Originally Published on Facebook 7 November 2017.
Have any of you ever been in a multiplex movie theatre when the buses deliver church groups there to see the latest Kevin Sorbo film, which could be titled anything but which really does possess the unspoken subtitle, DON’T WORRY, YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING YOU BELIEVE, AND ALL THOSE ATHEISTS WILL EVENTUALLY FIND OUT THEY’RE WRONG?
I have. Three times so far, for different movies. It’s a spectacle.
The first thing you find out, about church groups arriving at the multiplex to watch the latest defensive film, WE KNOW ATHEISTS SCARE YOU AND IT’S OKAY, is that nobody goes for entertainment. They go because it’s a grim duty. They go because they have been instructed that all movies not based on this kind of subject are evil and that they are being bused in to show support for godliness in this temple of far more sinful entertainments. Nobody expects to enjoy themselves. They are grim-faced, exactly the way you are when you are about to go to an interminable church service with the father whose sermons drone on and on and on. They know that they’re not going to have a good time. Having a good time is irrelevant. This is duty. And so they huddle together, many of them in their church clothes, as if they just got off the train to Auschwitz and expected a selection at any moment. Many have permanently devoted one hand to holding a soft-cover Bible, and they clutch it with special fervency in the movie palace, because you never know; somebody may run up and take it.
The next thing you find out is how many of them know nothing about the modern movie-going experience. They express total bafflement at the prices, to start with, and they start by regaling each other over how much a movie cost the last time they went. Four dollars? You’re kidding! Last time I went it was two! Or One! Then there are the posters for the other attractions. The ones that don’t baffle them completely — who is a Transformer, exactly? Where is a Hunger game? What is a Jennifer Lawrence? Do you think that actor in that poster is Jewish? — horrify them; that one over there is rated R! Good Golly Miss Molly! How can such a thing be permitted? The posters for horror movies give them the vapors, and I am not talking about the posters for genuinely gory stuff, but even PG-rated material meant for kids, roller-coaster rides set in haunted houses that might actually be roller-coaster rides, soon, if Disney can clear up the space. The mere existence of this stuff, on any level, terrifies them. Those who don’t discreetly avert their eyes call the lobby’s attention to how scandalized they are so they can ostentatiously avert their eyes. It’s important for everyone else in sight to know that this is not their domain.
These are the elderly church ladies and their husbands, and often they have with them another group, kids, who fall into three categories. The first is those who are too young to have completely signed up, who are wide-eyed by the video games and all the movie images and vocal about the movies they would like to see if only they were not being dragged to this important duty: let’s say, some superhero incarnation. They are either talked over or told that their family doesn’t go see movies like that, we’ll pray over that when we get home.
The second group of kids is those who have gotten old enough to sign on, who are beaming and clean-cut and well-scrubbed and eager for the movie to impart all the lessons they are weekly told about the evils of secular humanism. These are sweet and charming and well-behaved and it’s difficult not to love them, from a distance.
The third group of kids are those old enough to sign up but who haven’t, and they are equally divided between the tolerant, the eye-rolling, the profoundly embarrassed (who make eye contact with all the civilians, apologizing for being with these people), and the angrily resentful (I am only with these people by accident). When I saw the group enter to see GOD’S NOT DEAD, MERELY COUGHING, or whatever it was, one of those kids said something to the effect that the multiplex was filled with a dozen other movies he actually wanted to see and that he was stuck being dragged to this shit, and his mother slapped him in the back of the head. Hard. Glowering with rage, he allowed himself to be dragged in to listen to more of the off-putting shit he listened to daily.
Again, the one thing this doesn’t look like, really, is like it’s a lick of fun. Maybe there’ll be fun, later, when they all pile back aboard the bus and head back to the church, where they will have a spirited discussion of what they just saw, “spirited discussion” meaning that they’ll all agree with what they just saw and that nobody will have a dissenting opinion. And they’ll be back in the theatre only after another movie of the same sort, or another filmed Bible story, arrives there.
And if you’re wondering why Kevin Sorbo will make a movie of this sort when nobody is actually enthused about seeing it, this is why. I have seen this, as I have said, three times. Church groups getting off buses. They go because they have to. Because those are the rules. I promise you, the makers of such films get fliers out to the churches and sell the idea that seeing these movies is a major moral stand, which these people take on out of dedication and duty and a whole lot of fear that any other kind of movie is made. The makers know exactly how much money this movie will make and so they know exactly how much to spend on it. While telling themselves it will outgross the current Marvel offering.
Three times I have been in quiet lobbies waiting for my film when these groups swept in. Three different groups. I am telling you all that changes is the faces.
Leave a Reply