large silenced or edited down to neutrality. But what if the goal isn’t necessarily to influence or change pop culture, but to be conversant with it and perhaps have something to say on its own terms? After all, I don’t think it can be denied that pop culture influences how we view ourselves and the world around us.
These are fairly iconic examples, but I think this applies to more subtle life situations as well. Romance and gender relations, friendship, parenting, and even faith are all modeled for us, for better or worse, in pop culture. (I can count on one hand I think the films I have seen with a character demonstrating faith in a redeeming fashion. Signs…Chariots of Fire…that’s all I can think of. Not counting movies based on the Bible of course.)
Anyhow, my thought here is that what we see and experience in pop culture on some level influences our perception of people and circumstances, if ever so subtly, and even though in engaging in pop culture we generally don’t set out to discover and adopt these ways of living. I remember a friend suggesting once that America’s rampant obesity might be tied to our cultural obsession with skinniness by way of the skinny people we see on TV and in movies. Perhaps so.
I certainly think that people of faith contributing to what our culture as a whole ingests as entertainment or art is worth pursuing. I don’t think it’s a matter of “taking back our culture for Jesus” or any of that crap; it’s more that I don’t see many examples of artists of faith expressing their creativity in a way that is not disingenuous to their own faith journey. This I think would be pretty remarkable to observe.
It doesn’t seem appropriate to expect (or even hold out much hope) that a person of faith’s efforts toward the arts will be of the missional sort, having the kind of impact on other people that brings more love, hope and other God-things into their lives. This is perhaps a grossly under-thought statement, but I lump pop culture in general in with other expressions and institutions of the world as a whole, like politics and the economy, in the sense that a person who orients their life around their faith in God should be conversant with it and contribute to it as appropriate, but will likely meet with immense frustration if they make it a primary venue of their expression of faith.
And not to entirely contradict myself, but for folks who do consider themselves as having a call to the arts, pop culture can and in ways perhaps should be a great place to express that call, especially for those who appreciate pop culture, enjoy it and perhaps have something to say on its terms. That said, for the rest of us I’m sure there is no shame if our art never goes beyond, say, a small local production, or a modest circulation among friends. In the end, while the artist certainly should have something to say, I don’t think the process of creating art can incorporate the art’s expected impact too much before it begins to cross the line into propaganda.
People don’t particularly look to art for answers or for a right view of the world. As a friend of mine said recently, “the reason I watch anything and everything is to find moments of magic.” I think this is perhaps a better expression of what a call to the arts should mean than whether or not it is relevant or influential on pop culture’s terms.