PROVOCATIVE, ENLIGHTENING, OR DEMONIC

Imagery is powerful. Whether through still art or motion pictures, they’re designed to tell the brain and heart something. It’s data, and it’s influential—whether for good or bad.

It can be provocative or evocative; enlightening or galvanizing. It can also be just plain tempting or demonic.

MAINTAINING OUR INNOCENCE AND MENTAL HEALTH

As humans, we have choices to make about the images we place in front of our eyes. Sometimes, the images that come into view are outside our control. But lots of times, the problem is clicking an unnecessary thumbnail, or the solution could be as simple as making the wiser choice of not being glued to any device in the first place.

As Christ-followers, it’s crucial to our spiritual growth that we take seriously what imagery we invite our mind to process. The devil is prowling like a lion looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8). In real-time, that means Satan is actively looking to devour our innocence, sobriety, or mental health with images that draw us away from the purity, love, and peace of God through Jesus Christ.

FEWER AND FURTHER BETWEEN

For someone raised in a family that loved watching movies together, and someone who has a Bachelor in Film, I’m not one to watch as many movies anymore. When a really well-implemented film is released, I love taking part in appreciating all the work that was required to make it a reality. Those types of films are, however, fewer a further between now.

For one, Hollywood films are, and have been, losing originality. The use of CGI (Computer-Generated-Imagery) in nearly all media is through the roof. Overall, storytelling through the medium of film is just not as inspiring or engaging as it once was. More importantly, however, is that most films nowadays are generally godless.

RELATABLE AND NATURAL

The incentive behind images created for the sake of human attention has taken so many turns that we can see the convoluted difference between a man riding on a horse (the first motion picture ever to be caught on camera) and the gratuitous violence and sex we see in today’s imagery, as well as the lack of meaningful stories Hollywood tries to sell while relying on overly enhanced visuals rather than the simplicity of what is relatable and natural.

MEANT FOR MORE THAN THE EYES

Again, imagery is powerful. It is storytelling after all. But the use of film for storytelling is meant for more than the eyes. It’s also for the heart, mind, and soul. Why else is the combination of effective writing, realistic set pieces, compelling character portrayals, intentional and structured pacing, as well as a riveting music score so necessary in order for an audience to truly experience a movie, rather than merely watch one?

At a point in history where people are questioning identity more than ever before, where gender ideology is a hot topic, and where the argument between theology and New Age/agnosticism is so ubiquitous, film and media’s graphic use of imagery plays a larger role in shaping our understanding of these titans of spiritual warfare than ever before.

PROMINENT ROLES OF TRANSLATION

What we put in our minds affects the way we think, feel, and live. Not just film, but also music, food, who we spend time with, as well as which speakers/podcasts/motivational speakers we listen to, and the belief systems we adhere to… these all play prominent roles in the translation of the input from our experience of life to the output of our understanding of our role in this life.

How we go about finding the answers we have about life, and what those answers actually mean based on which belief system we use to discover them, also plays a pivotal role in the way we embrace and imbue our understanding of God’s intended reasons for our lives and how we enact our impact on others’ lives while we’re still here.

IMAGE PSYCHOLOGY

This is psychological talk, yes, and film is psychological. Imagery is psychological, not merely visual. The image hits the pupil first, and then it penetrates the mind. What are we allowing or even inviting to penetrate our minds?

When the industry releases new content, it’s not just a reveal into the creativity of the writers’ minds, but a movement of the influence of placing images and ideas into the minds of every person watching. New images with real impacts on sometimes very docile and sensitive minds.

The process between the mind taking in the information from the screen and the interpretation or transmutation of that information into the unconscious mind, where it spreads into the way our minds perceive the world around us—this is what we need to be more alert about, more aware of, and more vigilant in keeping clean, sober, and disciplined.

BEHIND THE PSYCHOLOGY

To iterate the above point differently, any and all media images have an impact on the way we view life and the manner in which we decide to operate within it based on our “input translations,” and that is also based on the way we’ve learned to think about the information we receive from all our previous life experience up to the point in time where we have a new one. This is extremely, profoundly complex, and this is before we even walk into the movie theater or open Netflix/Amazon Prime/Hulu, etc.

Yes, there is a bigger point I’m building up to.

AMBIGUOUS TRAJECTORY OF THE UNKNOWN

For filmmakers to simply produce content that is popular for the undisciplined, unconscious mind is to use their creative genius for the purpose of grabbing attention, all the while ignoring that the attention-grabbing content doesn’t respect the incumbency of teaching an audience how to mature in their thinking; how to live healthier, how to understand what the essence of belief does with the way we live our lives.

It’s one thing for filmmakers to do their best to be as creative as possible, as that is required for such an art form in order for it to evolve and grow. It’s another issue entirely to use that creative genius to produce content that only adds more complex diversions from what is truly substantial for a person to understand about how to better decipher the knots of life’s mysteries.

Basically, we have storytelling, and then we have all the stories pointing to the same or similar ambiguous trajectory of the unknown, rather than showing us how we can use what we do know to live a different, better way.

UNNECESSARY MEDDLING

To be clear, I’m not trying to hint at the use of rating systems like the way we currently rate shows as TV-MA or movies as R. I’m referring to the fact that a lot of the content with ratings are unnecessary to begin with, and when we’re not carefully discerning what we watch, we’re intentionally invoking a dangerous meddling of our spirit. We may not even be aware of it because we’re not paying attention to why we’re placing those images in our minds.

LEARNING TO SAY NO

Sometimes it’s about learning to say no to what we don’t actually need that enables us to grow in our ability to live our lives a better way. And what better source to use to determine what’s necessary to say ‘no’ to than the Word of God, itself: the Bible.

Paul tells us in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 that the Bible is to be used for “teaching, rebuking, and correction, and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” Is the correction of our mind and heart not included in the process of being prepared and equipped for every good work that slowly trains us for our heavenly future with God?

AN IMCUMBENT WARNING

Is this not the equipping process we’re resisting when we ingest media celebrating vanity, blasphemy, slothfulness, violence, and confusion? If we can admit that the film industry, or that Hollywood overall does not have our best interests at heart, then we must receive their inadequacy as an incumbent warning to put on the armor of God by listening to and revering the biblical instruction to grow in discernment over what to avoid, and stay vigilant in keeping ourselves out of that line of fire (Ephesians 6:13-18).

RETURN TO THE ROOTS OF CHRISTIANITY

We are bombarded with a plethora of content from a ridiculous number of services, and we’ve grown accustom to ingesting more and more to the point where we’ve forgotten (if we ever learned to begin with) about spiritual awareness, intentionality, and the humbleness to choose God over self. We must return to the roots of true Christianity and revere God’s Word as the finality, not merely as an option to consider in passing.

To fear God is to understand wisdom comes when we let go of the confidence that we can lean on the world to tell us a caricature of the real truth that God already knows and is the author of. We don’t get wise on our own; we learn it from the source, which is in the knowledge of God; not the flesh-pleasing mirage of the vanity of humanity.

UNABLE TO EXPLICATE BIBLICAL LOVE

The film industry seeks our money and our favor, but it doesn’t accept the burden of self-awareness when it comes to the need of the viewer. Secular creatives carry no obligation to build within its image-making mechanism the device to grow its audience towards a more fully rounded view of what love is, where it comes from, and what we are actually meant to do with it. Honestly, considering they don’t use God’s biblically unconditional, sacrificial love as a reference, it makes sense why they fail to acknowledge the source of the transcendent nature of the very love they fail to comprehensively explicate in their storytelling.

FILMMAKING ESCAPISM

Imagery is so powerful that we can often treat it like a personal relationship, but it’s not strong enough to be a substitute for one. It’s very important that we recognize film doesn’t need to be escapism. That is to say, escapism in the sense that it becomes our space to forget about life, our responsibilities, or to put on the sidelines our need to understand God and hear from Him.

Rather than an outlet, film should be a source that provides the perspective and atmosphere conducive to helping us grasp the complexity behind our labored life experience by revealing through the images there is a purpose, value, and meaning behind the suffering we endure.

A MISUNDERSTOOD OBJECTIVE GOOD

Secular filmmaking merely intends to glamorize the hell we humans aim for when we live as though God doesn’t exist. We create radical visuals hinting at the apocalypse, or reference theological themes like objective good and evil—all the while, the industry proselytizes that we ought to do what we please with our lives rather than worry ourselves with faith, as if that ideology defines the understanding Hollywood has of objective good, which misses the very target it purports to believe in.

EMBRACING THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE

Many of us have managed to escape reality by consuming such large quantities of media that we’ve acclimated to living to forget that this life has nothing to do with keeping ourselves distracted from the theological foundations for human existentialism. Rather, we’re alive to embrace the adventure of life in faith that God will reveal Himself over time as we seek Him first before anything else. But we won’t learn that from TikTok or Netflix—that is only known after receiving God’s grace, and trusting in Him through His Word.

MANIPULATED FROM THE BEGINNING

The enemy, the devil—is hard at work keeping lots of people distracted from knowing God by planting seeds of naivety that we don’t need to know who God is if we can blindly enjoy our lives free of spiritual awareness and truth.

It’s the wise who understand arguing against the reality of God while living in an objective universe we can’t fully explain is not merely foolish, it begs questions that cannot be answered with the relativism of secular thinking.

The film industry plays on this secular thinking but mixes in some elements of Christian theology in order to make the “good guys” and “bad guys” likable or hate-worthy. We’re essentially manipulated into knowing right from the beginning who we’re meant to root for based on behaviors or attitudes we’re expected to instinctually “know” are right or wrong, even though every secular film with this very manipulation does not preach or attempt to sway our attention in any way towards the reality of an all-loving, omniscient, personal God.

ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

In other words, we have the framework of Christianity; good and evil, free will and the choice to do right or wrong… without its roots. That’s twisted. That’s what we feed hundreds of millions of people globally: a mismatched version of what Christianity actually is. We’re given a mirror of the framework (an incomplete understanding of objective right and wrong), lacking the core (Jesus), and then we ignore the elephant in the room (the argument that we cannot have an objective truth or an objective universe without God’s existence).

OUT OF CONTROL IN ALL DIRECTIONS

How can an industry use God’s creation of good and evil, of objective right and wrong to help an audience enjoy a movie, all the while avoid catering to the argument that there is a God in the first place? It’s the combination of creatives’ God-avoidance, an audience who doesn’t seek content that helps make sense of God’s mystery, and the devil consistently planting seeds on both sides of the camera so that we’re all learning different ways of thinking and believing—all the while ingesting more material that doesn’t assist with our way of processing the very information that has gotten us nowhere in the first place.

That’s Hollywood storytelling.

NEXT STEPS FOR THE BRAVE

Where do we go from here? We must have the vigilance to say no to what we don’t need. We must return to the holy Word of God that tells us what we need and don’t need so we don’t question ourselves. And we need to be shrewd as a snake, cunning and alert, but innocent as a dove where we find ourselves looking in the right directions for the right end results based on the mentality of Christ, and not the world (Matthew 10:16).

In this way, we can end the game of godless film studios only creating content pleasing for our eyes but toxic for our souls. We bargain by taking back our souls and letting go of the fleshly desires we’ve learned to cling to. We learn with the help of the Holy Spirit to see as God sees through us, to live as God lives through us, and to seek content that helps with our spiritual journey rather than causing detriment to an already damaged theological understanding.

REPENTANCE & BEAUTY FROM ASHES

We’ve already learned what life looks like by flooding our senses with entertaining images that aren’t meant to guide us to kingdom-living. Otherwise it wouldn’t be so exhausting and depleting, rather than fulfilling, invigorating, or eye-opening. Along the lines of changing the material we ingest is to understand that this very act of ‘turning away’ is also recognized in Christian parlance as repentance.

We repent of taking something more seriously than God, and we’re replacing the substitute with God, as well as resources (including film) that helps aid us with our spiritual growth, and not resources that burn up the progress we make. By repenting, we acknowledge God as most important, and we exalt Jesus as Lord over all as we turn to the narrow gate where Jesus is ready to make beauty of ashes (Isaiah 61:3).

WRITE YOUR THOUGHTS TO ME

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I’d love to read from those who learn something, or who find inspiration or a new thought that made a difference in their walk. It’s a blessing to read from people, even those who have differing viewpoints or beliefs. As a Christ-follower, it’s not my desire to only talk to Christ-followers, but to help all to see the love and truth of Jesus through my words, writings, and responses. May God bless you all as you continue on your journey.

Image by Brigitte Werner from Pixabay