https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GhTsxQ6XI9E
If you look at the big moneymaker movies, the ones that kids at UCLA and USC and the New York Film Schools teach you, the golden age of cinema and a lot of these movies tell stories that inadvertently retell the gospel. A more modern example from the 90s would be Robert Rodot’s Saving Private Ryan directed by Spielberg. Well, what’s that about? Well, it’s on the surface. It’s a World War Two story about a, you know, rescue. But the fact that the title is Saving Private Ryan and not Extracting, not, you know, Retrieving, and it’s not Saving General Ryan or Saving Major Ryan. The whole mission is for the least important guy on the totem. Yeah, and so… Going to get the lost sheep, basically. This is the lost sheep. It’s the 99 are leaving to get the lost sheep. And of course, Tom Hanks character Captain Miller hides his identity as our Lord hides his identity in the Messianic secret. And then we learn he’s a teacher and he gathers these apostles slash soldiers. Well, I’m sorry, that is a low density retelling of the gospel, the incarnation. He’s sent from a higher authority to go behind enemy lines. ET is another example. The first Spider-Man movie is a ringing endorsement of celibacy. Give me a break. Spidey is taken up to the tall building by the Green Goblin and essentially told, you know, bow down and worship me. All these kingdoms will be yours. Mm-hmm. I could… There’s this example after example. Yeah, I agree. And I think that what’s interesting in a way is that Hollywood are not… They’re doing it… They’re doing it for money reasons. They’re doing it because they either consciously or unconsciously have been able to tap into patterns which people connect to. And so the most kind of anti-christian director can put out a blockbuster movie, which actually tells the story of Christ and or tells a story of… At least a story that maps on to, let’s say, the Christian story. Yeah. You know, one of the movies that I talked about recently was the movie Logan where there’s so much symbolism of kind of the ascent up the mountain and there’s all this imagery of Moses and there’s even imagery of baptism and all these stuff is there in the movie. But I mean the people who made it are not Christian at all. Like they’re not interested in that stuff at all. But I think that what it shows is that this story… One of the things I tell people is that the story of Christ is really the story. You know, we have come to the story which as kind of encapsulates all the story into one story or all, let’s say, the meaningful threads of storytelling into one story. And it’s so big that people don’t even see it. We’re so used to hearing the story of Christ that we don’t realize how every single detail of that story is replete with reference. And it also… You can expand it so much and go back into the Old Testament and show people how everything Christ says, everything Christ does is echoed in the Old Testament and brings it all together into his story. It’s such an amazing story. And so it’s kind of like as the world becomes more anti-Christian, the underlying program of our society is still there and people still need it. So they won’t go to church, but they’ll go see a movie in which the Christian theme is replayed over and over because it’s not conscious. It really is this unconscious desire to connect with that story. Film going as liturgical event. Think of it. It’s dark. There’s a prelude. There’s music. It’s kind of quasi, almost a substitute worship. And I don’t mean that pejoratively. Yeah, I would call it a liturgy of the narthex, I would say. It’s a type of art that… Someone, Aiden Hart, who’s a British artist, he invented the term threshold art, which is art which can bring you to the threshold of the church. It’s like a movie is still entertainment. It’s not participative, let’s say, like prayer or worship or liturgy is. It’s still an entertainment. So you are removed from it, but it can bring you to the threshold. It can bring you to the door and then you can experience the fullness, let’s say, of the church coming together and participating in the story. Like when we participate in the liturgical year and when we participate in liturgy, it’s not an entertainment. We are actively engaged in the story of Christ which plays itself out during the year. So it gives you identity and it gives you a place in the world.