By the Rev. Silvio Nardoni
Unitarian Universalist Community Church
Santa Monica, California
August 21, 2011

Before I start the sermon, those of you who watch videos on the internet will be familiar with the pop-up ad that runs before the video starts.  This is an unpaid pop-up ad.  If you want to see a movie that is spiritually uplifting as well as instructive, you need look no further than “Buck.”  It’s about a man who trains horses.  You should know that the last time I was on a horse, I was making an unscheduled dismount from the back side of the saddle, doing a half-flip in the air while my parents watched in horror.  As you can see, everything turned out OK, or reasonably so.  Even though my experience with horses is a somewhat painful memory, this is a movie I could watch a dozen times.

Speaking of which, I’d like to do a little social media work as a part of the context for this sermon.  To make it more fun, let’s do it by having people stand (as you are able) in response to my questions, and remain standing until your answer to the question would be in the negative.

How many people have seen a movie more than once?  Twice?  Five times?  Ten times?  Twenty times?  Thirty times?  Fifty times? (Postscript:  Three people were still standing at “Fifty.”)

Now, I’d like to slice the data another way:  For those who have seen a movie more than five times, let’s do it by category:  Comedy, Drama, Action, Western, Science Fiction, Foreign, Musical.  (Postscript:  No single type had significantly more than any other)

As you can see, there are films from nearly every genre which have attracted repeated viewings, and this brings me, finally, to the beginning of my sermon.
When I was invited to preach here again this summer, the first response from those who found out was, “What movie are you going to talk about this time?”  I don’t feel stereotyped or limited by that question, which carries the assumption that I will be talking about a movie.  That’s pretty much been the pattern of my preaching here over the last several years. I’m grateful for the welcome and support of my efforts to find nuggets of spiritual gold in the middle of the river of images that rushes down from the hills of Hollywood.

But I began to think, “What do I think I’m doing when I talk about these movies?  Inspiring those who haven’t seen it, to go out and rent or buy the DVD?  Giving a movie review?”  As I pondered these questions, I decided to set a new course for myself:  to write a book.   

I know that my starting point on any writing project is a working title.  Until I have that, the words just don’t come. So you heard it here first:  “How to Watch a Movie as Though Your Life Depended On It.”  That might be okay for a book title, but it’s a little unwieldy or pretentious for a sermon.  Besides, it violates one of the fundamental rules of preaching:  Don’t try to tell everything you know about a subject in a sermon, because you might convince your listeners that you have succeeded.

So, today’s sermon, more modestly titled, “Watching Movies for Pleasure and Profit” gives me a chance to start writing what will be the prologue to my book.
I don’t want to divide movie watching into two types:  those you watch for pleasure and those you watch for “profit”.  

My use of the word profit in this case means not monetary gain, but an enrichment of life, a nurturing of the soul.  Indeed, I think that one of the troubles with the world these days is too narrow an understanding of profit.  We look only at the financial pages to gauge profit (or lately, loss), but we ignore the larger and more fundamental meaning of the word, which is progress.  That, too, may seem in short supply, but the reason people come to a Unitarian Universalist church is to learn and share a set of values that doesn’t depend on the vagaries of the stock market.

Likewise, the notion of pleasure seems strangely divorced from an accounting of profit.  It’s unlikely that anyone would watch a movie more than once if they did not get some pleasure from it, and my basic thesis is that the “profit” emerges more often than not on the second, third or subsequent viewing.

This is not universally true.  I recently read an article that articulated a whole philosophy of teaching based upon a single viewing of a single scene from the movie, “Almost Famous.”  That scene helped the author understand that he was not “cool,” and that it was this very lack of “coolness” that made him a more effective teacher.  

So even a single scene from what was (for me anyway) an unremarkable movie can have the soul-enriching effect that I’ve usually only experienced from multiple viewings.  I guess in the same way that this teacher discovered that not being cool was the key to success as a teacher, I’ve discovered that being a slow learner is an integral part of my spiritual practice of watching movies.

Like all spiritual practices, watching movies both requires and develops a greater sense of awareness of what is going on inside you at the time you venture into the world of imagination brought to you by a movie.  When I say “world of imagination,” I include documentary films as well as fictional stories in that category.  I think both types of films have the same effect on us, namely, to bring a new set of characters into our craniums. Those images then bounce around inside like pinballs in an arcade machine, triggering the memories, associations, and speculation that we can use to understand our lives more fully.

A recent experience illustrates why this sense of awareness is not only an outcome but also an essential ingredient in the movie-watching experience.  I had a day at work which I spent mostly talking with capable and well-intentioned tech support people who could not tell me why the database program that I use to manage my law practice would not work.  I left the office in a funk, filled with a sense of frustration over projects and tasks left unaccomplished.

I got home and thanks to my wife’s uncanny intuition, she had recorded a movie called “Fly Away Home.”  It’s a touching and heartfelt story of a teenage girl whose mother dies in a car crash.  She moves half way around the world to live with her father. Ultimately, she learns how to hold onto the memory of her mother while gaining the skill and confidence to fly an ultralight aircraft leading a flock of geese on a thousand-mile migration from Canada to the southern U.S.  That movie was the perfect tonic for my spirit, and left me prepared to face the problems that I would face the following morning.  

So it is not only what the movie brings to us, but what we bring to the movie that brings a measure of meaning and soul enhancement.  I’ve watched that movie before, and enjoyed it every time, but on that day it spoke to me in a new and deeper way.  It gently chided me for exaggerating the losses I had suffered that day, which in no way compare to the death of a parent.  It gave me images of wonder, of taking flight, of both leaving home and finding a place of refuge to call home, if for only a time.  

Not all movies act as a kind of spiritual painkiller, nor should they.  There are times when I need to grapple with the agony and struggles in a movie. Not because I don’t have enough of my own, but I need reminders of what I am struggling for, which is not simply a life of pleasure.  The profit motive is not just about personal gain.  A holistic worldview takes seriously the well-being of others, even when we cannot be certain that our effort will produce any result.  

I think of the movie “Return to Paradise,” in which a young man voluntarily returns to a repressive Southeast Asian country in an effort to save his friend. The friend was in prison for possession of a drug stash that belonged to a group that had rented a house together. In the end, his friend is executed for this crime, and the other spends several years in prison, all for naught.  

Or maybe not naught.  Sometimes doing the right thing is in itself a moral victory, even when the consequences do not match our intention or desire.  I need to know that those impulses remain alive, that persuasion is not a lost art.  These films give me a satisfaction not born of knowing that everything will turn out all right, but that even so our choices carry considerable weight and worth.

There’s a price to pay for this approach to watching movies, and I don’t just mean multiple rental fees for watching the same movie over and over (or buying and storing the discs of those films who are candidates for multiple viewings).  Someone asked me the other day if I was a “film buff.”  And I had to answer “No,” not because I don’t love movies but because I don’t have the breadth of knowledge and viewing experience that is the hallmark of a true cinephile.

Like many aspects of life, you have a choice of how to allocate resources, in this case, time.  I’ve chosen depth over breadth, quality over quantity.  I can’t say if that is the “right” choice, but it is the choice that has brought me a measure of fulfillment that I don’t know how I could have achieved otherwise.  

My catalogue of soul-feeding films is slender, but still growing.  I don’t have a goal in my practice.  I won’t reach some summit from which I can see the “promised land.”  Indeed, if anything my path leads downward, into the labyrinth where shadows dance upon the walls.  Something draws me forward in that journey, which I cannot name or fully describe.   Even so, I am grateful for its presence in my life, and my prayer for others is that a kindred spirit will come to them, whether the medium be music, movies, or the myriad other doorways into the world of imagination.  May it be so.