Mediaculture: Reflections on the effect of media and culture on our faith

Films often serve as a mirror of the trends in our culture. As art, they also uncover certain realities we may otherwise ignore.

Among the films from last year on my top 10 list (see below) are several that deal with aspects of what could be called class conflict.

Perhaps most obvious is Inside Job, my No. 1 film, a documentary that looks at the factors affecting the economic crisis of 2008. Though not the best-made film of the year, it may be the most important, because it uncovers in detail the unjust, immoral if not criminal ways the financial industry took billions of dollars from people for its own interests. This global financial meltdown, which cost over $20 trillion and led to millions of people losing their homes and jobs, is still affecting us. And not much is changing, as the wealthy class continues to reap rewards at the expense of the middle class and the poor.

The Social Network, one of the year’s best-made films, also deals with a topic with wide implications for our social life: the beginnings of Facebook. It’s structured as a kind of class conflict between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who was hardly poor, and the wealthy twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Now Zuckerberg is among the wealthiest people around, ruling over the class-less Facebook empire.

Winter’s Bone takes us into a world that is foreign to most of us, as a 17-year-old girl in a poor rural area tries to keep her family together while searching for her lost father. Here the conflict is between what we see in this film and the kind of world we regularly see on TV or in films.

Let me skip to my No. 7, The Fighter, which tells the story of Micky Ward, who won the world light welterweight boxing title in 2001. He comes from a large Catholic family in a poor neighborhood in Lowell, Mass., a blue-collar town that catches boxing fever as it follows the fortunes of Micky and his brother, Dicky, a former fighter who has become a crack addict. While the film deals mostly with family dynamics, we again are brought into a world of violence and drug abuse, a world in conflict with our usual experience.

Waiting for “Superman,” another documentary, looks at our failing education system in this country. While many of the “drop-out factories” it names are in poor neighborhoods, the film shows how ineffective education spans class, affecting many of us.

Other films not in my top 10 reflect this attention to class. One is The King’s Speech, which tells of the struggle of the man who became King George VI to overcome his stammer. While many British films deal with class conflict, this one creates empathy for “Bertie” as he reveals to his speech therapist how he was treated by his father and nanny when he was a child. We are reminded that suffering affects all classes.

We in this country have tended to pretend we are basically classless, that everyone has equal opportunity to succeed. But the recent economic crisis and the growing (for decades) gap between rich and poor (see Miscellany, January) have tarnished that pretense. Great Britain, on the other hand, acknowledges its class divisions in almost every film made there.

One of the values of film (and other media) is that it can take us into worlds where we normally would not or do not have the means to go. These films introduce us to settings and characters that both reflect and challenge our experiences.

Gordon Houser, associate editor of The Mennonite.

BEST FILMS OF 2010
1. Inside Job
2. The Social Network
3. Winter’s Bone
4. The Secret in Their Eyes
5. Toy Story 3
6. Fair Game
7. The Fighter
8. Waiting for ‘Superman’
9. The Ghost Writer
10. Exit Through the Gift Shop
—Gordon Houser

BEST BOOKS OF 2010
Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self by Marilynne Robinson
Christianity: The First Three ThousandYears by Diarmaid MacCulloch
Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination and History by Dale C. Allison Jr.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: ANovel by David Mitchell
A Visit from the Good Squad: A Novel by Jennifer Egan—gh