Does Happily Ever After Exist in Hollywood?

The other night I went to a symposium on “church and beauty”. As terribly contrived as that title might sound to be deep or intellectual, it was an interesting lecture. The speaker (who by the way had two first names and referred to himself by both names) made correlations between art and Christianity. Some things he said were utterly fascinating with an amazing amount of insight. While other statements were left far too open ended as if because he said it, it doesn’t even need to be challenged. But that might be my preconceived notion that most intellectuals are so used to being in a class room setting that they never get challenged, therefore stop feeling that they need explanations for there ideologies…
Anyway in his talk he basically brought two scenarios of story foundations that he thought covered every popular story today… he put it that most stories fall into two categories: either “boy meets girls (and of course, vice-versa) and “a nobody rebel who makes good”.
He also made a fascinating parallel between our culture’s values and the stories we tell with their slow digression of morals… For example:
Beauty and the Beast. The original story was about a rich merchant with three daughters. Two of the daughters were selfish, self-centered and vain. The third was polite, selfless, and compassionate. One day through some trans-ocean voyage this merchant loses all his fortune and his family becomes impoverished. The two selfish daughters resent their father for it while the good one loved him all the more to support him. Through some turn of events the man’s fortune was later recovered and in celebration he asks his daughters what they desire. The two ask for gifts of jewelry and gowns, while the one asked for a single red rose.
The father returning from a journey one day finds a garden with beautiful roses and picks one, only to find that this rose garden belonged to a horrible beast! The beast after finding out he has these daughters makes a deal with the man that he will not kill him if he convinces the daughter of whom the rose was for to come care for the beast. The man agrees and to save her fathers life his one good daughter goes.
Time passes and the daughter falls in love with the beast breaking the spell that was on him and the two live happily ever after….
This stories moral was that good behavior and selflessness in rewarded while selfishness is never satisfied.
Contrast that with a Beauty (Bell) who’s first song in the Disney cartoon declares her superiority to her surrounding neighbors. Disney backs this notion up by not only making the entire village full of idiots but also making most people basically indistinguishable from the others. Bell is later rewarded for her believed greatness by actually achieving it and becomes queen over a town whose people are so brainless that they can be easily swayed into becoming an angry mob through a two-minute speech by another self diluted character, Gaston.
Disney effectively conveys that as long as you think you deserve something, you’ll get it. (Unless you have dark hair, then you’re a bad guy.) But working to achieve your goals or earning what you get is not important. In fact the character of Cinderella is now frowned upon as ridiculous or naïve. The idea that Cinderella’s principals kept her submissive to her stepmother and sisters is an idea almost unconscionable now at days.
The speaker made a much more detailed and compelling argument but said this to back up his main point in this section of the lecture …it is a lack of creativity that our arts become perverse and even dangerous. Like the pied piper who took the towns kids, the arts unchecked blur our direction for virtue and morality by caring away our sense of decency and duty. He sighted an idea in France from I don’t know what year that talked about regulating poetry and what is said. The reason was because the idea was that art was a window in which we see the soul of society. Just as any good poem can inspire you, a bad one can enslave you.
Of course he brought up Brokeback Mountain but only said that he felt artistically it was uncreative as if they took any other over played story line and made everyone nocturnal or some other arbitrary difference from normal stories.
I say all this because throughout his talk I thought about the film and theater industry. These people who spend a career pretending to be something they are not, speaking words written by other people, masquerading as lives that are not theirs become delusional and believe that they are bold in speaking out about things that they don’t understand. These misguided people have an ability to inspire people to believe past their surroundings but instead spend their time and popularity speaking out against injustices that exist in their sheltered little universe of morally inept peers.
If you can act well, you have an amazing gift. To be brave isn’t to take a roll that Hollywood deems controversial, or another roll that magnifies the worst part of our world and portrays it as commonplace. The brave path is to make sure that your ability to bring people into a character to inspire them to be better people.
What Hollywood does not want to accept also what enforces the idea that they are trying to create their own morality is the blocking, blackballing and or ignoring of original stories.
Passion of the Christ grossed $350,000,000.00 in the theaters and almost matched that on video. It was sold out weeks then days in advance for the first month it was out, breaking every box office record. Yet there was no talk of it at the Oscars or any other awards by the “entertainment industry” The hypocrisy of this industry crying the loudest about government cover-ups decides what is good and what is bad by what they determine good and bad not by actual ticket sales. They exalt the creators of Brokeback Mountain as if they were courageous to bring this love story to the public but had no difficulty with any one group about its opening. There was even a quote that said they were hoping for some uproar to help promote it and believed that Christians were trying to purposely ignore it so not to bring attention to it.
Lord of the Rings re-wrote J.R.Tolken’s King Aragorn as more rebellious so to appeal to a younger crowd. It was later changed back but again Hollywood thinks that things cannot be interesting unless they are rebellious, sending a message that you can’t be interesting unless you are rebellious!
Chronicles of Narnia: the original screenplay tried to write out Aslan as a lion! This movie grossed $300,000,000.00 without a word from any award organization! Instead the people who make movies were handing awards to themselves for the courageous release of an old story with a perverted twist of two men who fall in love with each other and then cheat on their wives. Unfortunately this story not only leaves the viewer with a distortion of real love as life long commitment would encourage but leave the viewer with a perversion of morality that “passion” somehow is such a pure virtue, that it trumps any duty or responsibility. Not to mention that this industry is the loudest proponent of born sexual orientation but is now advocating the natural interchangeability of one’s own orientation through two married men.

The point is people gravitate toward good stories that depict a world they want to live in but Hollywood is force-feeding a reflection of a deprived world because they have lost the ability to be truly creative.