You're Doing The Waltz With Your Murderer

Well, I just saw Elysium a few days ago and I must say that it is one of the dumbest movies I have ever seen. This is not to say that there weren’t any good scenes. Any scene with Sharlto Copley was enjoyable and the fight scene choreography was good.  Though, what ruined the movie was its heavy handed, beat you over the head stupid political message dealing with social justice. The moral I got out of the story was, “Americans bad, illegal immigrants good.” Since Neill Blomkamp is not American, I don’t know if he was exactly going for that, but all you have to do is replace “Americans” with any first world Western culture and “illegal immigrants” with any disenfranchised population and you get the same dumb message. “Why did you even go when the politics of the movie were quite clear beforehand?” You might ask. Well, I didn’t pay for the movie, my friend did, and I was expecting much more from the director of District 9 which was a brilliant allegory of Apartheid in South Africa. 

My overall goal of this article is not to provide a review of Elysium (for an interesting review, check out io9), but to point out something that came to mind after watching it. Why do we constantly pay to watch movies and games that hate us, our way of life, and our point of view? This is a question which I find is one of the most puzzling for any Christian or Conservative. Another example recently reminiscent of the politics of Elysium is the game, Bioshock: Infinite. While, admittedly, I have never played the game (I believe the Bioshock series, in general, is overrated) which is considered one of the best of all time, its disdain for Christianity and the Tea Party is well documented. However, I have read many Christians critics who have either not addressed this at all or simply rationalize the content as “just entertainment.” 

This argument for “just entertainment” rears its ugly head all the time. We are treated to images almost daily which mock God and Jesus Christ to no end and to take offense is to show oneself as a prude who can’t take a joke. A sad fact is that Christians themselves do a lot of the criticizing of other Christians. This is ridiculous because not only does it go against what God said in Galatians 6:7, “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” it is not the same for the other side. Movies with even hinted at Christian or conservative themes are destroyed by critics and leftists without the same kind of guilt-tripping.   

I am not one to call for boycotts or what not but what I do want Christians and Conservatives to realize is that maybe our money should go elsewhere when dealing with flat out anti-Christian and anti-Right Wing entertainment. Why do these men and women who despise us anyway deserve our support? I am reminded by two different lines in Norma Jean’s masterpiece, Memphis Will Be Laid to Waste, incidentally one of my favorite songs of all time.  The lines are, “You’re doing the Waltz with your murderer,” and “Mediocrity is the killer.” Settling for hateful rhetoric at our own expense in entertainment is settling for the mediocrity (the status anti-Christian quo) with which these movies and games will keep coming out because of profitability.