The Inklings and their generation are having a moment in the Evangelical world. Twenty years ago Jonathan Edwards and the Puritans were au courant (I know, I was part of that moment and even squeezed out a dissertation on Edwards). Now, it is Lewis, Tolkien, and the British lit crit crowd of the World War II era. Consider for example Crystal Downing’s recent book The Wages of Cinema: A Christian Aesthetic of Film in Conversation with Dorothy L. Sayers (out now from IVP).
This book brings together Sayers’ wider understanding of how Christians ought to engage with culture and a specific application of that engagement to the world of movies. If you’re interested in movies or in Dorothy Sayers, this is a good book to have under your belt. And, as I noted above, people are certainly interested in Dorothy Sayers.
What I’m less sure about is whether we are still interested in movies. We all know that theater attendance is down. And we certainly know that aside from a few genre-specific examples like horror, film quality has gone into a catastrophic decline the past two decades. I don’t claim to know whether the nature of the relationship here (is quality down because people aren’t watching? or are people not watching because quality is down? I don’t know…), but I know that this book comes at a moment when most of us simply aren’t watching movies. I actually had to stop and think what the last movie I saw in a theater was, and, well, it’s been a second. When we watch movies at home it’s usually a re-watch of something we already like.
To be fair, I’m no longer the target demographic for films. Since I’m not in the “male, 13-25 with disposable income” bracket movies are not made for me. But even that age isn’t going to the movies these days (or drinking, or having sex, or holding down a job). So I do wonder what shifts we need to make in our aesthetic sense if film isn’t something that is going to be driving our cultural landscape…
But, that’s a question for another book. If you’re looking for a way to think well about film, The Wages of Cinema is a great place to start.
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and teaches Political Science, Philosophy, and History in Southwest Missouri.
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