The entertainment we consume is supposed to, on some level, reflect the real world. Oh, sure, big blockbuster movies aren’t exactly documentaries: There may be gigantic monsters stomping around or sentient apes laying claim on civilization, but the demographics of a given movie try to have at least a passing resemblance to the cities and neighborhoods in which we live.
But, of course, movies and television shows aren’t perfect in this regard. Writers and directors, I think, try to be fair and inclusive and all that stuff, but they also create from a place of familiarity: Very often, they craft stories around worlds familiar to them (monsters notwithstanding). And sometimes balancing their own experience with demographic parity can be a little tricky.
So when people actually take a look at movies to see what sort of folks populate them, I’m typically fascinated by the findings—even if they might be a little misleading.
Last Tuesday, the gay activist organization GLAAD issued its second “Studio Responsibility Index,” which tracks the number of LGBT characters represented in major motion pictures. The index found that 17% of the 102 major studio movies released in 2013 included homosexual characters. GLAAD says that 7% were substantial, positive roles (like Jared Leto’s Oscar-winning performance in Dallas Buyers Club).
About a week earlier, the government’s National Health Interview Survey—the first big government study to examine the country’s sexual orientation—found that 1.6% of Americans described themselves as gay, while another seven-tenths of a percent said they were bisexual. That’s 2.3% of the population.
Taken together, those two studies might suggest to some that the LGBT population is actually overrepresented in movies. But, of course, that’s not exactly fair. And there are lots of different ways to parse these numbers. If we assume that most big movies have, maybe, 10-20 characters who say something during the course of the movie (not just one), GLAAD might have a point. If we accept the premise that entertainment reflects, on some level, the world as it is, then gays and lesbians may be anywhere from slightly to significantly underrepresented.
Or maybe not. After all, we only have two hours to get to know characters in the average flick. Is it possible that someone’s sexual orientation just didn’t come up in conversation? When you’re busy battling a zombie horde, these issues just don’t seem to come up.
Reflecting on this study, I wondered what numbers we might find if films were parsed for my own “special interest group,” if you will: Christianity.
According to a 2012 Gallup poll, about 77% of Americans identify as Christian—by far the biggest religious group in the country.
Now, don’t take what follows as anything scientific: I didn’t do a study of all 102 films GLAAD looked at. But just for fun, I did check out the 58 films I reviewed last year, and I found that 47% of them had at least one Christian character.
By GLAAD’s standards, that’s woeful underrepresentation—a 30% difference between the country at large and what we see in movies. And keep in mind, I’m counting characters who are barely even nominal Christians: The mother in Baggage Claim was counted because she was married four times in the same church. The Lone Ranger gets a nod because of a train car full of annoying, singing missionaries. The vile A Haunted House even gets tallied in the positive column because there’s a con man who pretends to be a Catholic priest. Trust me: This 47% ratio is generous beyond all rational sense. And if you take out the explicitly Christian movies I reviewed—productions like Grace Unplugged and I’m in Love With a Church Girl—the ratio goes down to 43%.
If we winnow down my results to positive depictions of Christianity, just 31% had characters manifesting what you’d call “positive expressions” of the faith. Take out the Christian movies, and the number dips down to 26%. And this obviously doesn’t take into account theologically accurate depictions of Christianity: I was just looking at Christians who were, for the most part, doing good things or motivated in a good way by their faith. So much for The Lone Ranger. I do give a thumbs-up to the exorcists in The Conjuring and church-going Clark Kent in Man of Steel (pictured). But, again, I was generous. My figures include such characters as the one-time-drug-dealer-turned-priest in Machete Kills and the naive soldier of fortune in Riddick, two of 2013’s bloodiest movies. (Interestingly, far more positive Christians found their way into R-rated fare than G- or PG-rated flicks.)
Now, there are lots of ways to look at these figures.
One, we could say they’re an illustration of the low esteem in which Hollywood holds us Christians. We could argue that more formal studies should be done to call attention to this faith gap.
Two, we could say it’s the natural byproduct of the entertainment industry’s own more secular culture: I’d guess that most creators in Hollywood aren’t regular churchgoers, and few of them are likely familiar with evangelicalism. They write what they know, and most scriptwriters probably don’t know very many people like me.
Three, we could look at these figures and say they’re a product of the entertainment industry trying to reach as broad an audience as possible. Religion is inherently polarizing, and even if 77% of moviegoers are totally cool with explicit mentions of Jesus, producers would probably still like to get the other 23% of Americans to buy tickets.
But for me, this very informal and fundamentally flawed exercise underlines the inherent weaknesses of such studies. Faith, after all, can be a very personal thing (much as I’d assume would be sexual orientation). If we had a chance to get to know some of the more “Godless” characters that kept my tallies from ever breaching 50%, we might come to understand that faith does actually impact them more than we see in a small, two-hour window. If you plucked two hours out of my life and watched me closely, there’s a chance you might not see me mention Christianity at all during that time. If I was simultaneously dealing with an alien invasion, the chances of me discussing my Lord and Savior might go down even more. (Or up, depending on how dire the circumstances were, I suppose.)
Yeah, these studies can be fascinating. And they can tell us something about Hollywood, or ourselves, or both. But perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into them.
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