I’m a pretty quiet person. If I go to a party, I’m the guy you’ll see standing by the ficus tree. If I go to a rock concert, I’ll be the one sitting down, clapping politely. Being a movie critic is about the perfect job for someone like me. I just watch and write, watch and write.
Who knew that watching a movie and writing about it could draw so much attention?
I reviewed Fifty Shades of Grey for Plugged In last week, and some folks thought that I shouldn’t have. Our Plugged In blog was deluged with readers taking us to task for reviewing a “pornographic” movie, and the whole flap was chronicled in the Christian Post and the Christian News Network.
I won’t say much about the controversy itself. Lots of folks wished I didn’t review the flick. Plenty of others are grateful I did. How that balance shakes out in the future isn’t up to me.
But I will say this: There are those who believe I should’ve written a Fifty Shades review (or some facsimile thereof) based on the trailer alone. It would’ve told me everything (they say) I possibly needed to know.
I was trained as a secular reporter and, as such, that just feels … strange. When I was working for a newspaper, I’d never dream about writing a profile on a politician based on his television ads. Instinctively, we understand that people have more complexity than can be communicated in a 30-second commercial. And because stories are all about us, they’re inherently complex, too. Even stories like Fifty Shades of Grey.
When I walked into the movie theater, I knew what I expected to see: A salacious, sex-obsessed mess of a movie—a movie I’d not like very much and never, ever recommend to anyone. That proved to be true.
But when I was driving home, I wasn’t thinking about the sex scenes or the sadomasochism or anything else that I expected to be thinking about.
I was thinking about brokenness. The hurt. The desperate desire of two people to find wholeness and wellness and even salvation, but who instead of asking for help from the only One who could give them these things, tried to find it all on their own. The result, predictably, is disaster. Because when we try to do things on our own—without God’s help—there’s nothing else it can be.
This blog is all about looking for God’s fingerprints in the stories around us—the stories we see in movies, in culture and in our own lives. In Fifty Shades, I saw a couple of people who desperately needed to see those fingerprints—but never thought to look.
In my Plugged In review, I wrote:
In Fifty Shades of Grey’s most brutal scene, Christian—driven by a compulsion even he can’t understand—decides he must “punish” Ana. He … begins hitting her with a belt, telling her to count as the blows land. “One,” she says softly after the first. “Two,” she sobs, tears streaming down her face. Her voice never rises, never finds a way past the very real physical and yet so very emotional pain.
When she reaches “six,” the punishment is over. She gets up, covering her breasts in embarrassment and humiliation—staring in horror at this half-man, half-monster she so cared for.
“Did that give you pleasure?” she hisses at Christian, each word covered in ice.
In the Bible, the number six is associated with man—his weakness, his imperfection, his fall. Strangely fitting, then, that Christian set the limit of his lashes at six, that his actions so clearly illustrate what happens when men try to fix their own brokenness. An imagined Eden is shattered, Eve covers herself in shame.
… This is a love story, it could be said. But any love story without God gets twisted into a broken, heartbreaking jumble. We go to extremes when we try to sate our leaking souls with the stuff of this world. When we don’t understand the love of Christ, we don’t understand love at all. We needlessly hurt the ones we think we love. We confuse words like honor and obey with subjugation and degradation. We have a monster within us, all of us. We make a mess of things.
None of this redeems the movie. But I’d not have thought about that element of brokenness had I not seen the thing. And maybe there’s a chance that someone—someone feeling pretty broken himself—might stumble across the review and be pointed in a better direction.
People can debate as to whether it’s necessary for a Christian movie critic to critique a movie like Fifty Shades of Grey. But now that the review is done, I’d like to think that God could potentially use it for good. I hope that He will. This job ain’t about me, after all. It’s about Him. I’m just the guy standing next to the ficus.
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