I wrote in the fall about how watching movies well can help us develop a healthy curiosity about the world around us and the ways artists experience it. Part of becoming a skillful watcher of movies—not to mention an honest audience—is seeking to understand experiences beyond our own. Movies help us do that.
Shortly after I wrote that piece, I got interested in how movies also help us develop intellectual tenacity—a virtue that, for my money, is sorely lacking today. Intellectual tenacity is a sort of good-natured courage in the face of opposition, an unwillingness to let go of ideas without good reason, and certainly an unwillingness to let go of ideas merely because the crowd isn’t in favor.
Instead of tenacity, my social media feeds seem to indicate we’re much more prone to bullishness: an inability to encounter ideas different from our own with charity while also holding our ground.
What we often need is some tenacity: a willingness to embrace intellectual challenges because something greater than us—the common good, for instance—compels us to do so. Someone who is intellectually tenacious can have a conversation with someone who believes something else, and can even be a sparring partner for that person, without either having to consider that person inherently evil for their ideas or agreeing with them. The people I respect most have this virtue in spades, and also often are friends (or at least frenemies) with those with whom they have profound disagreements.
Intellectual tenacity is what allows us to persevere in the face of difficulty, and let me tell you, that is something that dedicated watchers of movies develop in spades.
Here is the thing: Hollywood’s biggest-earning films are designed not to challenge viewers at all. They may take viewers on a thrill ride, or scare them, or make them feel good about themselves by inspiring them or titillating them or flattering them.
This makes sense for two big reasons: one, the movie business needs to make a ton of money to keep going. And two, we often watch movies in order to sack out at the end of a long day. Heck, that’s what I do a great deal of the time. I work hard. I grade papers. I trudge through snow. I ride subways. Shouldn’t I get to turn my brain off for 104 minutes and just watch something blow up?
Yes. I should. Entertainment is not a dirty word. It’s nice to take a bath or eat some chocolate at the end of the day, and that is what entertainment sometimes does for us: make us feel pleasure.
But the problem with chocolate is that if you eat it all the time, you get fat. And American movie viewers, and especially American Christians, are often fat movie viewers.
The novelist Michael Chabon, who has also worked in Hollywood (most notably on Spider-Man 2 and John Carter), defends and redefines “entertainment” in an essay collected in his book Maps and Legends. He concludes with this:
Yet entertainment—as I define it, pleasure and all—remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from everybody else. The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience and the universal hunger for connection.
Entertainment, in Chabon’s view, is not a one-way street in which the artist or actor or filmmaker performs and the audience is entertained. He reaches back toward an older meaning “entertain,” one we use less these days: a sort of analogue for hospitality. When you have dinner guests over to your house, you certainly are giving them something—a roast chicken, a glass of wine—but you’re also receiving from them.
In this way, real entertainment is a lot more like a dance, in which the partners on either side of the “entertainment,” creators and audiences, have a “two-way exchange of attention, experience, and the universal hunger for connection.”
So what happens when you encounter a creator through a movie?
The thing about filmmakers is that they are people, too (really, they are). We often talk like movies are made by some kind of abstract monolithic beast called “Hollywood”—and I used it that way myself just a few paragraphs ago. A great deal of what lands at the local multiplex is movie-by-committee, a product produced to appeal to the widest audience possible that will pay for it.
But if we go by Chabon’s definition, that’s not really entertainment. That’s just junk food.
A truly entertaining movie tries to reach across the “gulf” Chabon refers to and connect with the viewer, provoking her to think about the world and experience it through the eyes of someone else: a character, a writer, a group of people, a cinematographer, a filmmaker. There is great pleasure in this.
But there’s also challenge to us. C.S. Lewis characterizes the work of the viewer as getting themselves out of the way. In other words, when you watch a movie, you need to get over yourself, at least for the duration. Just come and listen to what someone else has to say.
What does this all have to do with tenacity?
First, approaching a film in this way means that you must develop the patience and self-control to let the story unfurl at its own pace. You can think about this like you would approach walking alongside another person and letting them talk to you. As a New Yorker, I find this terribly difficult—I walk very fast and get annoyed with people who don’t—but it’s only when I slow down and walk at the other person’s pace that the conversation can happen.
That means you need a certain level of stick-to-itiveness for some movies. Plenty of great filmmakers prefer to let their movies happen slowly, dwelling on images and leaving breathing room. This is in stark contrast to our hyperspeed world, and it can require some recalibration for the viewer. But doing so helps us develop the ability to do that throughout our lives, approaching difficult texts and people with a cheerful, enthusiastic grit and determination. Few of us do this well on our own. It’s a bit of self-sacrifice that requires development.
Approaching a film as an exchange between people, us and the creators, also means that we can find ourselves in conversation with someone with whom we don’t agree. Maybe their political views are different than ours, or religious views, or our ideas about how the world works or what makes us human or what is funny or what is sad.
When that occurs, I find—especially among Christian viewers—that two things can happen. Sometimes we find those views threatening and decide not to consider them at all. We refuse to see the movie or to listen to it, because it doesn’t match up with what we believe.
Of course, in some cases, that’s necessary: to use Andy Crouch’s terms from Culture Making, sometimes we need to make the gesture of condemnation toward a movie that is manipulative or harmful to the viewer. I often find myself making this gesture, for instance, toward movies that denigrate human dignity through mindless acts of violence played for titillating effect.
But usually I find something more like this: viewers who refuse to see or talk about, say, a Bible movie that doesn’t tell the story exactly how the text has it, or stories in which characters believe there is no God listening to them. Or sometimes people just won’t watch a movie because it is “heavy” or “depressing.”
The second thing that happens is we become belligerent, fighting back shrilly against the perceived threat. This isn’t tenacity. Tenacity listens before it reacts, and it reacts in love, which 1 Corinthians 13 reminds us, is not self-seeking or easily angered, and which always protects, trusts, hopes, and perseveres.
Which brings us to an important point: just watching movies doesn’t help us develop tenacity (or curiosity or anything else). We must watch well, which is to say, watch reflectively. After you watch a movie, go find an article, review, or essay on that movie and read it, or better yet, read a few. Talk to a friend about it. Try to write down some of your own thoughts. Pay the artist and the movie respect by trying to understand what you watched and figuring out whether or not you agree with it—and if not, why. Let it work on you a bit. Don’t rush. Form your own opinion, and give yourself the time to do it well.
When we’ve developed tenacity, we’re able to consider objections to our own views and work through those objections carefully and respectfully until we’ve come up with a reply that we’re convinced is sound and solid. Sometimes I’ve even discovered that my views needed to be challenged. Sometimes I’m wrong. Tenacity makes room for that, but won’t let go of objections and considerations till it’s satisfied we’ve done hard work.
This all is not very comfortable. But as any athlete knows, pleasure and comfort don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. Sometimes real pleasure only comes when we eschew comfort. Proverbs 14:4 says that a barn without any oxen in it might be clean, but there’s a lot to be gained from an ox’s strength, even if it means more work. Similarly, staying comfortable in our movie viewing might make it easy to think our clean, clear-cut ideas are always right—but there’s much pleasure to be gained from reflective viewing that builds our capacity to persevere cheerfully and interact thoughtfully with ideas and people not like us.
Alissa Wilkinson is Christianity Today’s chief film critic and an assistant professor of English and humanities at The King’s College in New York City. She writes CT’s “Watch This Way” blog and tweets @alissamarie.