Reflections on “Reflections on the Movies”

Last updated on: April 29, 2015 at 8:07 am by Coyle Neal

Reflections on “Reflections on the Movies” 2015-04-29T08:07:19-06:00 Coyle Neal

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Review of Reflections on the Movies by Ken Gire

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Before getting to the review of Ken Gire’s Reflections on the Movies, in order to be fair I need to give a number of qualifiers. First, I don’t know Ken Gire at all—this is the only book of his that I’ve read and, to the best of my knowledge, the only work of his of any kind that I’ve been exposed to. (With the possible exception of some of the Psalty-sort of books, which I may or may not have read in Middle School but which I do not remember now at all.) What’s more, from what I can tell he is a professional writer of both fiction and non-fiction, whereas I am not a professional writer of anything and best serve the world by not writing fiction. Because the world can’t handle nuclear-powered vampire unicorns defending the White House from aliens riding dinosaurs! So take the compliments and the criticisms in this review with a giant bag of highway grade rock salt.

In some ways, Reflections on the Movies is refreshing. Published in 2000, this book is evidence that Gire clearly liked movies long before most Evangelical Christians. Specifically, he watched and enjoyed movies before Passion of the Christ cemented the “back to the theaters” movement begun among Evangelicals by Braveheart. In a time when many Christians refused to watch anything not completely sanitized in content and had a habit of burning Amy Grant albums, Gire was watching and delighting in the best that Hollywood and the indie markets had to offer. And he was engaging with these movies well. If this book is representative, Gire is a wonderful model of how Christians ought to watch and think about. He is thoughtful, careful, and generous in his interpretations of movies in a way that we would do well to copy. And even where I disagree with a specific reaction or comment (sorry, but Dead Poets Society was a pile of plop), I can’t disagree with the enthusiasm and, well, reflection he brings to the table. I get the feeling that he would be the sort of person I’d want to have come in and talk to a class or a university chapel service about how to responsibly consume popular culture.

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And yet, for all that I have some hesitation about his overall approach. Not that I think he’s wrong per se; I just think that it’s an approach I think needs some slight nuance. Let me give you an example:

The best way to understand what a movie has to say to us is to reflect on the moments that move us, for those moments open a window to our soul. Through that window we can look, momentarily, into the depths of who we are. What we may see is something in our past, or our future, or something in the present. We may see our hunger and our thirst. We may see our deepest fears cowering there. Or the wings of our most beautiful dreams nesting there. We may see the open sore of our woundedness. Or the beginnings of its healing. We may see our shame. Or our deliverance from that shame. We may see our sin or our salvation. (pg 44)

Gire contrasts this deeply personal engagement with “criticism,” which he sees as cold, overly-rational analysis that strips the movie of its personal aspects and to some extent inhibits our ability to tell a good movie from a bad one. After all, we can criticize anything, and may even have a preference for self-involved “important” movies that fail utterly to entertain when “criticism” is our primary filter for film.

Part of this is surely correct. Criticism wrongly applied can certainly gut the fun right out of film and leave nothing but a shallow cynicism that can only be fed by the most ironic foreign art films available. Delight in movies withers and dies when criticism dominates.

And yet, I think Gire may have over-corrected a bit here. It’s true that we should enjoy film on more than just the critical level—being personally engaged is essential, to be sure! But just as we should not elevate the intellectual over the emotional, so we should not elevate the emotional over the intellectual. The former makes us snobbish fans of terrible indie films; the latter makes us fans of Nicholas Sparks. Both extremes are to be avoided, and Gire gets a little closer to the emotional side than I’m really comfortable with (not that I’m accusing him of being a Nicholas Sparks fan!). What we need is a good balance of the heart and mind, and while Gire’s book is still good, at times he tips in one direction more than may be wise.

With that said, my hesitation here should not be allowed to overshadow the good aspects of this book. Again, Gire really is a thoughtful and interesting guide to the movies and I am quite happy to recommend this book to those looking for a place to start thinking well about film.

Dr. Coyle Neal criticizes film critics in Bolivar, Missouri, where he also teaches political science.

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