In his Academy Awards speech from 1992, George Lucas, creator of the original Star Wars and co-creator of Indiana Jones said, “I’ve always tried to be aware of what I say in my films because all of us who make motion pictures are teachers—teachers with very loud voices.” As a creator, he understood on a deep level the power that movies and TV shows have to impact hearts and minds.
Developing literacy around movies and TV requires an understanding of at least three concepts: text, context, and subtext. For our purposes, “text” can refer to what’s explicitly on the screen, “context” can refer to the background information viewers are expected to have around what’s on the screen, and “subtext” can refer to things that aren’t explicitly stated in a movie or TV show, but that may be implied.
A lot of conversations about media literacy in Christian circles tend to center around what we’re calling “text,” in the form of questions like:
- Was sex or nudity explicitly portrayed onscreen?
- How many swear words were in the movie?
- Were characters portrayed doing drugs?
To be clear, these are important conversations, because regular exposure to these things can serve to normalize certain behaviors. But the impact of a movie also has a lot to do with what its viewers bring to the experience, and the way they may or may not be reading between the lines.
2024’s Inside Out 2 tells the story of Riley, a soon-to-be-9th-grader who is dealing with the anxiety of going to high school and wanting to fit in with the older girls. In the film, Riley develops an obsession with a high-school senior named “Val.” Given the context of Disney’s recent efforts to portray more characters from “underrepresented groups,” many viewers suspected subtext that maybe Riley’s obsession with Val was due to same-sex attraction. However, this is not explicitly confirmed in the movie, and remains up for debate.
Though subtext isn’t “provable,” once you see it, it can completely change your interpretation of a piece of media. Aslan being an allegorical symbol for Jesus in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe could be called subtext. It’s been argued that The Wizard of Oz has subtextual political criticisms of industrial capitalism (try saying that five times fast). The 2019 film Parasite is a straightforward story about a con gone wrong, but contains deeper subtextual commentary about wealth inequality and the plight of the underclass in South Korea (and, one could argue, the world).
It should be stated, also, that bingeing movies and TV shows makes cultivating media literacy harder. Processing the messages in movies and TV shows takes time, but bingeing involves consuming massive amounts of content as quickly as possible. Still, the points are there, whether or not we take the time to recognize them.