The film certainly divided the audience in that theater. The man to my right stood up during the closing credits and told his girlfriend that it was the worst movie he’d ever seen. My friend, who sat to my left, not hearing this comment looked me in the eye to state that this was “The End of Cinema.”

He did not mean that this was the concluding chapter in the history of film, but that what Malick had done in his intensely controlled, but emotionally lush, thematically rich combination of visuals, dialogue, sound and music is the very thing that cinema was uniquely designed to do. Cinema found culmination in this work. The Tree of Life could not exist in any other form. It would not be a good book. It certainly isn’t a song. Impossible as a stage play. It does and can only ever exist as film.

Three years before the The Tree of Life was released, in 2008, I saw trailers for the Wachowski Brothers’ Speed Racer. It looked stupid. The ridiculous saturation. The cliched lines. Unintelligible flashing lights trying to pass for action. And after the profound disappointments of the Matrix sequels and V for Vendetta, I had exactly zero interest in seeing it. If I had any doubts in my resolve and had cared to read critical reviews (which overwhelmingly panned it), I would have been steeled in my opinion that this was not a film worth my time.

Here we are 18 years later, and in that intervening time, I never stopped hearing voices—often of those I respected deeply—using phrases to describe the film as a “misunderstood masterpiece” or “an avant-garde blockbuster that was too ahead of its time.” I saw Jupiter Ascending—the first film I ever hated—and read about the travesty of Cloud Atlas, which continued to affirm my opinion that The Matrix was a fluke and the Wachowskis have no actual talent for filmmaking.

But the voices didn’t stop. “The greatest racing film ever made.” “Should have won the Oscar for Editing.” “An art-house film disguised as a racing movie for kids.”

So this past week I caved. I teach high school film classes. It was Senior Ditch Day and AP exams were happening at the same time, which meant my class attendance was virtually non-existent. Why don’t we give it a go for the few stuck in the screening room with me?

I’ll say it. “I was wrong.” And I have never seen anything like Speed Racer.

In the final racing sequence of the film—amidst a blur of flashing lights, blurring lines, car sounds and flashbacks—I was surprised to recall my friend’s statement about the The Tree of Life as “the End of Cinema”. And in one particular moment during which I could no longer parse individual images—even if the film where paused, I could not tell you what I was looking at—I still had no doubt what was happening. It was emotion painted on celluloid, and in total service to the story.

But it is not just speed and overwhelm on display. Michael Bay is another filmmaker often, and perhaps rightly derided for form over substance, but I would defy anyone to claim he isn’t a master of visual exposition. The opening of Armageddon is case in point. Several storylines kicked off with minimal dialogue and zero confusion. It may not change you, or ask anything of you, but for what it is, it is masterful. So too here we see the visual medium used in ways to create meaning in exclusively cinematic ways.

Speed Racer is not the first to utilize the techniques that it champions, but is the only film I’ve seen to make it part of it’s essential vocabulary. What other filmmakers might do once in their film with a wink and played for laughs, the Wachowskis fully commit to. Instead of shot-reverse-shot, in a film about speed, why not just whip the camera from car to car.

Is it ridiculous and over the top? Absolutely. Does it play perfectly into the momentum and emotion of the moment? Absolutely.

It’s fun to imagine the early pioneers of film being confronted with the pure cinema on display here. What would the Soviets, who theorized techniques of film editing based on the limited film processing techniques of the 1920s and 30s, say when faced with the vision of a character as a child, transitioning to a shot of the same character as an adult via the head of a character in a third location providing commentary that contextualizes both shots at the same time?

A cocktail of Pudovkin’s “Parallelism,” showing two different incidents occurring at the same time, his “Simultaneity,” which we commonly refer to cross-cutting between two scenes happening at the same time, “Leitmotif,” which repeats shots to create a cumulative meaning over the course of a film, all assembled in a comprehensive blend of Eisenstein’s “Metric,” “Rhythmic,” “Tonal,” and “Overtonal” montage.

Buckle up, Comrade.

To put a fine point on it—the strength of this film is the editing. With perhaps the exception of some quieter family moments, every single shot is planned to the nth degree because of an intricate tie to the shot that comes before and the shot that comes after (or, as seen above, simultaneously!).

Lest anyone walk away from this with the impression I think The Tree of Life and Speed Racer ultimately stand on equal footing, I’ll say clearly: The Tree of Life is the sort of film you watch, rewatch, digest and walk differently afterwards. Speed Racer, well, not so much. Though it is worth saying out loud that despite the incredible play the Wachowskis use in the film, there is a genuinely sincere core, which is perhaps why the film works. Every other film I’ve seen where “MORE!” felt like the guiding principle could not take itself seriously at any point. And yet, at the center of this story is a nuclear family who cares, who expresses care, and who stick together. The filmmakers don’t seem to be winking at the camera either—”See isn’t this cute in the middle of this chaos”—and I think it serves as a landing place for minds and senses overwhelmed by the rest of the movie.

Will Speed Racer endure? I don’t know.

Is Speed Racer the “End of Cinema?” Hardly.

But I do believe Speed Racer is a place where many could rediscover the play that ought to be present in a work of art and to be inspired to continue to push the medium to create greater meaning and joy in the stories that are told.

Watch this silent, 8 second video excerpt from John Hess' awesome Filmmaker IQ series.

Now reflect on how you felt and what you thought about as you watched.

I'll presume you thought something like "that man was confident, was attacked, then afraid." Maybe you felt vicarious fear on his behalf.

If I'm correct so far let me highlight some assumptions you made.

1. That the man and the gun were in the same place. Do we have confidence that the gun wasn't in Brazil and the man in a research lab in the arctic?

2. That the 3 shots you saw happened sequentially. We assume we are watching things as they happened. Why?

3. That the man is reacting to the gun. Perhaps he is watching a woman across the room trip, and she is try to prevent spilling a bowl of pasta.

4. That something happened before this scene with the man and the attacker.

We could go on, but what is extraordinary about this video (and as we will see, any video that features editing) is that the sequence of shots generated ideas and feelings in your heart and/or mind and you didn't question how it did so.

Let's do it again.

You're likely more aware now of your thoughts and feelings, but isn't it interesting that the EXACT SAME CLIPS, REORDERED, can create an opposite story? More accurately you created an opposite story in your interpretation of the clips.

All of this is happening on a pre-conscious level. You did not reason your way through the 10 seconds --

I see a man. He looks afraid. He likely is afraid. I now see a gun. It seems spatially oriented toward the man. He is reacting to the gun. He is afraid of the gun. etc.

By constant exposure to moving images, we have been trained to intuitively understand the operation of film and video. (Though I even wonder if one who had never seen an edited film, would correctly process a scene when seeing it for the first time.) When an edit occurs, we understand there is a connection between the shot that comes first and the shot that follows. Though it may be more accurate to say we feel a connection between the shots. In the viewing of a film, we are not building an argument, but being guided, even manipulated, on an emotional journey. When editing is done well (and all the other elements of production are working), we are guided right along with the intention of the filmmaker.

So what is the effect of repeating such emotional journeys?

James K. A. Smith, in "Desiring the Kingdom", argues that we are liturgical animals. To (hopefully not too grossly) reduce his argument: Our actions are not primarily a result of an unending chain of rational choices, rather a pre-rational movement toward ingrained desires or "loves." Our loves are shaped by liturgies (and here he uses liturgy not just to describe Sunday morning services, but any activity, secular or sacred, that shapes and aims our desires and thereby forms who we are.) A liturgy might be watching TV after coming home from work, at which point we expose ourselves to various competing images of "the good life." Notice that it's been many years since commercials made arguments for their products. As Smith posits, they've discovered by simply presenting their products within a vision of "the good life as seen on TV," we, who see that vision possibly once every half hour, begin to desire that life and implicitly sense that we need that product in order to achieve it.

I used to believe myself immune to the world of advertising. I worked as a video editor. I knew the tricks advertisers used. I knew their arguments were non-sense. Until one day my wife asked me to buy laundry detergent. I approached the cleaning product aisle and scanned the dozen or so brands of detergent. I focused in on Tide and the generic brand. I told myself "I don't want the cheap stuff." I reached for the Tide. "What's the difference? Is the other cheap in price or actually quality?" I stop and scan the bottles. "What makes a good detergent?" I have no idea. "I'll just get the generic brand." I grab it and begin to walk away, but my gut tells me I've made the wrong choice. My gut speaks "Do I really want my wife to use a laundry detergent that will not produce the happiness that comes with 'the good life?'" I buy the Tide.

This was not rational. But I felt little choice.

***

As I teach Film Studies at a Christian High School, I hear a lot of conversation about and guidelines for film viewing. They mostly boil down to "avoid sex, violence, and profanity. And make sure the 'message' is good." These guidelines might have more nuance, or context, but the driving idea is that if we watch representations of evil, we will be more inclined to evil, with the assumption that representations of evil always operate on the surface level or that they can be uncovered with a critical reading of the film's subtext. And we ought to avoid such representations of evil.

For example, in an imagined film version of "Crime and Punishment" we watch Raskolnikov murder Alyona Ivanovna, the pawnbroker. Assuming our students believe murder to be wrong, they could reason "Alyona did nothing wrong. She should not have been killed. Raskolnikov is a murderer and has committed evil." This would require little more than "looking skills" and a moral center. We could demand more of our students and in a critical reading of the whole film we might conclude that the filmmaker himself believed the murder to be wrong and was using the scene as a piece of his "argument." This reading would recognize actions in the story as illustrative of ideas which combine and contrast to create subtext. Neither reading would be necessarily inaccurate.

So what more do we want? The student has wrestled with the moral implications of Raskolnikov's actions and placed them in a larger worldview context.

In the aforementioned example, we equip our students to recognize the communication of text and subtext created by parsing actions inside the story. But we completely ignored stylistic subtext. Imagine if Quentin Tarantino directed the scene. What we could possibly get is a story that says "this is wrong", but as the film cuts from closeups of the knife, to the glee on Raskolnikov's face, underscored by a soul stirring piece by Quincy Jones, we find our hearts saying, "Hell yes!"

Are the edits and production elements able to be turned into truth claims that we might analyze and assess their validity?

Or, to deal with a concrete example, how might we turn either of the video clips at the beginning of this essay into a syllogism so that we can analyze its truth value?

I don't believe it's possible. Because the edits are not engaging us on a rational level. They are aimed at our heart.

Imagine, or better yet, remember a time when you screened a film for violence, sex and profanity and discovered it had an acceptable amount to view by yourself or with someone younger than you. The film begins and we see a great injustice served against the protagonist. Over the course of the film the protagonist overcomes enormous odds until he finally confronts and (in a PG way) destroys "the bad guy." We cut from the bad guy's look of defeat to the protagonist's relieved face. Our heart rejoices, we might say, because "justice is served--and God loves justice." How often do we see this same pattern? Like water carving a path over time, each destruction of a "bad guy" in such a way orients our hearts to rejoice in his or her destruction. We wait for the Pavlovian dopamine kick as we watch their final downfall. In this way, it serves as a liturgy. But where else is it directing our hearts?

I'd argue that when we watch such a scene, we are not engaged in rational consumption, perhaps weighing the wrongs against the justice served. We are already emotionally connected to the protagonist. We want what he wants and receive the denouement with pre-conscious rejoicing.

It's one of the reasons "Continuity Errors" pass so often in film and television. It's often not that the editors didn't catch it, but that they gambled (most often correctly) that the viewer would be tracking with the film emotionally and the take with the continuity error would better serve the emotion of the scene than trying to be spatially accurate.

So what?

Another article would be necessary to begin an outline of what Christian Education ought to achieve -- Though I'd point any curious reader to James K. A. Smith's "Desiring the Kingdom" as an extremely thoughtful place to begin. But I'd propose that one goal ought to be equipping students to parse and dialogue with the media they encounter in the world--the media which is shaping their hearts and loves.

We require High School students to take 4 years of English courses. Partly, because it is the language we speak and the study of it will allow students to communicate more effectively. But I also believe it's founded on the idea that the written word is where students will encounter and dialogue with culture. I sometimes informally poll my students at the beginning of a school year. "How many of you have read 5 books this year?" Maybe a hand or two. "How many of you have watched at least 10 videos this morning?" Most hands go up. The written word is not the place our students (or let's be honest, most of us) are spending their time. And yet, as they dialogue with film and tv, their equipping has been "watch out for Sex, Violence, and Bad Words."

Like they study grammar in English, to train students to understand the way film and television (and Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok etc.) are orienting their hearts, they need to understand the operation of film and television which at bare minimum is the juxtaposition of images over time to create an emotional response to what is represented on screen. And they should understand that the emotional journey, good or bad, wears grooves into our hearts that will eventually direct our actions.

Students, or people, will never be able to watch film and TV on a purely rational level, nor do I think they should. There is great beauty in the emotional journey film can take one on. But as students begin to reflect on their loves, their visions of the good life, if they are not able to parse the formation of their desire through a medium they encounter daily, if not hourly, they will be woefully unequipped to the task. Alternatively, and more importantly, they will not be able to train their hearts to love a beautiful vision of the good life.

The short answer to the question, I believe, is that every element in their production is suffocated by "The Message." At the end of the day, the important thing is not that the employee was entertained or see the great plain of human potential open before them, but that he fully understands that he should not take money out of the cash register, or that she knows the proper way to disinfect a conveyer belt or that coworkers know protocol for announcing an office relationship. Anything that gets in the way of this message theoretically increases the probability that an employee will steal, improperly disinfect, or engage in illicit, covert office romance. Therefore, anything that dilutes the message must be cut.

And I think this is probably fine for the medium of the training video.

But what about films? Shouldn't they communicate good messages?

The issue is that I believe many of the greatest films don't have "a message." Certainly they have a point of view, but in many of the movies I love, the point of view is aimed at a question.

Martin Scorsese's "Silence" is a film I think about often (and already wrote about here). It's the story of two 17th Century Jesuit Priests who smuggle themselves into Japan to preach the Gospel. What they find is that the Christians in Japan are brutally persecuted. The priests are caught and expect the same or worse, but instead discover the Japanese won't touch them. In fact, the protagonist finds he is treated like royalty—with the exception that he is forced to watch the peasants who ascribe to the faith he preaches suffer until he, the priest, recants. And so the priest is forced to consider "Is the preservation of mortal life more valuable than preaching what I believe to be true with all my heart and in fact the key to eternal life? And if I don't preach, will those I have preached to hold fast to the faith? And if I recant and stop their suffering, will they even still hold fast? Am I causing the suffering? Would Christ approve of my decision? Why won’t HE just give me an answer?" By the end of the film we don't have much in the way of answers. Martin Scorsese has said he believes in the Gospel and that the ending of the film is hopeful. But it's not easy and if I were forced to identify what it was saying, I would list off questions.

Film, done honestly, allows it's characters to live and breath and move in ways that might not cleanly support a moral system. But by allowing them this freedom, we gain insight into what makes us human which in turn allows us to test and better understand our moral systems (and so much more!).

I'm going to risk offending here, but I believe all of this directly relates to faith based movies as a genre. In the days when movie theaters were open, I liked to go to the theater and try to identify the faith based films by the first 30 seconds of the trailer. It was always easy because "The Message" was basically announced from the very beginning and hammered home throughout the 2-3 minute runtime. When you get to see the actual film, you discover that the message is no more nuanced.

In fairness, I've heard that the Kendrick Brothers, for example, do not consider themselves to be filmmakers, but preachers who use film. And so why would I hold them to any other standard?

For me, it's just such a violation of the power of film.

Roger Ebert wrote that film is "a machine that generates empathy." In no other art form are you so literally forced to see the world as another sees it. Unless you turn from the screen, you are seeing a story from the angle the storyteller wants you to, in the timing the storyteller wants you to, focusing on the subjects that the storyteller wants you to. Why would we use this power to point the camera at 2 dimensional characters who have no life outside of driving home one very specific moral idea? Why use a feature length film to do what 2 sentences could do more clearly?

I guess it can be entertaining... But it also just becomes another sort of training video, though instead of making cheese burgers, it's instructing you how to be a good Christian.

But what if, instead, we point the camera at our best attempt to capture human beings and the struggles they have with the wild complexity of this fallen world--particularly as they try and follow their moral compasses, to do what is good, to pursue "the good life"? I think this is what the Bible does (and as an aside, I'd point out that the "heroes" of our faith fall short of the clear demands of God's law far more often than the heroes of faith-based cinema).

Can we talk about Abraham being asked to sacrifice Isaac? I get the parallel with God the Father and Jesus, but we can't just leap over the fact that God adopts the voice of Moloch and demands Abraham murder Isaac for no discernible reason outside a test of faith. Truly, I believe in the goodness of God, but I have questions, and I defy anyone to give me a simple explanation for what's going on here. To simply jump to "God will provide" and not to sit in the middle of these questions that certainly Abraham wrestled with is going to short-change us a lot of what the Biblical narrative has to offer.

Christ uses narrative to speak of himself in scriptures, and when does the parable not end with something like "The disciples didn't understand what he was talking about." (Luke 9:45, Luke 2:50, John 10:6, Luke 18:34, John 20:9) Was Jesus a bad communicator? Should he have cleaned up his story to make the message clear?

Let me be clear-- none of this is an argument for lack of clarity as a mark of greatness. And then to return to an earlier distinction-- I think great film does have a point of view, which requires solid beliefs about reality and people. But I believe rather than forcing characters to jump through hoops to prove a moral conclusion, the film allows them to work through human problems in messy ways that might not leave a clear answer at the end, but if it's honest and we wrestle with it, will actually illuminate the moral obligations and challenges in our own life.

If we are trying to prove a point, or convey a message, through film, it's as if we were forging a path through a jungle and focusing exclusively on our destination and the path to it. If someone comes behind and is either not interested in the destination or is starting from a different place, what good or even interest is it to them? Like the training video, if the viewer isn't trying to learn to use the deep fryer or even trying to work at McDonald's why bother with it?

On the other hand, creating a character and sending them off in pursuit of a question is like tracking a wild creature through the jungle. We don't know where they'll go, and it will be messy and we'll probably get hurt, but we'll discover so much along the way. We'll cross dozens of well worn paths. And we may actually still end up where we wanted to go in scenario one. But the thing is, we've been led by a desire for discovery. We haven't forced the journey. Because we're willing to earn some scars, we'll discover realities and beauty far outside our comfort zone. And because of the paths crossed, we will find many other sojourners to invite on our journey through this great "empathy machine". What a powerful place to start loving our neighbor.

One more clarification--I do not mean that the work in pursuit of the question is not focused, or refined. Take "Jurassic Park" as an example. Whether it's Steven Spielberg or Michael Crichton asking the question, I feel the film is exploring man's relationship to nature, particularly in his role as "Scientist." And from the opening shot we see man literally facing off with nature.

How man should respond to nature is carried throughout the film. The Lawyer, the Park Creator, the Paleontologist, the Saboteur, and the Chaotician all provide perspectives on how man ought or ought not to respect nature. And certainly there are lessons to be drawn from what we watch, but because the film maintains integrity in the questions it asks, it allows us to enter in and explore the question from where we are and to see the many sides of the question.

The film then is sort of a recounting of Spielberg's or Crichton's quest to answer the question.

(We might be tempted to think that Ian Malcolm's famous line "Life, uh, finds a way" is actually the message of the movie, but the whole premise of the film is that the dinosaurs did not, uh, find a way and needed to be resurrected from extinction.)

I recall the writer Jeffrey Overstreet saying something to the effect that his favorite works of art are the ones in which it feels like the creator was just about to discover something. And I like that because the posture that allows the creator to discover something is Humility. And isn't that what's lacking in so many "message-driven" films (secular or sacred)? I'm not saying they should be uncertain, compromise truth, or any such thing. But the creators should recognize the limits of their perspective. We are not God and his truth is certainly bigger than our understanding. To uncover the scope of its reality, we will have to trek from home though uncomfortable territory. This requires asking questions we don't know the answer to, and using the means available to us to pursue those answers.

In several lectures, Marilynne Robinson has discussed how literature ( and she would categorize film as a subheading under "Literature" ) can allow us to expand the scope of our experience. Honest reading (and viewing) of Honest writing allows us to compound our experience with the lived and interpreted experience of others. We can see the world so much more broadly. And in turn, to love so much more broadly.

I don't expect a Wendy's rap video could effectively do as much.