Just a day or so ago, I made one of my infrequent trips to the theater. In my case, that means that I saw a movie. I have been to see live shows in the past, but those are things that I almost never see. It is hard to do what some people call ‘enjoy’ when you insist on analyzing everything that you come into contact with. Did Sherlock Holmes have this problem?

This may just be the lot of a stand up philosopher. I will see two movies this week, a real treat, and I will have more capacity to discuss inane theoretical implications of these entertainment media than I will explaining the films’ grade on the good or bad scale. That annoys some people who know me. Do I know anybody who is not annoyed by my inability to understand if a movie is good or not? You do understand that there is no law mandating that you have to know if you have a positive opinion about the quality of anything, don’t you?

Par for the course, I made an observation. Hollywood seems to have no problem expressing the existence of evil and its direct intervention in the daily lives of mortals. Movies can go so far as to depict the ultimate fallen cherub, Lucifer, without skipping a beat. The depictions are far from accurate, but they are allowed.

What Hollywood seems to have a problem with is the depictions of good. Aslan was written as the son of the ‘Emperor Over Sea.’ More than the king of Narnia, Aslan created Narnia, out of nothing. He gave High King Peter instructions on how the fight the White Witch before he went off. From the onscreen depiction, you would think that Peter was an indecisive coward. That is not how High King Peter was written.

The same could be said of King Aragorn in “Lord of the Rings.” King Aragorn was written strong enough to use the crystal ball that even Gandalf dared not to use. In the movie, the good characters are reduced to antiheroes. It is as though self esteem, the property that is most present in the villains, has been mistaken for virtue and honor.

There is a group of demons said to be the children of Lilith. They are the Incubi and the Succubi. Legend says that they will seduce their victims and kill them in their sin. This is a reasonable assertion because it would prevent a victim from seeking forgiveness. Why would Satan have a problem with killing people before they have a chance to seek forgiveness by grace? Killing people in their sin does not make a monster into a hero.

Hollywood both overestimates and underestimates the power of real evil. There is many orders of magnitude more evil in pride than in hate. We have been talked into forgetting this old lesson. But, we also forget that Satan, like Hollywood does have limits. Eventually, a real bounty hunter will be sent to collect Satan to begin his sentence in a prison that he never really had control over.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Mulligan Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.