Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry

The Brazen Serpent

The Brazen Serpent Who first seduced them to that foul revolt? Th’ infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived The mother of mankind . . . John Milton Paradise Lost I, 33–37 Positive church relations with the moving pictures did not spring forth overnight. A history of theological resistance to images and amusements colored the uncertain reception that church leaders gave to the novel invention. Before the early-twentieth-century church embraced the possibilities of motion pictures, biblical and ecclesiastical notions of graven images and brazen serpents shaped its reluctant affections. Moving images were theologically problematic for many adherents of the second commandment. Of particular relevance was a conception of film as a serpent, of a beguiling intruder into a good, moral life. The origins of the Christian film movement point back to this image, both as a caveat against movies and as a vision for them. As early as 1909, Garnet Warren, a writer for the New York Herald, noticed that film had a certain hypnotic effect on members of the nickelodeon audience. He marveled at how the moving pictures had for these persons the “obscure fascination of some serpents.”1 His conception of the silent cinema appearing as a legendary cockatrice whose mesmerizing gaze would stun, daze, and devour its victim proved a curious prophecy. Likewise, the witty George Bernard Shaw described the storytelling power of the cinema, unreeling images to the illiterate as well as to the literate , as rhetorical means to keep its “victim (if you like to call him so) not only awake but fascinated as if by a serpent’s eye.”2 Shaw recognized 1 15 in 1914 that the English mind and ideals, nay, even the entire human conscience , would be shaped by the mesmerizing, serpentine force of cinema. Ben Hecht, the irreverent screenwriter who mocked Hollywood even as he financially exploited it, confirmed this perception of the cinema in his jaded writings. In a collection of stories entitled 1001 Afternoons, he offered wry accounts of the doings of the celebrities of the 1920s. He spoofed the ubiquitous publicity ploys of the industry and likened them to the dastardly deed of “selling the celluloid serpent.” Rather than viewing film as “ribbons of time” or some other romantic notion, Hecht stripped away the fanciful illusions of the blustering idol-making industry , revealing the dead, empty skin of a dangerously seductive snake and a subsequent huckster marketing of snake oil.3 The winding, charming, mesmerizing, spell-inducing serpent was indeed an apt metaphor for the hypnotic art of the motion picture. Reflecting in the early 1950s over his participation in such a suspect vocation, Hecht claimed it was a dishonest industry that too facilely solved problems of politics, labor injustice, or domestic conflict with a “simple Christian phrase or a fine American motto.”4 Others viewed the snake as that most heinous of seducers that slithered into the Garden of Eden seeking to poison all humankind. American dramatist Walter Prichard Eaton contributed an article in the Freeman on the “Trail of the Celluloid Serpent,” warning of the widening effects of this popular educator in shaping the mores of young audiences.5 Like the serpent, the moving pictures were condemned for being manipulative and compelling, even winding their way into the safe haven of homes and gardens . In contrast to this nest of evil snake metaphors, I derive my use of the analogical concept of the brazen serpent from the peculiar biblical narrative in Numbers (21:4f) regarding the death of some of the children of Israel in the wilderness. When these people grumbled and complained about the lack of food and water (not only was the food miserable and loathsome, but there wasn’t enough of it either), the Lord sent fiery serpents that fatally bit the people. When Moses interceded for them, the Lord, who had previously commanded that His people neither make nor worship any graven image, instructed his servant Moses to make a fiery serpent and set it on a standard so that anyone who looked at it would live. The bronze serpent thus became, for a season, a symbolic vehicle of healing, of rescue, of life. One could pick up serpents and not be hurt, but healed. In what Sir James Frazer called sympathetic magic, a connection 16 | The Brazen Serpent existed between serpents and healing that extends back to Aesculapius...