Hollywood may have been unwilling to honor Mel Gibson for his blockbuster The Passion of the Christ, but it is definitely willing to cash in on the success of his movie by scavaging religious imagery to plump up otherwise thoroughly secular films:
"In the summer blockbuster movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith, from 20th Century Fox, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play godless suburbanites and professional assassins. But when they steal their neighbor’s car for an extended chase scene, a crucifix hangs conspicuously from the rear-view mirror, and in the next scene the actors wear borrowed jackets that read ‘Jesus Rocks’ as they go on the lam.
"’We decided to make the next-door neighbor, whose crucifix it is, be hip, young, cool Christians,’ explained the movie’s director, Doug Liman. ‘It’s literally in there for no other reason than I thought: This is cool.’
"Liman isn’t alone. Mainstream Hollywood, after decades of ignoring the pious — or occasionally defying them with the likes of Martin Scorsese’s revisionist Last Temptation of Christ and Kevin Smith’s profane parody Dogma — is adjusting to what it perceives to be a rising religiosity in American culture."
Uh huh. Sure.
What these Hollywood types don’t seem to understand is that Mel Gibson’s movie succeeded because it was sincere. It wasn’t aimed at milking the presumed "religiosity" of a target audience. (Had it been so crassly targeted it would have been far less overtly Catholic in its appeal to an overwhelmingly Evangelical Christian audience.) But draping a crucifix on a mirror and stuffing pop icons into "Jesus Rocks" jackets is so patently patronizing as to be immediately scorned by the audience whose bucks Hollywood wants.
Christians, in the eyes of Hollywood studios, are handy milch cows but are not worth taking seriously.
Interesting: A catholic complaining about being patronized. Now that’s a good one.
What on earth is that supposed to mean?
I saw this story in the paper, and my first thought was, “So the cool Christian character in mainstream Hollywoood is in the same position as the homosexual character of 25 years ago.”
In other words, the story’s not about him, but he can be the next door neighbor. Maybe in another five or 10 years he can be the best friend. After that, who knows?
Kidding of course. The Hollywood of 25 years ago gave us peripheral gay characters because they were trying to slowly help us become as broad-minded as they are. With Christian characters, they think they’re being broad-minded throwing us the bone of a peripheral Christian character.
P.S. Sharing the incomprehension of Liberman’s puzzling remark.
“Interesting: A catholic complaining about being patronized. Now that’s a good one.”
Has all the profundity of a left wing jelly donut.
Patronising being the key word there. I’m very tired of the ‘hollywood knows better than you,’ bull. They don’t have a sincere bone in their bodies. They wouldn’t know what sincere belief was if it dropped an anvil on their heads. SO until they’re willing to actually engage “middle america” on our own terms, and not keep living in their “coasties” little world… their lame attempts at portraying “normal people” are going to fall flat.
My wife and I saw the film over the weekend. Anyone who thinks the jackets are meant to be complementary toward Christians is kidding himself. Pitt and Jolie put the jackets on because they have nothing else to wear and the jackets happened to be in the car they stole from their neighbors — the joke is in the irony of two cool people like Jolie and Pitt reduced to wearing something so goofy. I also noticed that the jackets come on about 20 seconds after Jolie, in an exchange of secrets the couple has kept from each other for many years, confesses to Pitt that she’s Jewish — as if either of the assassins gave religion any thought at all.
The movie is enjoyable over all, but the religious references, if anything, presuppose that the audience cares as little about religion as do the people making the film.