Pierced to the Heart

The ugly realities of life mean that, if film is part of engaging with life and diving deeper into the heart of God, we will encounter ugliness in film. But how much should we take? When is enough enough? Where should we draw the line? To begin with, let’s be quite clear: We should be discerning about which films we see. There are many films with shallow or ugly hearts — and they may be so even without having overtly objectionable language, sex, drugs, or violence. We could spend the time watching the film, but why? Principles for dealing with film content include:

• Sin is centered in our hearts, not our eyes. In the Sermon on the Mount and in His dealings with religious leaders, Jesus made it clear that we are sinful first and foremost because of what is in our hearts. If our hearts are not right, we are in sin no matter what we see. Conversely, if our hearts are doing well, simply seeing something does not necessarily engender sin in our hearts.
• We are told to expose the darkness to light. Paul said to expose “deeds of darkness” and Jesus said “be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves.” To expose something, we must talk about it, and film is a powerful medium for dialog. Yes, we want to talk about it in a way where we avoid sin, but talking about it, even via film, is not sin in and of itself. Sometimes, the best way to expose something as ugly is to show it in its full ugliness and say nothing more.
• We must learn the foreign language of those we would love. If a filmmaker is not a Christian, it is not surprising that they would be speaking in a language that is foreign to us. Neither is it surprising that friends and colleagues of other belief systems would connect with the filmmakers’ foreign language. If we would love them, we must learn their language. We cannot expect that they would learn our God langauge.
• Content discernment requires grace and forbearance. Portraying ugly content in film falls along a continuum from abstract, with few details, to visceral, with strong detail. We will differ in our sense of where along this continuum that any given scene in a film should lie — these are difficult choices. In love, we should be gracious toward a filmmaker’s choice, and all the more if the filmmaker is not a Christian.
• Ugly content should be ‘organic’ to the film. Ugly content in a film, whether it is profanity, nudity, violence, mysogyny, pride, prejudice, excessive luxury, or anything else, can be either gratuitous or integral to the film. Ugly content is gratuitous to the degree that it does not contribute to film’s core exploration of an issue — it is there for those that find pleasure reveling in ugly content. To the degree that ugly content is an integral part of the film’s exploration, it becomes organic to the film — part of the living fabric of the film. Yet still, we should have grace toward filmmakers’ choices.
• Content choices are between an individual and God. No matter what the general principles above may say about a film’s content, what we each individually choose to see is a matter of our own personal conviction before God. Something is wrong if we want to see a film because of the ugly content it contains. On the other hand, it does not require ugly content to send our hearts down a wrong path, so we may be more restrictive than others. Or, we may simply not be ready for things that others are watching.