Is Hollywood still the church of the masses? Not in this digital world | Terry Mattingly

As the creator of classics such as "It's a Wonderful Life" and "You Can't Take It With You," director Frank Capra knew how to touch the hearts and souls of moviegoers.

The self-described Christmas Catholic took that power seriously. "No saint, no pope, no general, no sultan, has ever had the power that a filmmaker has," he once said. This was the "power to talk to hundreds of millions of people for two hours in the dark."

The power of today's digital media is much more complex than that, said Barbara Nicolosi Harrington, a former Catholic nun-turned-screenwriter and Hollywood script doctor.

"Hollywood has been the church of the masses, but I don't think that's still true. At least, we cannot say that movie theaters are the sanctuaries they once were for most people, especially for the young," said Harrington, author of "Behind the Screen: Hollywood Insiders on Faith, Film, and Culture."

When she was young, she explained, mainstream entertainment "was everything. Hollywood created the images that told us what was cool and what it meant to be a success and to be loved."

Now, when she talks to young people, they have a completely different relationship with mass media. The voices and images of Hollywood are competing with legions of "influencers" who reach the masses through omnipresent smartphones.

"There are so many competing screens and so much of the content is truly asinine," she said. Young people accept that, but believe that they and their peers can decide what is true and what is false in that digital universe. When messages hit home, social media mavens then connect users with creators, activists or networks linked to the content.

"Kids think they're in control," said Harrington, reached by telephone. "But how can you tell what is right and wrong if it's TikTok and its algorithms that decide what you see? … You think that you get to decide what is right for you and what voices will guide you. But is that true these days?"

The big question is whether millions of parents, pastors, teachers and counselors realize how much the balance of power has shifted in mass media and entertainment. This is the question I have been trying to address in a Substack newsletter I call Rational Sheep ‒ a name drawn from the prayers in the Orthodox Christian baptism rite.

A quarter of a century ago, in an essay called "The Liturgy of Mass Media," I noted the importance of the work of scholar Quentin Schultze and a circle of Calvin University researchers in their book "Dancing in the Dark."

"Usually adults simply ignore youth-oriented popular art. … By ignoring youth art, however, adults ignore the children in their care," they wrote. In the cable-television age, one pattern was clear: "Instead of watching TV with their families, teens generally watch it alone or in peer groups and talk little to their parents about their viewing." All of these mass media signals became "maps of reality," providing "stories, metaphors and symbols that explain life and suggest responses to its quandaries and mysteries."

Back then, said Schultze, reached by telephone, the goal was to teach "discernment" to adults and young people as they wrestled with the mass media forces in their lives, trying to put what they saw, heard and read into "a biblical context" of good and bad, beautiful and ugly.

"Now we feel like we're in the ocean up to our eyeballs just trying to find out what is happening," he said. "We are dealing with interwoven digital networks ‒ local, national and global ‒ that change and morph based on how people use them."

It's hard to practice discernment while smartphones serve as a "divide and conquer" technology that divides people of various ages into different audiences when dealing with politics, business, morality, education, family life and, yes, faith.

"It's hard to be discerning when you're not even sure what many of these messages and symbols mean," said Schultze. "Children in our homes who are only three to four years apart are literally growing up in different worlds." While it's hard to know what parents, clergy and teachers should be doing, he added, "One thing is certain ‒ you can't ignore what is happening and act like it doesn't matter."

Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Oak Ridge and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Mattingly: Digital media replace Hollywood as church of the masses