Film, DVD, and video provide much of the visual language that students bring with them to college. They are likely to express their sense of generation, gender, sexuality, ethnic and racial identities, and their role as consumers in terms of the images, styles, and story lines that circulate in popular visual media. This means that educators who ignore such media dismiss the looming stock of images that form the vernacular vocabularies and cultural grammars of our students. Screen media are especially important as visual media because viewing them is one of the few extended visual experiences that young people today are willing to endure. Television, the Internet, and video games—also screen media—are a different form of visual activity since they are completely controlled by the viewer and are experienced in much shorter parcels of time (video games may capture a boy’s attention for an afternoon, yet not as a single game but as a long succession of different games). Film and video still find teenagers sitting quietly for two hours or more, absorbed in a single, sustained passage of time. Where else in their lives do they submit to such a discipline in attention? Most religious services today take place in much shorter periods of time.
Film and video are able to develop important visual skills. If video games enhance visual acuity, a motion picture engages young people in at least two fundamentally important skills: visual narrative and empathy. The ability to follow a story taking shape means nurturing the raw capacity for narrative interpretation. Intermingled with this is the experience of weaving oneself into the story so that it becomes a meaningful experience, emotionally significant and relevant, a story that matters. Empathy with characters, the anticipation of plot, and rumination on why it is appealing or what would have made it more so are the rudiments of humanistic interpretation and critique. The pleasure of analysis rides on the ability and willingness to engage in empathy and visual storytelling.
An example of this is the critical analysis of Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josie Wales in a class I’ve taught, “Interpretation in the Humanities.” Students wrestle with their view of Josie Wales—he begins the film as an innocent farmer-turned-renegade Confederate soldier who won’t give up the fight against the Union army, which is portrayed in the film as utterly corrupt and unfeeling. This allows us to discuss the enduring life of the Civil War in American culture and the degree to which its ongoing representations often eclipse race as a factor in the war as well as American society ever since. Students have a mixed feeling about Josie Wales. They feel he was an innocent man wronged by those whom he fights, yet he’s on the wrong side of the war. As the film unfolds, their feelings for him strengthen as he becomes a Moses figure who gathers up outcasts and misfits into a Western Exodus in search of the American Promised Land. Yet, on reflection, matters are complicated. Josie Wales relives the troubled relationship between Whites and Native Americans, on the one hand, and Mexicans, on the other (Wales—could there be a more Anglo name for him?—makes peace with the Indians and single-handedly slaughters the Mexican bandits). African Americans never make an appearance in this reiteration of the American national narrative. Discussion of the film serves as a very effective way to engage students in critical consideration of two intimately connected features of American life that are often ignored and about which Americans are deeply ambivalent: race and religion.
Film is a public event, something best experienced on large screens, viewed in the company of many people. Television, Internet, and video games are also shared, but in a much smaller presence, and most commonly with family members or close friends. Film pulls us out of our familiar environments into a broader public setting. The college classroom is the place to engage this public experience with public interpretation. Many students wish to privatize film as a personal experience of mere entertainment. At first, when urged to comment on a film they’ve seen, students fall back on the inarticulacy of enjoyment: I liked it; I didn’t like it. But buried within these simple judgments are definite reasons for liking and disliking. Excavating them requires equipping students with the fundamentals of critical discourse. For example, what is it that viewers find so appealing about the cowboy-Moses Josie Wales who leads the American Exodus from the violence of Civil War, conflict with Indians, and the threat of rape and enslavement by Mexican marauders? Does Josie as Moses appeal because he resolves or ignores or justifies racial conflict in America? The ability and willingness even to ask the question let alone venture an answer is a laudable goal for the college classroom.
Like film, religion is also something experienced in public—whether it is organized worship, social action, or such public rituals in civil religion like reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or singing a patriotic anthem in a sports arena. Like film, people have unprocessed responses to religion, which cry out for critical analysis. Students are often very inarticulate about religions, their own and especially those of people very different from themselves. Films and videos in the classroom provide the opportunity for uninterrupted meditation on religion and the visual medium of representing other worlds of belief, which can be fruitfully engaged by visual narrative and empathy. Americans are very good at gathering and curating personal experiences. We are connoisseurs of what interests us, what causes us pleasure, what makes us feel affirmed, validated, and appreciated. But we are less capable at explaining why something pleases us. Accounting for the appeal of the products we consume and discussing both our pleasures and displeasures publicly is not something that consumption itself encourages. Critical analysis pulls us from the archives of private enjoyment into the public square of discourse, where we can stand aside from our pleasures and scrutinize how these fit into the larger worlds of other people and the thorny problem of representation.
David Morgan is Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Professor in Christianity and the Arts, and Professor of Humanities and Art History in Christ College, the undergraduate humanities honors college of Valparaiso University. He has taught at Valparaiso University since 1990. Morgan edited and contributed to a volume of essays, Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman (Yale University Press, 1996), which examined the history of the popular religious art of a commercial artist. For several years, Morgan chaired the International Study Commission on Media, Religion, and Culture, a group of scholars and media practitioners that met around the world with scholars, media producers, and religious teachers and leaders to study the intersections of the three fields. |
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