The Documentarathon

And speaking of cultural exegesis, last week a visit to the local Rogers Video for some family movie-night fodder saw me leaving the store with a handful of documentaries (along with the afore-mentioned movie-night flicks). Over the last few days I've been working my way through them, and looking at the world with slightly different eyes as a result. These are some thoughts on what I watched last week:


Food Inc. This unflinching look at the industrial food industry leaves you with a creeping feeling in the pit of your gut and a lot of difficult questions about where our food comes from and how it arrives on our plate. Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and Bill McKibben's Deep Economy had already briefed me on the argument that the modern food industry has created some pretty serious moral, environmental and health crises for us, but the film's aerial shots of huge feed lots and its footage of mass-production "chicken factories" were no less disturbing for all their being expected. What Food Inc. added to the discussion was its look at how the interests of big money pretty consistently trump the interests of human well-being in policy- and law- making when it comes to the American food supply.

In Debt We Trust. One of two films I watched about the credit crisis in the United States, In Debt We Trust puts a human face on the realities of predatory lending and deregulation in the American credit card industry. Produced in 2006, mere months before the "bubble" actually burst, it makes some ominous predictions about a coming economic collapse that have turned out to be hauntingly accurate. For all the gargantuan numbers it tosses around, at times In Debt We Trust seems to over simplify the issues, painting a black-and-white picture of a Darth-Vader-esque credit card industry swallowing its innocent victims whole, who, through no fault of their own, find themselves swimming in a sea of inexplicable and inescapable debt. I don't doubt that the credit card industry is just as brutal, greedy and callous as the film makes it out to be, nor do I deny that this represents a serious moral crisis with global implications. I wonder, however, if the existence of a 926 billion dollar credit card debt in America is actually just the symptom of a deeper cultural malaise--the rampant materialism, the spiritual vacuity, the creeping shadow of ennui, the ego-centric sense of entitlement, the impulse to bury our heads in the illusory sand of the entertainment culture-- stuff like that-- stuff that we're all culpable for and capable of, not just the evil credit card industry that's willing to loan us the money (at 30% interest, of course) so that we can pay for it. To its detriment as a documentary, In Debt We Trust never asks any serious questions about this cultural malaise, preferring instead to point a single self-righteous finger at the corrupt politicians and bloated bankers.


Maxed-Out. Maxed-Out repeats the same gargantuan numbers, interviews many of the same economic analysts, and even includes some of the same footage as In Debt We Trust. Its interview of two collection agency guys is down-right creepy (like when the one compares his work of harrasing helpless debtors to a competitive athlete who's found a way to make a game he loves to play pay the bills), and some of the stories are really heart-wrenching, stories of people with the tread-marks of an unregulated credit card industry on their necks and spirits. The palette with which Maxed Out paints the picture, however, is bit less black-and-white than In Debt; and to its credit, it doesn't attempt any of the failed lunges at tongue-in-cheek satire that make In Debt feel sort of silly at times.

In the cool-down time of my little week-long documentarathon, I've been thinking a lot about St. Paul's declaration in the book of Colossians that God has triumphed over the powers and authorities in the cross. Walter Wink argues that when the Bible talks about "the powers" like this, it's referring to the invisible structures of human society, the spiritual dimmensions of the political, economic and cultural institutions that we put in place to help us control and define our life together, and that inevitably turn around and start to control and define us instead. Wink suggests (very compellingly) that when Paul says this kind of thing about God "disarming" the powers, he means that through the Cross and the Spirit of Christ, humans can be set free from these "invisible structures" in a way that allows us to see them for what they really are, and redeem them with the wisdom and love of God. If Wink is right, then the cultural malaise, the political corruption and the corporate greed illustrated in movies like Maxed Out and Food Inc are concrete examples of "the spiritual powers" in our world; and if St. Paul is right, then the Word and Spirit of Christ offers us the best, and only real solution to the deep social crises that these films are attempting to disarm.