I’ve finally taken another step into the 20th century: I rented a movie.
Most of the time when I want to watch a movie at home, I buy it. This isn’t very economical, of course, but it has its advantages. I don’t have to worry about watching the movie on time or taking it back, it gives me a healthy supply of crap should friends come over wanting to watch movies, and, most importantly, I just plain feel like a better person than you because I own The Maltese Falcon and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. I used to be able to mitigate these costs by selling movies at the Movie Trading Company, but they’re no more, and I don’t know of any other convenient way to get rid of the things I don’t want anymore. I guess renting kind of makes sense.
All the cool kids are using Netflix these days, but I don’t want to jump that far into the future just yet. Allegations that Netflix gives queue priority to newer customers over older ones along with that class action lawsuit to similar affect make me a bit wary of joining Netflix or any other mail rental service. Brick and mortar rental stores still exist, of course, and they’re still handy, but the pricing of DVDs has made them much less necessary. VHS tapes used to be split into two categories based on the retail price: those priced to own and those priced to rent. I guess movie publishers have decided that there’s more money to be made from home theater enthusiasts if everything is instead priced in the range of the end user, so you don’t see many triple-digit DVD prices. VHS and these inflated prices are as dead as the 45s in your basement, so, while it’s still handy to be able to rent a movie for some fraction of the purchase price, it’s no longer the only reasonable way to see certain movies.
I got a Blockbuster card. I don’t have any particular love for Blockbuster; they’re just the first place I was able to find. I could have sworn that there was a Hollywood video next to that Publix on Hammond, but I was sadly mistaken. I signed up at the Blockbuster on Abernathy, which is an annoying uphill, heavily trafficked mile or so out of my way. I guess I still won’t be able to watch The Last Temptation of Christ, but whatever. I kicked off my new movie renting abilities with a different God movie: Jesus Camp, which is about evangelical Christian kids being indoctrinated into the culture war that the Christian right insists is being fought against them.
Documentaries seem to be coming more into vogue lately rather than simply being stuck in the back of the store next to Jacques Cousteau and a bunch of other nature films. Jesus Camp is a bit different from its contemporaries in that it doesn’t try to inject the filmmakers’ opinion. Michael Moore isn’t there telling you what’s good or bad, Morgan Freeman isn’t anthropomorphizing penguins, it just documents. The back of the box says that the movie appeals to two main groups of people: evangelical Christians who think that it’s a great documentation of their beliefs and way of life, and people like me who find their lifestyle terrifying.
As a bit of background on my own religious and political views, my parents raised me a good Catholic—I was an altar boy, I was confirmed under the patronage of St. Declan, all that stuff—and I tend to lean left politically. I’m not really as active in the church as my upbringing tells me I should be, but Catholicism still makes the most sense to me theologically, since the doctrine seems to have a firm grounding in both history (admittedly, a lot of the history was hastily assimilated from pagans during the first millennium or so of the church’s existence) and philosophy, and I at least know where to go to church on Easter. The born-again revival mentality throws away much of the philosophical background of Christianity, which I find disappointing but can understand as part of their effort to form a new church out of what they perceive as something gripped in decay, but the most striking difference is in the form of the church services. Catholic mass is one big ritual, a parade of symbols and reminders of God’s presence in the world with a sermon in the middle. The idea to me, besides the expression of community, is to get you pumped up enough about God to live out the rest of the week in a Christian way, and you get a little lesson to take home, too. These newer Christian services are instead more of a freeform ecstatic release of the ego. I think that some aspects, like glossolalia, are a misinterpretation of the events in Acts, but hey, whatever. I also find it interesting that while some Christian sects ignore several centuries worth of recent history, they make powerful use of ecstatic trance, which predates monotheism, but hey, whatever gets you going, right? I don’t agree with it, but I don’t have a problem with it.
In Alabama I grew up around Pentecostals and foot-washing Baptists and the like, so I don’t know that I found the movie “startling” like the New York Times, but I did find it a bit unsettling. The demonstrations of kids speaking in tongues or handing out Chick tracts at the bowling alley are strange from my viewpoint, certainly, but it’s not anything I haven’t seen in person. What really got me about the movie was the attack on rationality. There were several scenes in the movie of children being home-schooled, and the education provided demonstrated a willful ignorance and twisting of fact to fit preconceived notions, whether biblically inspired or simply politically expedient. Abortion was a central issue in the movie, but I can understand the stance on that one. Certain interpretations of life, including the Catholic one, hold that abortion is murder, and murder is pretty universally bad, therefore abortion is bad. I think the issue has been oversimplified by everyone in recent times—St. Thomas Aquinas wrote of a doctrine of delayed ensoulment which seems to be ignored nowadays—but I understand the viewpoint and agree with parts of it. Evolution, of course, was another big issue, and one I’m not as willing to ignore. The fundamentalist mindset does not allow the luxury that Catholics and other Protestants have to interpret parts of the Old Testament as parable and allow that science is God’s language for the universe, but the attacks on science still make no rational sense to me. If evolution is wrong then either we are sorely mistaken about certain fundamental aspects of geology and biology, a revelation that I feel would best be made by further pursuit of these theories, or we are living under the power of Descartes’ worst fear, a trickster God. That these Christians can seemingly so readily accept the latter proposition is both boggling and horrifying. This particular religious viewpoint emphasizes a literal devotion to the Bible with critical thinking and a quest for knowledge becoming lost in the fray. This is what I think makes this type of religion both incorrect and dangerous. The children in this film are learning to become obedient to modes of thought that are brand new relative to the history of religious dogma, and they never understand why. They are given blinders to the wonders of the world and told to wear them in the name of God. I pity these children. Global warming also made a brief appearance, and that’s an issue for which I really can’t understand any opposition except from those who have something to gain from unencumbered industry. Worst case if we do something to fix it is that there’s no man-made global warming after all, but we get cleaner air. Pollution is still bad, right?
It wasn’t the religious indoctrination of the children that upset me, but rather the political indoctrination. These kids are being taught to take their religious fights into the public arena, that moral righteousness trumps our essential freedom of (and from) religion, and they are being given not the seeds of doubt essential to scientific discovery but instead a solid grounding in blind obedience. Jesus Camp documented the creation of a new generation of ignorant, irrational people who will someday take part in shaping this nation. I found it all very sad and frightening.
I returned Jesus Camp today (I’m really starting to hate Mount Vernon Woods. I need to find a better route.) and got a copy of Thank You for Smoking. I hear it’s pretty funny.