To the 21st-century reader, the suggestion that cinema is a destructive and corrosive force will likely appear absurd. To attentive cultural critics of the early 20th century, however, it was all but self-evident.
You’ve heard it before, certainly: The screens are killing us. They play to our basest passions and appetites, rendering us passive, and almost subhuman, consumers; they inflame our desires for instant gratification and rob us of the practiced virtues necessary to restrain them. Those who resort to the screens open themselves up to the manipulation of the propagandist and the psychological operator, thereby imperiling their spiritual freedom. This danger of seduction is exacerbated by the fact that the screens cut us off from the real: the world of nature, from human community, and ultimately from God Himself. Indeed, they are creating a false religion of technology and sensation as a rival to the true faith. We must resist them now, before it’s too late.
Most readers of The Imaginative Conservative are doubtless sufficiently conversant with contemporary discourse on technology to recognize that the first paragraph’s assertions track closely with our current smartphone debates; many will detect echoes of older arguments from Neil Postman or Marshall McLuhan. But however much the criticisms I provided above mirror more recent technological anxieties, they were originally directed not to the smartphone and the personal computer, nor even to the home television set, but to a technology now universally accepted as neutral and even benign: the cinema.
To the 21st-century reader, the suggestion that cinema is a destructive and corrosive force will likely appear absurd. To attentive cultural critics of the early 20th century, however, it was all but self-evident. One need only read these critics to get a sense of just how alarming and disruptive the introduction of the cinema appeared in its day; as they saw it, the cinema destroyed earlier folk-art forms, robbed men of their leisure, and reduced them to a state of listless passivity. Fr. Conrad Pepler—an English Dominican largely forgotten today, but remembered by Aidan Nichols as “an outstanding spiritual theologian among a uniquely gifted generation”—worried about the immoral and sensational content of midcentury films, but still more the danger posed by the medium of film itself. When a man goes to the cinema, Pepler argued, “Little is asked of his intelligence; he sits passively in this unreal world.” Postman and McLuhan would approve.
Pepler was hardly alone in his concerns. Christopher Dawson—quite simply the most important Catholic historian and anthropologist of the 20th century—regarded the cinema (and its spiritual siblings, the Ford car and machine gun) as the embodiment of a modern culture that “destroys all that is best and most distinctive in the local and national cultures” while leaving them prey to greed, lust, and the desire for power. T.S. Eliot contrasted the virtues of the old, low-class music hall with the spiritual vacuity of “the cheap and rapid-breeding cinema.” The former, he observed, was a lively and communal affair. Music hall guests actively participated in its performance and joined in the choruses, and thus “engaged in that collaboration of the audience with the artist which is necessary in all art and most obviously in dramatic art.” By contrast, Eliot argued, the cinema offers nothing but a mind-killing flicker of “continuous senseless music and continuous action too rapid for the brain to act upon,” producing only “listless apathy.” Similarly, for C.S. Lewis, the cinema cuts “untrained mind” from “its only access to the imaginative world.”
Because of the cinema’s violence to art and its audience, it is only natural that is critics saw it as the herald of a new dystopian age. For Dawson, the cinema was the avatar of a new stage of Western culture—one that could not hope to endure, and did not deserve to. As he states in Progress and Religion,
We have entered on a new phase of culture—we may call it the Age of the Cinema—in which the most amazing perfection of scientific technique is being devoted to purely ephemeral objects, without any consideration of their ultimate justification. It seems as though a new society was arising which will acknowledge no hierarchy of values, no intellectual authority, and no social or religious tradition, but which will live for the moment in a chaos of pure sensation.
The loss of tradition, values, authority; the dominance of the sensational and ephemeral; the rise of scientific technique: Dawson’s Age of the Cinema simultaneously anticipates the modern dopamine economy and presents an almost perfect analog for C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man. This new tyranny of the sensational and ephemeral could not but have spiritual side-effects, as Pepler observed:
Indeed, the cinema does seem to draw the last drops of the life-blood of religion from men. Into those darkened temples the new faithful flock with a constancy that used to be devoted to the temple of the gods. There passively they are led to worship in terms of life and death, love and nature, sex and horror all drained of reality, shadows upon a wall.
The concluding Platonic note is of the highest importance. The history of Western Culture had been one of ascent: from ignorance to philosophy with Plato; from polytheism to monotheism with Abraham, Moses, and the prophets; from earth to heaven with the person of Jesus Christ. With the cinema, all that is undone. Man becomes by his own volition once more a prisoner in the dark cave—both physically and spiritually. Indeed, Pepler went so far as to say that a generation nourished “by the exotic and unreal sights and sounds of the cinema” would all but inevitably fall away from faith; in his view, imaginative restoration would be a prerequisite for religious revival.
So Dawson sees the cinema as a precursor to the abolition of man; Pepler, as a new paganism. For all this, it may be Eliot who provides the bleakest picture of the cinema-saturated future.
When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motorcars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories from a loudspeaker, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians.
In early twentieth century anthropology, the Melanesians were a byword for cultural stagnation, irrelevance and decay. Under the reign of the cinema, the citizens of the West would likewise wither: irrelevant anachronisms cut off from their roots, inhabitants in a world they cannot possibly understand. As C.S. Lewis said, “there is death in the camera.”
What are we to do with these concerns, a century or so on? It is of course tempting to dismiss them out of hand as hopelessly antiquated, Luddite, or perhaps simply snobbish. We might observe that the cinemas are here to stay, and not even the crustiest reactionary suggest getting rid of them. After all, we have seen (as the authors above did not), the rise of highly intellectual film criticism; even T. S. Eliot might hesitate before accusing Anthony Lane of “listless apathy.” Moreover, we know just how quickly and easily the cinema could be adapted to Christian ends and accommodated within the Church: Pope Paul VI was a cinephile! Pope Francis loved Babette’s Feast! The Passion of St. Joan of Arc, The Passion of the Christ, and now The Chosen!
And yet, are we quite sure that there is nothing to the concerns raised by these wise and good men—that their observations about human nature and the nature of the cinema are entirely baseless? If not, the universal and unquestioning acceptance of the cinema in our society should at least give us pause and teach us to adopt a more critical and cautious attitude towards innovations in technological communication—whether the smart phone or the television or even the silver screen. “Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves,” Tolkien’s Gandalf reminds us.
What does this mean in practice? Here I offer no sure and approved guides, but only reflections from my own experience. I cannot help but observe that the thickest, most wholesome, and most edifying community I have ever been a part of—that is, the Anabaptist congregation in which I was raised—was decidedly screen-skeptical. In my early childhood, home televisions were a rarity and viewed with suspicion; cinema-going was prohibited outright. Minimal screentime left more time for things that actually mattered: four hours at church on Sundays and another service on Wednesday night; youth group hymn-singings every night of the weekend; the occasional Bible study, service project, or potluck on ‘off’ days. Nor can I fail to observe that the communal life and identity of that community appears much weaker today than it did forty years ago—or to notice that this weakening at least coincided with the community’s increasing adoption of screens.
Correlation does not imply causality, but it can at least invite the question—if we have the courage to ask it. Even asking such questions is, at this stage in history, a countercultural act. Generations of advertising have conditioned us to ask only what we will do with a new technology and what it will do for us: make money, write the email, be entertained, reach souls for Christ. We must learn, again and again, to ask what the new technology will do to us. Before an individual or a community habituates itself to an innovation, they should pause to consider: what will this technology mean for me, for my community, for my relationship with Christ? Will its use make me a better, more integrated person, one wholly alive— or rather the opposite?
We may not be comfortable with the answers that come from the asking. But how else will we know? As Eliot observed almost a hundred years ago, survival itself may be at stake.
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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.