Chrystal Downing | More Than a Message: Dorothy Sayers, Film, and the Flesh of Christian Art

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian Podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I am pleased to welcome today Crystal L. Downing. She was a previously a professor of English and film studies and the director or co-director of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College. And that has the most comprehensive collection of Dorothy Sayers' work on the planet. And so she's written a book called The Wages of Cinema, Christian Aesthetic of Film in conversation with Dorothy L. Sayers. And we're going to be talking about film today and cinema. And so, Crystal, I'm really excited to have you here. Thanks so much for being on the show. Glad to be here. So let's just start out. I think a lot of times when I read through the book, one of the things that I was pleasantly surprised by was that this wasn't about necessarily just story in film. And I think a lot of us get stuck on story. And so your thesis in the book is really to sort of expand beyond story and say, you know, there's much more to film that matters. And so maybe that's a good starting point. How would you describe that to your everyday viewer of just a movie? What are they seeing? What should they be paying attention to? And how does story fit in a broader context? Right. Well, as a professor of film, I'm very aware that most of the famous directors as well as film theorists are concerned. I was going to say disgusted, but I'll just say concerned about people who reduce film only to story, that film is a medium that emphasizes the visual. And unfortunately, Christians too often reduce film to what I call a content delivery system. And so they're oblivious to the artistry of the form. And that is very ironic for Christians because Christianity is predicated on this radical notion that God took on flesh. God became an incarnated medium through Jesus Christ. And that is the means through which salvation occurs through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Sayers was very concerned about this because she did a first of all, she loved film, but she also loved theater. She did a series of radio plays about Jesus where people throughout England, and this was the early 1940s. This is during World War II. Christians set up protests that Sayers did not use King James English in her plays. Yeah. And it's as though they didn't want to really understand and get a sense of the power of the medium itself. They just wanted to protect tradition, King James English. She described that as being docetism among Christians. Sayers actually got hate mail from Christians. Sayers was accused of causing the fall of Singapore to the Japanese because she refused to censor her plays. And so docetism comes from the Greek. It means to seem. And in the early centuries of Christianity, there were Christians who said, well, Jesus only seemed to be human. He wasn't really human. And as Bishop Martian, who reflects docetism, said, well, the trouble with flesh is it's filled with excrement and there's no way God would be filled with excrement. And so there has been a long tradition in Christianity of rejecting the medium. It's just about the idea. And so Christians approach the film the same way. Just as they reduced Jesus to God's content delivery system or docetists did, Christians today are docetists about film in that it's just about content. And you extract a message and often a message that really doesn't pay attention to what the director, the filmmakers are doing. Yeah. Before I ask my next question about that, why don't we frame out who Dorothy Sayers is? I might have started with that. I don't think Dorothy Sayers is going to be familiar to everyone. So give us a little bit about her background, who she is and why she's so important for Christian aesthetics. Yes. First of all, a way into understanding Dorothy Sayers is near the end of his life. C.S. Lewis, which most Christians have heard of and probably seen the Narnia films. Lewis was asked, who are some influences on your spiritual life? Everybody knew about his journey to faith and how Tolkien was part of that. But this was later in life. And he named four people, two specialists on mysticism, G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers. So these plays that I just told you about these radio plays about Jesus where Christians got upset about them. C.S. Lewis, when he got actually Sayers sent him a copy of her published edition about his plays. He so valued them that he read them every year for 20 years, every year until he died. So Dorothy Sayers was a spiritual mentor to C.S. Lewis. He was reading her radio plays about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus while he's writing the Narnia Chronicles. So she is very significant in his life. But also because of these radio plays, a lot of people listened to the ABC programming because all these Christians were protesting it. And it was actually discussed in parliament as what is this when, you know, very tradition bound. So thousands of people listened to the plays because they assumed Dorothy Sayers was just demythologizing. And, you know, why are all these Christians upset? And no, she was telling the gospel story. She got thousands of letters from people saying, for the first time in my life, I understand what the Christian message is about. And she told C.S. Lewis this. I've gotten thousands of letters. So God works in mysterious ways, right? Well, that was later in her life. She was born in 1893, so five years before C.S. Lewis. She grew up. Her father was a rector, so she grew up in a Christian background. But Christianity in England at that time was just so connected with politics. Bishops in the Anglican Church are part of parliament. You know, she considered herself a Christian, but it's just didn't mean that much to her. She got this very prestigious scholarship to go to Oxford University. And she was so glad she was at a college. It was the woman's college, Somerville College, that it didn't have chapel and she didn't have to go to chapel. So she would write home to her mother, not asking questions about Christianity or faith. She'd write home to her mother saying, can you send me some cigarettes? You know, we're talking in 1912. So she then went to, after she graduated, and at Oxford, people don't realize that at Oxford University when Sayers was there between 1912 and 1915, Oxford already had six cinemas. So Sayers was going to movies and she would write a film about them. She was just fascinated about them. She actually won a prize in photography when she was in what we would call high school level. So she knew the power of the visual. And when she was working in France, she was working at a school there, she met a film director and they just had this conversation. And he

Invited her to write scenarios for film, and she said, and she loved it. She would have liked to have become a screenwriter, but that when she met the director, it was during the demise of the film. The film enterprise in France went downhill after World War I. So she just needed money, and that's when she started writing detective fiction. And she invented this character named Lord Peter Wimsey, and her detective fiction became bestsellers in the period between the wars. Dorothy Sayers was far more famous than Agatha Christie. And her detective fiction has a more intellectual component. But her primary detective is not religious because she wasn't interested in being in religion. But then, because she was this best-selling author, she was invited to write a play for Canterbury Cathedral. And that play forced her, because the play is about Canterbury for the festival at Canterbury, had to be about the cathedral, the history of the cathedral. And, of course, what is the cathedral built about and for Jesus Christ? So she had to take her worldview. She had developed this intense interest in the integrity of work, but she had to figure out, well, what does that have to do with Christianity? And at that point, she developed a theory that the Imago Dei, which comes from Genesis 1.27, where we're told that we're created in the image of God, and she realized, well, we're created in the image of God. In Genesis 1, what is the God of Genesis 1? That God is not a lawgiver, not a judge, not a redeemer. The God of Genesis 1, in whose image we are created, is a creator. And so the Imago Dei or the image of God then must be creativity. But then she said, yeah, but the Christian view of God is Trinitarian. And so in this play, she actually has one of the angels at the end of the play explaining how creativity reflects Father, Son, Holy Ghost. And she aligned her concept with the Father corresponds in the artist's life to an idea, and then the Son corresponds to energy, and then the Holy Spirit corresponds to power. Now, that seems very abstract, but if you look at creative people, they often say, yeah, I have this idea, and I just started fleshing it out. And the incarnation of an idea, they aren't separate. The idea and the incarnation of it are one, just as Father and Son are one. And then the power arises from that collaboration between Father and Son or idea and energy, and you get power, and then the power affects other people. But first, it affects the artist. The three are one. Any artist, whether it is a painter or a writer or a filmmaker, the idea has to be incarnated first, become a medium. But the first power is to oneself. Like any writer or filmmaker, the writer will look at the rough drafts. Filmmaker look at early reels, and they say, oh, we've got to change that. So the power. So the three are one. This blew people away. Nobody had ever talked this way before, and someone who read this play that was transformative in Sayers' life said, you've got to write a book about this. And the book was called The Mind of the Maker. Still to this day, there are people who are interested in the relationship between Christianity and the arts, and they're discovering Dorothy Sayers. In her own day, the famous cultural critic Jacques Barzun celebrated what he called Sayers' Christian aesthetic. And then Philip Yancey, which a lot of Christians have heard, who many Christians have heard of, he wrote a Christianity Today article about the brilliance of Sayers' Trinitarian aesthetic. And he says, yes, I experience that every time I write. And then in 2020, the famous Christian artist Makoto Fujimura published a book with Yale University Press where he starts with Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker. And C.S. Lewis himself called The Mind of the Maker indispensable. So here is a Christian aesthetic. And I admit, anybody who has studied Sayers is very familiar with it, but nobody had applied it to film. And since I taught film, I thought I could do that. And then here's another little tidbit. Because my husband and I were directors of the Wade Center, I had access to all of Dorothy Sayers' unpublished work. And significantly enough, the woman who put together the four-volume collection of Sayers' letters left out every single letter in which Sayers praises film. Really? Interesting. So this is why nobody has been aware of it before. Fascinating. So I was able to retrieve all this unpublished material where Sayers not only tells her parents about this, and most of the films she singles out, film theorists would agree with her that this is a superb film. So she was seeing film right when film theory, so she was theorizing right when film theory, the early days of film theory. So the connections are amazing. Well, I will say, so as I was reading through and sort of getting your treatment of Sayers, but also the way you arrange your book, you talk about the emergence of the history of film. And I found that so helpful because there are a couple angles here. I mean, number one, you know, it's emerging from theater, which is a very different medium. And when you watch a film, you realize, you know, if you go to watch a musical on stage or anything on stage, and then you watch a film, you're going, yeah, these are different, completely different. But I would also say, you know, nowadays, I kind of grew up in online education, so I was a dean of an online college prior to doing what I'm doing now. And one of the things we sort of struggled with was, do you post recorded lectures in the classroom online? Is this really a good practice? Because what you're doing is you're saying, well, it's one context. There's a whole different feel to a lecture in a classroom where you're actually sitting there listening to someone who's standing there than there is recording that and putting it online. It's not exactly the same feel. And so it would be similar to what my family and I watched. Oh, it was one of those big musicals. I can't remember what the name of it was now, but they started streaming it live online. And I was like, this is cool, like we get to see it and whatever. But, you know, having been to see musicals on stage at Broadway and those kind of things, like it wasn't the same. It was actually kind of almost boring to watch because you're actually getting the camera angles on the singers. You're not necessarily getting the whole state. Like you don't get to see it and feel it the same way. And so it was almost like, yeah, it was cool to get to see it and you get to hear it and all that kind of good stuff. But the medium really does impact its power. Right. And what it can actually convey. It doesn't do it as well as online. And so I just thought that was I thought the emergence of film from theater was really interesting. The shift from into silent movies where they're using, you know, fade ins and fade outs, right, to the different cuts and scenes that film has and all of that contributing to the form. And so I think that was one of the things in your book that I most appreciated was that film had to emerge and it had to sort of take on its own life. And I think theorists like Sayers were recognizing that it needed to take on its own life. And obviously some talented directors figuring some of this stuff out. But it's sort of amazing to see how it emerged out of that and and took its own form on. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed with inflation, market volatility and ongoing global uncertainty? 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But the incarnation of the stage, which is what you're talking about, is really powerful. Having the actual physical bodies there. And the wonderful thing about theater is that you as the audience have power over what happens on stage insofar as any actor who has been on stage will tell you the audience affects performance. If they can feel the audience laughing in the right places and, you know, they can just feel if the audience is connected. Right. And if there's someone disruptive in the audience, that can affect the actors on stage. So when film came out of theater, many people were conceptualizing it as just another presentation of theater until, and it was really the Russians who took leadership. A lot of people don't realize the very first film school was in Moscow. Russians saw the power of the medium much sooner than, especially the development in America. It was all about capitalism. You know, how much money can you make off this? Sure. And it was Europeans who saw it as an art form. So rather than the actors being the medium in film, it is the film itself. The film is the medium. And so attention to how the film is cut and put together. It's still borrowing a lot of terms from theater. So much of what we understand about storytelling by human figures. Goes back to the ancient origins of theater. And again, many people don't realize that theater originated as a religious right. Sure. So there's this connection between religious sensibilities and theater and then the appropriations into film that Christians need to be more aware of. Yeah, it's not a it's not a big leap to go from the ritualistic expressions in the temple. You know, how you have these the laying on of hands of the scapegoat and sending one off into the wilderness. The different sacrificial things where you're actually embodying and incarnating something live before people as opposed to explaining it. Right. Just having someone stand up and go, now, if we had a sheep here, here's what we would do. And this is what it would mean. That's a whole different thing. But when you actually do it, that gives a different picture. And so it's a small leap, I think, from those sort of ritual enactments to something that you're trying to convey live in a theater setting in like ancient Greece or ancient Rome, where you're trying to convey sort of an aspect of the ritualism that was going on wherever, but just in a slightly different mode. And so I think that embodiment, it seems to me that there's an organic connection between that sort of embodiment. Right. So for many years, film had a stigma that it wasn't, didn't have the embodiment of theater and many theater actors, they would not gain to act in a movie. Yeah. But it's because they were still bringing theatrical sensibilities to their understanding of film. And you have to see it as a different medium. As its whole medium. Right. I heard Denzel Washington, I think it was Denzel Washington, if I'm remembering correctly. He said that the theater is really the actor's medium, but the film is the director's medium. Yeah, right. And so it's not that there's no acting that goes on in a film, but at the end of the day, like he said, the director spends, you know, months after the actors are gone arranging and cutting and sequencing and like really making that film his own or her own versus the theater where it's just happening live and the actors are on stage and they're, you know, like you're describing, they're reacting to the audience. And so I think it, it's helpful to underscore that difference. I will say, you know, you mentioned Russia where, where I started to become more familiar with this. It was a few years back. I went to on a trip to Germany where we're doing like the World War II sort of tour. And you saw those movies that were done as propaganda films of Hitler and the Nazis. And they talk about how they were shooting Hitler, mostly from the ground up and how they, you know, how they, how they created these scenes that would, I hesitate to say reinforce the message, but maybe become part of the overall power of the film. And so they're, they're trying to portray Hitler and his various cohorts as larger than life almost. And you can really only do that in film. Yes, that's right. Or maybe you could do it in film differently than you could do it in real life because they, they pulled an awful lot off in real life too. But in film, they could really, I mean, they play with the lighting, they play with the sound, they play with the music, they play with the, the shots, the clipping, all that kind of stuff to really make these films like part of the message that came through was the visual effect of the film. I don't know whether I'm saying that right, but. Yeah. No, exactly. In fact, D.W. Griffith, the famous filmmaker, is the first one to actually figure out the psychology of what you do to the medium. So he was the first filmmaker and he was making films during Sayer's life. He was the first person to put the camera on the ground so you could look up at, you know, a person's body and you might see the ceiling above them. And I'm sure that's what they did with Hitler because it makes them look more powerful because they fill the whole screen. They look like their head is almost touching the ceiling. And he added the psychological effect of cross-cutting where you go from different scenarios like a woman is being threatened by bandits and the husband is on his way home. And meanwhile, the cavalry is coming and cutting back and forth. And what Griffith would do, you cut among the three different shots, but then make them each fewer minutes. So it's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it actually has the viewer, it's like your heart races while you're watching this. So this was developed early, early on. In fact, there are many theorists who say the height of artistry in film was during the silent film era because you had to rely on the visual. The visual. Yeah. And once sound came in, a lot of people, it was just mimicking theater again and they lost the power of the medium. Of course, now that's been resolved again and the great filmmakers understand the medium itself and pay attention to it. There is a wonderful film that deals with this. In fact, I spent quite a long time talking about it because it is addressing the very issue of the tension between theater and film. It's called Birdman. It stars Michael Keaton. It is a fantastic film because it's helping us think through why there is still tension to this day between theater and film. I would say that was, along with the, and I don't remember the title of the movie exactly, but the Bridge movie that you note in the book. Oh yeah, The Railway Man or David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai. Bridge on the River Kwai. That's it. Bridge on the River Kwai. The Birdman and Bridge on the River Kwai, really, I thought, drove home a lot of what you were talking about in the book.

I mean, the Birdman stuff, even when you were talking about sound, what came to my mind was that section of the book where you described the two different types of sound, sound that's within the movie and sound that comes without the movie, and the way they played with our expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's outside the film. This is part of the score. And then he'd walk down a hallway and see somebody playing the music. And so it just disrupted your expectations in that film where you'd hear music start and you're thinking, OK, that's

that applies to this is we are all both Cain and Abel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We all, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And that's why these films that make these simplistic categories of good guy versus bad guy, even what you're describing shows that something film can do that theater would have trouble doing is use images to embody memories and thoughts. Whereas on stage, the person just has to say, oh, I remember the time that I... Right, right, right. That this woman spit my food, you know, and it's just not going to be as powerful as when you have a sense that, okay, this is what's happening in his brain and it's no coincidence that some production companies are called DreamWorks because our brains come up with images and at least the way I dream, there's not much conversation in the dream, but yet I know what is happening. Yeah, I've been doing a lot of study on Revelation. And so I think as I was also reading through your book and thinking through the images, you know, obviously Revelation is a text-based medium, but when we look at it from a hermeneutics perspective, we usually, what we try to do when we're interpreting that is we try to visualize what's being presented in text. So there's a symbolic aspect to that book that you really need to try to visualize to some extent in order to understand that this symbolic aspect, this representational aspect is part of the message of the book. Again, you know, do you want to make a movie of Revelation? Probably not. You know, like, but there is an imaginative aspect of that book that isn't really available in, like, one of Paul's letters, let's say. You know, you don't really need to understand what, you know, one of Paul's cohorts like, you know, you don't really need to know what Philemon looked like, right? Or not Philemon, Philemon. What Philemon looked like to understand what's going on with Philemon. But in Revelation, because the text uses symbols and paints pictures, you almost have to get involved in that sort of medium. And, you know, like I said, it's obviously just text-based, but I remembered a portion, I think I understood this correctly, that even when Sayers would write her detective novels, she really did focus on trying to, quote, paint a picture with words within her novels because she'd understood the power of this sort of visual activating, we might say, activating the visual system. Mm-hmm. Is that correct? Yes, because she loved camera work and she actually wrote home once and was talking about visual pictures, and I forget now, because she was very young, while in college, whether it was a photograph or a film that she saw, but she said, it needs no words! Exclamation point, exclamation point. Just the power of the visual image. What you're talking about, too, is relevant to an actual discipline within film studies, which is called adaptation studies. Okay. The whole adapting a novel or adapting a play to film. And people will complain, oh, it's not like the novel. Well, of course it's not like the novel! They are different mediums! And in fact, the closer film tries to be to the novel, it's going to be a crummy film. Yeah. And so how can the visual image speak what maybe took 10 pages to cover in a novel and you can do it in just this maybe one-minute shot? Yeah. And so I think many people, because they aren't attuned to the power of the visual image, they aren't aware that maybe the film is doing more than you are seeing. Yeah. That is interesting, too, going back to Genesis 1 and the Imago Dei, that every time God creates something, it says, and he saw that it was good. That's right. And the word, I've been told in Hebrew, just literally means seeing. Mm-hmm. So God's seeing of creation. And so then we're made in the image of God. How do we see human creations and value the beauty and the poignancy of those creations? 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Yeah, there's almost a, when we talk about that seeing in Genesis, I would say that in addition to just looking at it, what you almost have there is a discernment about the value of. So you're seeing it, but it's not just a visual activity. Yeah. It's also a capturing and an understanding of what this is in terms of tov. It's good. Yes. And so there's a, I wouldn't boil it down to just the biological, physiological act of seeing something, but I also wouldn't say that it goes so far beyond seeing like it should, we should translate it judgment or something like that. I don't think that's what it is. It's an understanding and a capturing of the value of the thing that's been created. And so, yeah, I really liked that. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. One thing I want to add, because I don't want people to think, and I make this clear in the book that Sayers is saying the Imago Dei can only be fulfilled by artists. That creativity can enter any profession. And she actually, to make this point, she says, whether it's church embroidery or sewage farming, someone can practice the integrity of work and be creative about it. Like a sewage farmer, rather thinking, hey, I have all this sewage here. How might it be used for fertilizer for farmers in the next county? You know, that's an act of creativity rather than just kind of going through your job. Or a parent, you know, how can I be creative about entertaining my child in ways that gets them to be more critical thinkers rather than just handing them a screen? Yeah. Well, when you talk about the integrity of the work, right, and that sort of idea, just the picture that comes to mind, and it's one that you reference in the book, Dodgeball, the movie Dodgeball, because you have this whole discussion about the deus ex machina, right? And how, you know, sometimes movies will just use this and it's like, oh, this helicopter comes out of nowhere and rescues the person. And now the show's over and you're like, where did the helicopter come from? Like, what is happening? Like, it doesn't feel like it closes anything up, really. It just needs to end. Like, we're out of time. So let's send a helicopter in. Boom, done. But what I found fascinating about Dodgeball is you think about it, you know, the treasure chest that they pull out at the end. If people have seen the movie, he bets on a dodgeball match and wins a bunch of money to save his gym. It's like a goofball movie. But the treasure chest has deus ex machina on it. And so it's this sort of ironic, self-referential, like the movie knows what it's doing, right? And by putting that on there, it's saying, we know what we're doing. Like, we needed to button this up. And then you have the post-credit scene of Ben Stiller in a fat suit kind of complaining about, oh, the good guy won and you got your happy ending and, you know, the horrible whatever. And so it had this sort of, those scenes and those little nuggets allowed for the film to maintain an integrity within itself. Whereas with...

Without those elements, you're kind of like, uh, really again? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. You have to pay attention to those tiny little things, and that deus ex machina is one of the elements that film theorists have borrowed from Greek and Roman theater. Horace coined that word to describe how the Greeks, in order to resolve a narrative, would just, they actually devised a crane and would lower a god like Zeus, or an actor portraying a god like Zeus, onto the stage and comes and he says, you go here, you go here, you two lovers get together. Case closed. And it's outrageous, but a lot of films today, just like you're describing, do the same thing. And when I was teaching at UCLA, my students often would be recruited to watch Hollywood films and give feedback on the endings, and they would change the ending depending on audience response. Kind of like, okay, we want to make money from this movie. That's not going to be a good movie where it's just how much money can we make? We better get some feedback. And so they will do deus ex machina, as film theorists talk about it, but applying it to the artificially happy endings. And wow, there's so many films that I was thinking, this is an interesting film. And then they just give me artifice at the end. Right. Yeah, I mean, you can see that all over the place. And I think it's interesting, even movies that I kind of enjoy. The end of The Matrix series where you have the robot coming in and taking Neo away. And I think that, I think you referenced this in the book as well. They have it credited, the robot credited as deus ex machina. They don't say it in the movie. And so unless you're really paying attention, like that cleared up a lot of things for me when I read in your book and I'm like, but I thought it was a horrible ending. Yeah. I just, I kind of hated it. I'm like, this is where we're leaving this? This is horrible. You know, and so you have these sort of disappointing moments where you're like, yeah, that didn't feel like it fit well enough to actually make the movie. You know, like to actually close things off. Just didn't feel like it fit well. Whereas you think about movies like, I don't know, one of my favorites is Rocky. Rocky should lose in the end, right? He should lose. This is what should happen. And it does. And you're like, that was the kind of the perfect ending to that movie, I thought. My daughter read 1984 this last year for high school. And the ending of that book, I told her, I'm like, this is like the perfect ending. This is what the book needed for integrity. Like the guy can't win, can't beat the machine. That's the whole point. And so I think there are some works with that integrity. But I'm glad we got to that integrity of work kind of conversation. Hopefully people kind of get that, that it's internal to the work itself. It needs to be true almost to itself while also trying to be true to the reality that it's representing, I think is a fair way to put that. Yes, yes. Right. Again, rather than either or, it's both and. So it's not just about the visual image. Yeah, you've got to consider story as well. But unfortunately, most Christians, when they talk about film, they just only think of story. And people from Alfred Hitchcock to the famous film theorist Christian Metz, they just say, it's not just about story. It's story and art. It's both and. And Christians need to be both and thinkers because we follow a both and Savior. He's both fully God and fully human. And we hear it so often that we forget the radicalness of God's incarnation in Christ. So we've got to honor, in our faith, it's about the medium of flesh that God took. So in our understanding of art, we have to pay attention to the medium that has been enfleshed on screen, on paper. We're coming up on the end of the time, and I just want to ask this last question because I think it's important. Like, how would you suggest then Christians approach film? Obviously, we've had some sort of moral, pietistic approaches to film, right? On both the right and the left. Yeah, and I think those can be appropriate, right? So, you know, I would try to steer my kids, for instance, away from movies that have, you know, gratuitous nudity or something like that. Oh, of course. Well, and I have a whole chapter on women and film, too, for that. Right. But, you know, what I find fascinating is, now, I'd want them to be at a maturity age where they could really appreciate the film, but like Schindler's List portrays nudity in the film, but it's a very realistic, you know, sort of portrayal of what's happening in, you know, concentration camps. And so you kind of sit back and you're like, well, this is a different sort of nudity than we're used to seeing. And so I think, yes, there's a morality that we need to consider as we're approaching film, but then we also have to appreciate the fact that in order to drive some of this stuff home, the reality has to be captured. And so I'm just wondering, I've kind of thought about that one in different ways throughout the years, and I'm still not really sure where I land on it. But help us understand how to maybe give us some frameworks for approaching film and how Christians might think about film differently. Well, part of it is to pay attention to what I call the stigmata of film. St. Francis, of course, was the first incident of bearing the stigmata, which are the signs of Christ and in his palms having the cuts. And to think of rather than film as stigma, the stigmata is paying attention to the cuts in film. When does film cut from one image to another and why? And that is the attention to the medium and its relationship to the story. But to be aware, too, of camera movement. Why is the camera doing a panning shot from one way to the other? And just to ask, to be more mentally active. And mental activity is good. It prevents dementia. So many people, I mean, they are couch potatoes, so they'll just watch a film. It's just to pass the time away. But if you start just even thinking of it as an art form. And so before I see a film, I always read reviews beforehand to see what people I respect are saying about it. And these days, I say, I talk about the problem with the, there's fundamentalism on both the right and the left. And now films that are getting all this praise, it's just because they have a certain ideological component that is, it's fundamentalist wokeism. And so how do we achieve what Dorothy Sayers called that delicate edge of balance? And the, actually, she called it the razor edge of balance, the delicate balance, razor edge of balance. So to be a more active viewer, which again is, has Christian implications, is that church just shouldn't be this passive thing where we go to because we know, oh, this is important to go to church. We are active participants. Sayers actually said, and the reason I use the word stigmata is she says, I believe that theater has all the stigmata of a real and active church. Because, and then I would say the same thing about film because it inherited much from theater. Every person working for a production, either of a play or a film, is really important. It's not just about the preacher, you know, or it's not just about the good in church, the good, whether you like the music or not. Every member of a church contributes. And too often people reduce, they don't think about the importance of the lighting technician on, for both stage and screen. They don't think about the sound technician for both stage and screen. If they aren't doing their job, you're going to have a horrible experience as an audience member. So it's just much more active viewing.

One of the things I do, and there are all these books written by Christians where they don't talk about the history of film, they don't talk about camera movement, they don't use the language of film. They have no awareness of film theory. That is like a Christian who has no awareness of the history of Christianity and that the Trinity wasn't, the word Trinity wasn't even coined until 200 by Tertullian. And interestingly enough, Tertullian used a word from theater to conceptualize the Trinity. I mean, there are scholars who think that Jesus was involved before his ministry helping his dad build a theater that has been found four miles from Nazareth. And Jesus uses the language of theater. The word for actor was hypocrite. And so someone putting on an act, Jesus uses. He got that from theater. I mean, there are so many interconnections between Christian faith and the valuing of the arts. Yeah. Well, and we see this in some theological works. I think von Balthasar's Theodrama, you know, his multi-volumes on Theodrama and then Van Hooser's drama of doctrine, I think sort of revised some of those things. But it is really important. And I love the advice to be active watchers, like turn your brain on when you're watching a movie, maybe not all the time, you know, if you're, but it's okay to leave it off sometimes. But I also think that if we're really going to seriously be impacted by a film, if we're not just going to kind of sit there and it's just downtime, we're really not watching that closely. But if we're really going to be impacted by a film, we do need to be thinking actively about what's going on and what the film is trying to convey to us. I wouldn't say do to us. I appreciate one aspect. I think you mentioned it. It's the film itself has power. It doesn't try to exert power over the watcher. Right. Right. And so I think, you know, when we're watching good art, it has a power all of its own that we're going to be impacted by, but it's not trying to, and I think this goes to the comment about the ideological sort of bent nowadays. That's trying to exert a power over us in a way as opposed to containing that power within itself and allowing us just to be impacted by that presence of it within the work. So, yeah. And her Trinitarian perspective, we are actually participating in the creation of the art by thinking about it. She has a whole chapter in Mind of the Maker called Pentecost. You know, the Holy Spirit came down on the disciples and this was a movement towards participating in Christ's message. So, but that means not passivity. So it has, as I say, and you say, have power over us. We bring our power of observation to the film. Yeah. It's just part of the act of watching, really. It becomes part of that overall ecosystem. Oh, there's so much more to say. What's really cool is Sayre says any artists will recognize there is a triadic component to any artwork. And I show the verification of that insight with Ingmar Bergman, who said, yes, I have a triadic approach, you know, famous Swedish filmmaker, Francois Truffaut. I show how he echoes Sayre's and their their lives overlapped, you know, the great French New Wave filmmaker. So her theory is being proven by even non-Christians who take creativity seriously. Yeah, it's a fascinating realm. I mean, I'm glad I so appreciate you being on the show today. It's just like I think film is just one of those. I've loved movies for as long as I can remember. And, you know, I sort of have this intuitive sense of which ones I like and which ones I don't and which ones are actually good and which ones aren't. You know, and I like a little of both, I suppose. But I think your book really did clarify for me how some of this stuff works. And it's going to give me some tools as I watch movies now to sort of go back and go, oh, I see what the filmmaker is doing here. That's a really interesting way that he's arranging those shots and those kind of things. So I guess I'd say encourage the audience. Get the book, read through it, because I do think it it does. It gives you some handles. Most people aren't familiar with all the film terminology. I know I wasn't. And so it gives you some handles to go in when you're watching a film and go, oh, I get what's happening now with the scenes. I understand why this scene's here and what he's doing with the camera angle and how the music's working, you know, with the film and all that kind of good stuff. That was really fascinating. And I so appreciated the historical approach that you took because I thought it was just great. So thank you. Yeah. So, folks, if you're out there and you ever watch a movie, I would definitely recommend The Wages of Cinema. It was a fun read for me. I enjoyed it. And really appreciate you being here and talk about it. Yeah. Thank you so much. Absolutely. All right. Well, we'll leave it there and we will catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Thanks so much, everybody. And look for the book in the show notes as well. This is an IVP title, so we get a 20% discount on the IVP titles. So you can get a 20% discount and the code will be in the show notes and any other relevant links and all those different kind of things to Dr. Downing's work will be in the show notes as well. So take care, everybody. See you on the next episode. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Hi, I'm Dr. Michelle Bankson, a board-certified clinical neuropsychologist and host of Your Hope-Filled Perspective podcast. After 30 years in the mental health field, I am passionate about helping you regain hope and transform your life. Join me and my amazing guests as we tackle real-life struggles with compassion, vulnerability, and biblically-based insights. If you're ready to renew your mind and find practical solutions to life's most common concerns, subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform.