Fictional Unpleasantness

Every good story needs a bad villain. There is real evil in the world and this ought to be reflected in our stories. Recently, Sam and I spent a day at Disney's Hollywood Studios. One highlight from our day there was the Indiana Jones stunt show(--not its official name, but I can't bring myself to use the word epic on this blog). During one of the fight scenes I noticed a departure from the movie. The final fight scene of the movie famously takes place on and around a Nazi war plane. This is the scene in which Marion gets caught in the cockpit of the plane and Indy has to get her out before the it blows--that while fighting off a brawny bald gentleman with a moustache. It's a thrilling sequence. But I noticed in the stunt show something different about the plane. In the movie, the plane has two large swastikas emblazoned on the wings marking this plane as belonging to the Nazis. In this reenactment, however, the swastikas were gone. Disney, I assume, did not want to have the swastika--the symbol for one of the most wicked regimes of the last century--to feature prominently in their fun-for-the-whole-family stunt show; and I understand why. The Holocaust was nearly all the history they taught us in public school (that and slavery were about it), so I've read about the atrocities committed under that flag. I understand wanting to avoid mentioning the Nazis at a theme park.

So what's the problem? Well, I think this illustrates our tendency to whitewash evil. It is we who invent movie rental services that take out any part of a movie which might bother us. But what effect does this have?

In the best case scenario, we become wimps. If we don't see evil in stories, we don't recognize it when we encounter it in the world. When we finally do bump into real treachery, we run. We've trained ourselves to run from fictional unpleasantness, and this transfers into life. If the in the best case we become wimps, in the worst case, we become confused wimps. Back to the stunt show. 

You see, Disney didn't just remove the swastikas--it replaced them. With what? With what did they choose to replace the flag under which those unutterable atrocities occurred? They replaced it with a cross. The flag flown above the enemy camp is no longer emblazoned with the mangled cross of Nazism, but the cross of Christ. This is the inevitable outcome of blacking out wickedness. We call evil good, and good evil; put darkness for light, and light for darkness; put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter. If we whiteout the dark stuff, the light starts too look pretty dark. Why did Aslan kill that nice lady who gave Edmund dessert?

So when you see evil in a story, hate it. Hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Our role in movies and books is that of the audience, but our role in the world is that of characters. If we want to be (or raise) the kind of characters who run from evil, keep fast-forwarding through the scary parts. But if we want to be the kind of characters who fight evil, we must be the kind of audience members who see evil and hate it. And it's only Christians who believe that evil can be beaten. To paraphrase Chesterton, read stories about dragons, and not only about dragons, but about dragon killers. Then, being well versed in the catechisms of heroes, fight.