My congregation, The River Church Community in San José, California, is in the midst of a 30-day partial media fast. In our last two hours before bed, participants have committed to shut down phones, laptops, televisions, and other media devices. Instead, we are pledging to use the time for deep interactions with family and friends, or for fulfilling personal activities with God. We call it the “Challenge.” To me, the positive replacements have been more meaningful than the media negation. Using media doesn’t seem especially soul-killing.
Men, Women and Children shows us why our media fast is needed. The film is intended as a fictional exposé of our culture’s hidden sexual and relational sicknesses in the vein of American Beauty, and its particular focus is on the Internet. It feels a bit overwrought to me, but it certainly contains some truth. To the extent that the film is a true portrayal of America, we need to shut down our devices and tune into each other and God.
The film features several characters with interconnected stories, all hiding shameful Internet-enabled secrets; it’s like Crash with a different focus. The boy with the porn addiction is texting with the girl whose modeling website sells racy photos of her. That girl’s mother is starting a relationship with a man whose son discovers on Facebook that his mother, who abandoned the family a year before, is engaged to remarry. That son spends hours playing a video game on-line, but has finally found one “real life” relationship he cares about with a misfit girl at school, who has a secret on-line identity she hides from her mother, who watches every interaction she has on-line to protect her from predators. And so on.
All the interconnection ends up seeming contrived, I would say. Stories of many intersecting characters can work well, but there’s a threshold number past which they feel fake. Too many coincidental connections that add up too well. Men, Women and Children crosses that threshold.
Which is too bad, because one element of the interconnectedness does reveal a profound truth: generations tend to suffer the same problems as their parents. We Christians might call this “generational sin.” One father, even though he has kept his porn addiction secret from his son, he finds that the boy has been using the same material. The daughter who sells her modeling shots on-line is abetted by her mother, who justifies it as preparation for an acting career. The mother herself had gone to Hollywood to be a star, and she also had tried to use her sexuality to forward her career. That’s how she had become pregnant.
The characters of Men, Women and Children need to take the “Challenge.” To shut off their media connections for thirty days, even if just for a couple hours a night, would do them a world of good. The positive replacement activities would be even better: to talk to each other in “real life” about their real lives, to center on God as their source of joy and satisfaction.