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On the Vital Necessity of Having Fun At The Movies

On the Vital Necessity of Having Fun At The Movies

Last updated on: August 22, 2016 at 3:24 pm by Mary Pezzulo

On the Vital Necessity of Having Fun At The Movies 2016-08-22T15:24:18-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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So, it turns out that I’m the only person in the whole country who enjoyed watching Ben-Hur. That’s fine, and I will address why I enjoyed it in another post. But I want to take a moment to respectfully disagree with Kate O’ Hare (of Kate O’Hare’s Pax Culturati here on Patheos Catholic) about first reaction to Ben Hur. Writing last Friday, she didn’t endorse it for its good points, but because she thought we ought to buck up and financially support faith-based films. Her review was mixed and tended toward the negative, but she thought we ought to go see it anyway. Now, she’s since retracted her endorsement on the grounds that it was too generous to begin with, but I want to address what she originally said anyway– not as her statement but as a statement we hear all too often. We all too often hear, that we ought to pay good money for a ticket to a film we aren’t going to like, because the film is trying to convey a Christian message. In that way we are to encourage Hollywood to feed us another piece of no-fun art with a Christian message.

I vehemently disagree with that statement. I think we should hold faith-based films to the same standard as every other film and vote with our dollar for films we enjoy. You see, enjoyment is an absolutely necessary part of the aesthetic experience. Enjoyment is why art exists and why people care that it exists. Enjoyment is why we pay attention to art; it’s the way in which art coats its medicine. Art can’t do what art is meant to do if it’s not enjoyable. It’s not able to teach, heal, unify or accuse us unless it first grips us in the embrace of enjoyment. Yes, we ought to educate ourselves until we can enjoy good art rather than kitsch, but that doesn’t mean that artists shouldn’t try their hardest to make art enjoyable for a wide variety of people.

Enjoyment is the difference between standing in awe before one of Monet’s paintings of his water lilies, and having Monet accost you in the garden store to tell you how much he likes water lilies. Fun is the difference between watching a well-made production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and reading a tiresome scholarly essay about the values expressed in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Enjoyment and fun are the difference between choking down a bowl of unadorned raw kale once and never having the courage to do it again; and sauteeing kale with some excellent bacon, finding it’s nice that way, and having a healthy breakfast every day for the rest of your life.

Fun, you see, is a necessary part of a work of art. An object meant to be a work of art that is no fun for anybody is merely an artifact. And this is deadly serious business, because art is absolutely necessary for human life. We need art as much as we need food. Art is the natural language of the human person. It’s how we communicate emotion to one another; it’s how cultures sustain themselves; it’s the most natural means a human has of healing from the traumas of day-to-day life. Art is how we know ourselves, and knowing ourselves is something we must strive to do. Without art, we die. Without fun, we have no art.

So, you see, we can’t do without fun.

Now, this doesn’t mean that we don’t have a responsibility to educate ourselves so that we find fun in good art. We ought to. Food is also necessary for life, but we do have a responsibility to taste the bacon and kale and not eat strained baby cereal forever. You ought to read books until it comes so easily that reading the classics doesn’t seem like a chore. You ought to teach yourself about paintings until you can see why Picasso would go and do the things he did to the human form. You ought to stop protesting that you can’t understand what Shakespeare characters are babbling about, and let the beautiful words wash over you whether you understand them or not.

Still, if even after a thoughtful examination of a piece of art, you don’t find the art enjoyable, you can leave it alone. The piece of art has a responsibility toward you, not only to teach and heal you but to give you a good time while it does. You have a responsibility to look for the good time and to leave if you can’t find it. I found Ben-Hur to be a fun, campy romp like the Peplums of the 1950s. If you don’t find it a fun, campy romp, you have no responsibility to sit in the theater for two and a half hours because it’s faith-based. You don’t even have to buy a ticket to support the efforts of the artists. If the artists didn’t do something you enjoy, they failed. It doesn’t matter if they were trying to teach a moral lesson you agree with. If they didn’t do it in an enjoyable way, they failed to teach the lesson. Go home and watch Star Wars or something else you’d like.

The reason we go to the movies, is not to be catechized. It’s to view art. True art heals and teaches; it holds up a mirror through which we can repent. It doesn’t have to directly catechize. And if art catechizes without being any fun, it fails. You don’t have to bother with failed art that catechizes, any more than you have to buy a badly made and uncomfortable t-shirt because there’s a Bible verse stamped on it. It failed to do what it was supposed to do; leave it alone.

That said… I really did like Ben-Hur. But more about that another time.

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