Dr Baehr, in Australia for a family wedding, spoke to Christian media and filmmakers in Melbourne and Sydney at the weekend. “Who controls the media controls the culture,” he says.
Dr Baehr’s message to the studios is simple: sex and violence don’t pay, but affirming positive values does.
The average family-values blockbuster ”” limited violence and sex plus a positive message ”” earns $US200 million ($A228 million) at the box office in the US, whereas big releases pushing atheism ”” he nominates The Golden Compass and There Will Be Blood ”” average only $US16 million, he says.
The Golden Compass ”” the $US200 million screen adaptation of Philip Pullman’s anti-religion children’s novel, released in Australia on Boxing Day ”” flopped in the US, while There Will Be Blood offers vicious anti-Christian stereotypes, Dr Baehr says.
“One of the big things we’ve done is dispel the myth that sex, violence and profanity is what people want. The figures show it’s not,” he says, arguing that 151 million people are in church in the US every Sunday, while 28 million are at the cinema.
His analysis isn’t bad in the aggregate, but personally I’d disagree with his tastes in movies. Some morally disturbing films such as [i]Sin City[/i] I recommend based on the way they were made. I don’t extrapolate from them on how to lead my life. But “bad movies” with all sorts of defects are simply a basic part of our culture, and I wouldn’t want to push my tastes on the rest of the viewing populace. Baehr’s views on this seem to be more assertive, and citing the Hays Office as a precedent isn’t a good symbol, for me.
Not to mention, Tom, that despite the hideous violence and brutality of [i]Sin City[/i], the message of the three story lines was still deeply moral, with heroism and selflessness championed in, admittedly, flawed characters. I think that’s a good thing.
Is it really true that, on any given Sunday, half of the US population–151 million people–are in church, or at some other house of worship? I live in small town “heartland American”, where I would think churchgoing would be near its national height, and I don’t think the figures are that high–probably closer to 35-40%.
Even so, I was surprised that theatre-going is so low.
#3 that citation is off significantly. There are all sorts of numbers on that, but saying that half the US population attends Sabbath services (of whatever day) every Sunday has got to be wrong. I believe that more accurate might be that half the US population thinks about going to church and does so with a frequency higher than just on Christmas and Easter. So “every Sunday” a population of “151 million are in church” is like saying “all dogs bite”. Well, they do, just not all the time.
I seldom see movies, but I have read that the studios deliberately make the critically acclaimed politically correct movies for the awards, and to satisfy their own consciences and guilt over being so rich. They finance this hobby with the much more lucrative “family” genre, which they do not like artistically.
I don’t watch movies because the terrific special effects have taken over, and more often than not the filmmakers have forgotten to present believable characters and plot. For the current price of a movie ticket, I don’t want to go be horrified or indoctrinated.