Reflections on my Month of Documentaries

1. Supersize Me

After two years of trying to push through a thyroid disorder, I have been amazed at the importance of the relationship between food, our bodies and God. As Dr. Wirzba says, eating reminds us that we are still creatures, reliant on God and God's creation. Supersize Me shows the underside of what eating the wrong things can do to you. And to make things even worse, marketing plays a role in skewing information and leading us off course into territory that has us degrade our bodies.

2. The Century of Self (BBC)
I highly recommend this one. It comes in 4 parts.

The first section focuses on Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and the founder of "Public Relations." Not long after Freud had compiled and sythesized all of his thoughts and ideas on the power of the unconcious, underlying animalistic desires, and a certain depravity of humanity that is a danger to society, Bernays brought those ideas to American business. I can almost see it happening so innocently, an appopriation of knowledge that is dangerous. Ironically, I think that the Church had probably tapped into some of that for years. Anyway, Bernays used this information to get people to buy into various ideas. One of these ideas was consumption. Bernays was already "in bed" with business so to speak, so he used psychology to get folks to buy more products. Part of the idea behind filling folks with products is that the products could represent their desires and the people could assume that they were happy. Meanwhile, folks wouldn't worry about things like democracy if they were chasing "stuff" or thought that "stuff" made them happy. Keep in mind that Bernays was originally was in charge of "propaganda" but he changed the name to "public relations" because it had been closely associated with Nazi Germany. Yet again, when you think about it, this is the same information that the Bible has been telling us for a while: idolatry, love of money, treasures on heaven vs. treasures on earth, etc.

Part 2 focuses on Freud's daughter, Anna, as she attempts to carry on her father's work. While Freud seemed to be very pessimistic about society, Bernays saw the information as something to exploit (to become incredibly wealthy and politically powerful), Anna honed in on child psychology and pragmatically believed that society could shape us in such as way as to tame our inner badness. Her teachings reflect the leave-it-to-beaver era of the 1950s and which slowly began to be questioned throughout the 60s and 70s. By those later periods, psychologists were beginning to advocate letting the devil out of you rather than trying to repress it. While this is a fascinating shift, I wanted the BBC to follow that lead to how we deal with ideas about our inner badness, but it didnt' go there. However, they made a shift toward explaining that whoever you are once you release all of your inner badness and society's pressures, then you both arrive at the real self or you can be so stripped of self that you can create a new self. Either trajectory resulted in people who now sought out a certain means of self-expression, a need which advertising would eventually pick up on. Part 3 in particular goes in depth of how business could now target not just a general audience, but could focus in on particular subsets "the prep," "the hippie," "the jock" and people who buy stuff to fit their lifestyle as a means of self-expression. Yet again, advertising, marketing and consumption would be able to manipulate the inner workings of the human desire--in this case to be oneself. I think these two segments should speak to the Church in how we describe the self. The only way I can pull my head around it is using the language of the old and new self as described by the apostle Paul. The new self does bring freedom and the old has to be stripped away. I think the Church might actually have a lot to say about this.

I was not as impressed with Part 4. It centers on President Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair as examples of how the techniques that were born in the marriage of business and psychology come to politics. The previous section showed that Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were able to win elections with assertions of the individual which appealed to the new understanding of the self. In the case of the rise of the New Left, both Clinton and Blair used focus groups, polls, etc. to pander to swing voters in attempt to always please the people. Although the political focus seems to be a offswing from the previous three sections premises about business, self and consumption, a certain truth rises at the end. If you try to pander to the public, then you are always at the mercy of the sway of people's opinions and desires. The individual reigns while a sense of community is demolished.

Although this documentary was made in 2002, I almost felt that Part 4 could have easily gone into the impact that "the self" has had in Church culture. All I could think about was the algining of the Christian Right with George Bush and a focus on "personal relationship with Jesus Christ," making a "decision" for Jesus, arguments concerning the individual's right to choose (and even how all of that gets into the culture wars). I'm not articulating it very well, but there is so much that we can talk about as far as the Church and the individual goes. Unfortunately today, the easiest consumers, most easily decieved consumers are Christians. Sell a piece of decorative wood with a Scripture on it, a Christian will buy it. Sell a knock-off t-shirt from a popular advertisement and substitute the logo with "Jesus," a "conservative" Christian will buy it. Sell a t-shirt that says something about AIDS, poverty, Africa with a small percentage of the proceeds going to those causes, then a "liberal" Christian will probably buy it. Why else do you think Bono chose to base the Product Red campaign on corporations? I heard him in an interview say that the market has become the way that people excersie their democracy (and I wonder if this is sometimes how we attempt to exercise our faith). Consumption has totally taken over the Church. I no longer feel comfortable in most evangelical Churches, not just because of politics or on certain hermeneutics, but because everyone dresses so nice it makes it seem like you gotta be rich to be a Christian--or at least stylish.

To be continued.