Here's my newborn term paper on the topic (sans footnotes, lemme know if you want 'em).
Life upon the Wicked Stage: Wading through the Ethical Quagmire of the Entertainment Industry The modern entertainment industry suffers from a gross lack of excellence. There is no truth in the gritty realism of Sundance, no goodness in the bright lights of Broadway, and no beauty in the plastic films of Hollywood. They have thrown unnecessary blood at us by the bucketful, paraded increasingly obscene sexuality before our eyes, and opened fire on our brains with magazine after magazine of putrid language and filth. In the blessed, holy, and matchless name of Realism, amen.
It is in this festering swampland that God calls Christian actors to express, clarify, and communicate truth, goodness, and beauty through excellence in their craft. But, in our fallen world, truth is seldom beautiful and the presence of evil often serves to illuminate the good. As one writer put it, “Because of the nature of sin, Christians should create characters that are both confused and confusing.” But as we stand on stage, spewing the hate-filled language or displaying the promiscuities that bring our confused characters to life, Jiminy Cricket begins chirping in the back of our minds, worried that we might be taking this acting thing too far. We realize that, at some point, the presence of sin in entertainment ceases to be a means of exhortation and becomes mere exploitation.
The problem comes in finding that point of distinction. After all, “one person’s sense of exploitation may simply illustrate his own prudery, while another person’s tolerance may actually be her own indulgence and besetting sin.” In considering roles that depict sin, Christian actors must humbly look to Scripture as a guide to exercising godly wisdom and discernment.
When Denzel Washington first received the script for Training Day, he sent it back to the director with “The wages of sin is death” scrawled across the cover page because the original screenplay failed to kill off the crooked cop, Alonzo Harris. Washington understood the importance of the director’s intentions – to leave Harris alive would be to exhibit violence for its own sake. In contrast, Scripture presents sin as a matter of fact, an historical narrative. The intentional difference brought about by Harris’s death in the reworked screenplay calls attention to the chasm between narrative sin and the presence of sin for sin’s sake – a difference that Christian actors must resolve before accepting or rejecting a role.
Though sin may be present as a matter of historical fact, it must also be depicted appropriately. Scripture depicts violent, base, and disgraceful acts more as manifestations of our need for redemption than the obsessive focus on gratuitous and exploitative scenes we see in entertainment today. As Brian Godawa puts it: "When David cuts off Goliath’s head, we are not indulged in a slow-motion close-up of the sword piercing the neck and carotid artery spurting blood as the eyes pop and the flesh rips." The Scriptural norm is to avoid such pornographic storytelling. And because we are to imitate Scripture, this means voyeuristic sex scenes, indulgent violence, and purposeless crass language all land their respective scripts in the discard pile.
Sin is sin is sin is sin. Unfortunately, most Hollywood directors have chucked this memo in the name of “exploring morality” and proceed to make any sin a virtue and any virtue a sin. But in God’s story, sin has consequences. David took pride in the size of his kingdom and God smote his people with a plague (2 Sam 24:10-15). Judas betrayed Christ, then took his own life (Matt. 27:3-9). Satan will be cast into a lake of fire and brimstone to be tormented day and night, forever and ever (Rev. 20:10). Celluloid sin depicted without celluloid consequences exchanges the truth of God for a lie. And for the Christian actor who strives for truth in story, this glorification or normalization of sin cannot be tolerated. When there is no king in Israel, everyone will do what is right in his own eyes (Judges 17:6).
But what of that sexually promiscuous character? Many sugarless stories involve the reality of loose women, hookers, and whores, showing just enough skin to get the point across. Though watching these stories can be edifying, we must look to the reasons for Biblical modestly in order to decide whether or not the role is appropriate for a Christian actress. Men respond visually to women and they will gawk at immodesty on the stage or screen just as they do immodesty on the street. Since God commands modesty in women (1 Tim 2:9) in order to protect them from attracting the wrong kind of attention, Christians should refrain from immodesty on the stage and let the pagans proudly display their golden snout-rings (Pr. 11:22).
That just leaves us with the troublesome character who constantly insists that God damn various people, places, and things. Let the dialogue be painted in the various and sundry shades of black and blue language, but throw a “God damn it!” or “Jesus Christ!” in the mix and most Christians will battle the onslaught of such blasphemous language with the bravery of Forrest Gump. But unlike immodesty, we cannot equate blasphemy in the mouth of a character with blasphemy in the mouth of the actor. If we did so, we would be forced also to condemn David for quoting blasphemy: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” (Ps. 14:1) If the fact of the blasphemy is presented as sin with consequences – neither normalized nor glorified – then Christian actors should have no problem speaking it as the character. The sinful actions of characters are not imputed to the actor.
With intent, depiction, context, and the presence of consequences churning in our minds, we can let Scripture inform our decisions to accept or reject roles that illustrate sinful behaviors. These roles can be hard to find, let alone land, in an industry characterized by rampant and unrepentant sin, but as Christians faithfully pursue their callings as incarnational storytellers God will redeem our little corner of the world, too.
Updated On: 3/6/07 at 02:40 AM
