Ben Crowder

I love going to the theater, both film and stage. There’s something magical about walking into that black box, large or small, and sitting down to watch a story play out. Theaters brim with atmosphere that you just don’t get at home.

So now I’m wondering what it is that makes the theater magical. The velvet curtains? The sticky floor and smell of buttered popcorn? Being in a dark room with strangers?

I think the dark room does have something to do with it. Theaters eliminate distractions by surrounding you with darkness. All you can see is the story unfolding before your eyes. You get sucked in and wrapped up in it, almost possessed by it, as if you are the story. It’s pure mind, body not included. (Most of the time I almost forget I even have a body.) And it’s a displacement of the mind, transporting you straight into the land of the movie or the play. Isn’t that incredible? Teleportation is already here, folks, waiting for you at your local Cinemark.

Perhaps part of the difference has to do with the space as well. Theaters are large and grander than most home theaters. All that empty space hanging above you is ripe with possibility — that’s the power of the high ceiling (cathedrals, anyone?). Speaking of space, watching a movie on a smaller screen — say, on a phone — isn’t the same, but it isn’t as bad as you’d think. Once your mind gets immersed in the movie, it’s as if it takes up your whole viewing space, like you’re sitting on a windowsill watching things go on just outside (or inside). Size almost doesn’t matter.

Except it does, and the larger screen at a movie theater brings with it an even stronger immersive magic that’s much harder to maintain when you’re being distracted by your peripheral vision.

The benefit of watching movies at home: cost and convenience. That’s why most of the movies I watch are at home. But the magic is important, I think. I’m not sure why, but it is.

We’ve been talking mostly about movies, since you can’t watch plays at home unless they’re filmed first, and that just flattens them out and makes them boring. Conversely, live stage theatre is even more magical than movies in a way. Not only are you in a large, dark room surrounded by strangers (strangers = possibility and suspense and intrigue), but the story is being strung to life by actors mere yards from where you watch. With enough gumption, you could climb up on stage and touch them if you wanted to. (That’s generally discouraged, of course.) You feel as if you could enter the story with your body and not just your mind. And even though you don’t actually waltz on stage much to the embarrassment of your companions, that feeling of “couldness” triggers something surreal.

Inside the theater, whispers take on a mystical aura and everything seems tinged with more importance than before, plump with meaning and portent. Afterward, you see the world with new eyes, refreshed, rejuvenated. After all, you’ve just spent the last two hours inside the mind of the story.

I hope theaters don’t disappear. I don’t think they will. If it takes shenanigans like 3D glasses to keep the movie theaters in business, so be it. (But if they stop offering 2D movies, I’ll stop giving them money.)

I’m going back to my old ways. You see, once upon a time I was very careful as to which movies I’d watch, but then something happened. I got too caught up caring what other people thought instead of what God thought. And so I started watching the movies everyone was watching. All those PG-13s everyone sees without batting any eye? I watched a lot of them. And for the past two or so years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve noticed a steady decline in my spirituality.

Now, over the past few weeks I’ve had several friends mention their media standards. What used to be normal for me — watching hardly any PG-13s, for example — now felt almost absurdly rigid and stifling. But after three or four knocks on my door, God started to get through to me. I’ve finally woken up out of my Hollywood-induced trance.

So, I’m taking the higher road. From now on, if movies don’t harmonize with the standards and values I’ve learned from the gospel, I won’t watch them. Period. (Same for books, but this seems to be less of an issue. That’s a topic for another post.) Yes, this means the number of movies I watch will be drastically reduced. Yes, it also means I won’t fit in as well socially. After all, people with higher media standards get labeled as puritans and extremists, crazy radicals who obviously Just Don’t Get It. You know what? I don’t care. I know what’s right for me, and I’m sick of letting the world push me around with its peer pressure. Brand me as a heretic if you want, but I’m walking out of the theater so I can go find my God again.

Is this for everyone? I don’t know. But my bet is that most of us are living beneath our privileges, cheating ourselves out of the richer communion with the Spirit that we could otherwise be having. We’re desensitizing ourselves far more than we realize. Oh, wait, that’s not politically correct. People want to feel good about the path they’re already on. Besides, isn’t everybody doing it? And they’re all going to church and seem to be doing okay, right? Well, I’m sorry, but “everyone’s doing it” isn’t the philosophy I want to live by.

Look, I’m not saying people who are caught up watching the world’s shows won’t go to heaven. I think God is a lot more forgiving than we realize, honestly. And this isn’t a crusade to change what anyone else is watching; I’m just trying to change myself.

Yes, there are plenty of good stories out there. Yes, you can have intense emotional experiences with many of the world’s movies. And you might even be able to feel the Spirit during parts of them (I’m not entirely sure how that works, based on what I know of the Spirit and its avoidance of the ungodly, but I’m not going to say what God can or can’t do). But I’m aiming for godhood, and most of the movies and television shows out there aren’t helping me get there. In fact, they’re pushing me in the opposite direction. I don’t want to feel like extramarital sex is normal. I don’t want four-letter words floating around in my head. I want peace, not gratuitous violence. And I’m sick of imbibing the world’s subtle philosophies against faith and values.

So, goodbye to all the movies I would have watched had I not just stepped off that course and onto a new path. I won’t really miss you. But I’ll feel a lot better — less of the split-soul syndrome I’ve been suffering from for the past few years when I was trying to straddle the line with one leg in Babylon and one in Zion. I want God more than I want entertainment. I want the Spirit more than I want to be accepted by my peers. And I want holiness more than I want Hollywood.

Watch this little French girl tell a story and I’m pretty sure you’ll want to adopt her, too (via Garth Bruner):

Once upon a time… from Capucha on Vimeo.

See? Told you so. :)

Check out Joy to Everyone, a new video by Stephen Jones of the BYU College of Fine Arts and Communications:

I like it.

I’m proud to announce that the first issue of my new magazine, Mormon Artist is now available!

I’ve been working on this for the last two months, though a lot of the work got done today (I’ve been working on it for eleven hours now — next issue, I’m going to plan things better so I don’t have to do this :)).

The web version is okay, but I recommend the PDF, which looks a lot better and has more pictures to boot. But the choice is yours. :) (There’s a print version that’ll be available via MagCloud.com once I get the proof copy back and make sure everything’s okay. I’m guessing it’ll take a week or so.)

Okay, I’d write more, but I am exhausted. I’ll talk more about this project later. :)

[tags]Mormon Artist[/tags]

I didn’t hear about George Lucas in Love until this past week, and I don’t know how I’ve gone this long without hearing about it. It’s awesome. (Backstory: when I was a kid, I was a huge Star Wars fan. Read all the novels, even. As I grew up I moved on, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for long ago in a galaxy far, far away.)

Watch it on Google Video or YouTube. (YouTube seemed to have better quality.)

[tags]George Lucas in Love[/tags]

One of the very familiar faces in LDS cinema was spent some time in jail a few weeks ago. (Thanks to Torben for the link.)

Michael Birkeland was arrested on Friday after police say he stole a computer from Utah Valley University. The man, who is used to being in front of the camera, was actually caught because of a camera built in the computer…. Two days later, the victim logged onto Skype and, thanks to the built in camera in his MacBook Pro computer, he could see exactly who was using his stolen computer over the Internet.

Kind of sad to see even LDS actors messing their lives up, but really, who are we kidding — we’re not invulnerable to all of that. We’re human just like everyone else, and if we let go, we fall, just like the rest.

On a lighter note, three cheers for Macs and their built-in iSight cameras! That part was awesome. :)

I’ve previewed a few popular television shows over the last handful of months and I’ve noticed something troublesome: they’re not as clean as they used to be. It’s not just that, though; the culture of what’s accepted in society and on TV (and what’s not) has radically altered over the past couple of decades.

Take sex, for example. It’s on TV to a degree and certainly in movies far more than that. Now, actual depiction of sex is overt and obviously dangerous; the less visible and more insidious danger is the Babylon worldview that latches on and burrows its way into our souls, into our spiritual bloodstreams. It’s okay to have sex with whoever you want, says that philosophy. Everyone’s doing it. Now, I don’t think this means that when we watch movies with this kind of perspective, we’ll go out and start mating willy-nilly. Luckily most of us have more inhibitions than that. But I’ll be darned if we don’t end up feeling like there’s nothing really wrong with extramarital sex, like it’s just something people do. It loses its sin value and becomes as commonplace as breathing or eating.

As followers of Jesus Christ, however, we don’t have the “luxury” of thinking that way. We’re not carnal animals. We can be, if we forget who we are, but we’ve got a greater destiny than that. We worship God — not Aphrodite. And God has commanded us to be chaste, to save sex for marriage and marriage alone — marriage between a man and a woman. Pretty much the complete opposite of what the world thinks.

It’s not just sex, of course, though that’s perhaps the most obviously anti-gospel philosophy. Take action-adventure movies as well. Lots of people die, and most of those deaths are casual; nobody cares unless it’s one of the main characters. I’ve found that when I come out from watching an action-adventure movie, deaths roll off me like water off a duck’s back. And that bothers me. Death should mean something to me. Sure, we believe in a life after death, but the casual-death philosophy of these movies has nothing to do with a post-mortal belief but rather has everything to do with a cheapening of the value of a life. The message I get from these movies is that a life is only worth something if it belongs to somebody important. That’s messed up.

Does this mean that we have to rear back and abstain 100% from anything with a worldly perspective? I don’t know the answer to that. Ideally, yes, complete avoidance would be best. In reality, though, I don’t think you really can avoid it completely, since it’s everywhere. Utterly pervasive. Which is why we have to constantly inject ourselves with the antidote: the gospel. We have to remind ourselves of the standards and bounds the Lord has set so that we don’t get brainwashed into joining the Parade of the Natural Man. It’s easy to let go and get sucked into the march along the broad and wide path that leads to spiritual death. It’s not so easy to hold tight to the iron rod. But we can’t let go.

I think this is why we read our scriptures every day. This is why we go to church every week. This is why we pray daily. This is why we go to the temple regularly. I mean, we do those things for other reasons, too, but we do them on a regular basis because we keep forgetting.

It’s like there are shadows everywhere, climbing the walls around us, seeping in through the floorboards, wafting in with the breeze. They’re relentless, always trying to get close, and they’ll never give up — not in this life, at least. We have to keep bathing ourselves in light to keep the darkness at bay. A one-time fire isn’t going to cut it, because tomorrow they’ll be back, in greater numbers. We keep the fire lit day-in and day-out because that’s the only way to stay safe.

Luckily, it’s easier to read our scriptures than it would be to keep a literal fire going every day of our lives. Or is it?

One last thought. The world doesn’t take kindly to people who disagree with it. You don’t like what the world has to offer? Sorry, that’s not PC — you need to be a little more tolerant. Open your mind and stop living a sheltered life.

Blech. At the cost of what? Our souls? We can’t judge other people — that’s not our prerogative — but we can judge ourselves. We know when we’re toeing the line. It’s way too risky to flirt with Babylon. If we really believe in Christ and his gospel, we have to stand up for what we believe in. We can still be kind and allow other people to believe what they want to believe, but we can’t sway with every worldly wind that comes around. We have to stand strong.

Over the past month, I’ve been revising Tree of Blood a lot. (Ten or eleven times, to be exact.) After several revisions I realized that I’d written myself into several plot knots, primarily because I’d been adding in all sorts of backstory without stepping out to make sure it still made sense as a whole. And so I stopped myself. I wrote an outline for the whole play, then went back and rewrote it from scratch, and after a few tweaks here and there, it’s noticeably better. Still creepy, but without all the confusing holes in the plot. :) We’re in the middle of rehearsals at the moment and will be performing in a mere two weeks. Egads!

And I’m not assistant directing anymore, by the way. I’m directing. Yup, I don’t have all that much experience under my belt (assistant directing a single forty-five minute play and writing four of my own plays, plus watching lots of plays and movies over the course of my life :P), but I’m now the director of James Goldberg’s play Repeating History. It’s a good training-wheel play, since it’s only three pages long. But it’s got its own challenges, too — the bulk of the play is effectively a Powerpoint presentation, for example. There’s only one character (well, there’s sort of a second character, but she only has two lines and she’s not onstage). And the play has a lot of historical allusions that most people probably aren’t going to get, because we’ve all forgotten almost everything we learned in U.S. History.

In other news, I’ve got a few new projects lining up. First, I really want to get back into writing novels, so I’ve decided to aim at 1,000 words a day (which, as I learned from my NaNoWriMo experience, should be a piece of cake) and I’ve started outlining the one I’ll focus on for the next few months.

Second, almost every time I watch a movie I want to start writing screenplays, so I’ve decided to finally start doing it. I’ll probably start out with short films because, well, they’re shorter. :) And they’re similar to short plays, which I’ve got a decent amount of experience with.

Third, I’m writing some TV scripts for a demo for this new television channel that’ll be starting up soon. I don’t know how much I can talk about it yet — probably more than this, but I’ll play it safe for now — but it’ll be fun. And regardless of the fate of the channel, it’ll be a really good learning experience. Besides, who ever thought I’d be writing for TV? Not me. :)

And last but not least, I need to start blogging on here more often. Monthly isn’t going to cut it. I’m also itching to redesign the site, but that’ll have to wait for a bit. (I’m currently redesigning the New Play Project site. And have been for a while; hopefully I’ll get it done this weekend.)

Unbindery’s on hold for now.

Advance disclaimer: read this post with a grain of salt.

So, there was an interesting bit in the newspaper this morning. (The following quote comes from the AP, whereas I’ve linked to the Washington Post, by the way.)

…McCain distanced himself from comments in which top adviser Charlie Black said another terrorist attack this year on U.S. soil would benefit his candidacy against Democrat Barack Obama. McCain was startled by the attack comment when asked about it during a news conference after the speech.

If life were a movie, this is what the real story would be: McCain is planning a terrorist attack ala 9/11 (which of course George W. Bush was behind — since we’re still in movie mode, remember, and the British did announce the falling of one of the towers a full seven minutes before it actually fell). Black’s up to his neck in it but wants to get out. So he spills the beans, trying to expose this dark conspiracy he’s been a part of, but the rest of the gang quickly cover it up. End result? Black’s out of a job, and in a month or two (if not sooner) he dies in a freak auto accident.

Life isn’t a movie, of course. ~sigh~ I have to admit that I delight in conspiracy theories, if only because they’re so much more interesting as stories than the plain old truth (usually), but they rarely seem to be true. That’s sad. What if both McCain and Obama were involved in this huge global conspiracy that’s been going on for decades and it’s somehow managed to stay a secret for all that time? That would be cool. Completely fantastical and extremely improbable, but very cool.

(Just for the record, I’m not saying that 9/11 was cool. I’d prefer that people not die, honestly. But since it did happen, and since we can do nothing about it now that it’s solidly in the past, it’d be a lot more interesting if it were some massive internal plot instead of merely Al-Qaeda. A conspiracy connected to Area 51, of course. And no, I haven’t been watching X-Files.)

Since life isn’t a movie, we have, well, movies. Fancy that. And it really is safer to contain most of the conspiracy theories in the cinematic realm, come to think of it. Three cheers for a more interesting reality! :P