Millstones on the Road VII: Steven Filthberg

This will be the seventh of a series of articles relating the dangers of the modern media for your Catholic Children. I hope this articles will help you to take care of the spiritual health of your children. 

To state that the world is in a bad state of affairs is to state the obvious. Children are very easy to influence and a Catholic must take care of their souls. Remember and meditate on what Queen Blanche told to King St. Louis!  "My son, I would rather see you dead in my arms than in the state of sin". Your child's soul and even your own depend on how you raise them.

Steven Spielberg is one of the most prolific, and the most succesfull filmaker ever to step on earth. He can turn all the audience into children with his wowing special effects, his heart-warming scenes and his understanding on how to mezmerise people. I won't deny he is talented. But I won't try to parade him as a good guy because he knows how to make awesome motion pictures. 

Maybe Steven Spielberg is not particularly popular among young children. But his average rating is PG and PG-13, which is accepted by the wider majority of parents, even for their toddlers. Dont' we have a society that lets children play Grand Theft Auto and Slenderman, then watch The Woman in Black and Child's Play, and then get lectured about sexual matters at school? The Spielberg films I will analyse are usually popular among children, even children below the age MPAA deems appropiate. 

Jurassic Park:

Jurassic Park's main theme is nature going out of control at the hands of pridefull humans, who are careless with technology and try to do things beyond their power, however there is no mention of God outside of Ian Malcom's stupid blasphemy: 

Ian Malcom: God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs. 

Ellie Sttatler: Dinosaurs eat man. And women inherit the earth. 

You just can't destroy God and just as you can't create dinosaurs from thousand year old petrified blood.  

Most of Jurassic Park's appeal is watching dinosaurs eating humans, which is morbid entertainment, to say at least. Even tough it's a PG-13 rated horror film, there are lots of children-aimed products, including videogames, an animated show named "Jurassic Camp", legos, and more. What's the point of having the legos if you haven't watched the movie? 

Jurassic World is even worst than the original movies (it wasn't directed by Spielberg, though). There is toxic environmentalism, since a little girl lets dinosaurs lose on the face of eart "bc they ur alive like me", while the movie discusses the posibility of defending dinosaurs just as other animal species, even though they are too big and will compete with other creatures.  Ian Malcolm claims dinosaurs will punish men for their careless use of technology, and that "God is not part of the equation.". All dinosaurs except some hervibores are dangerous in the original movie, yet in Jurassic World, Blue the raptor is seen as a tame pet. 

Indiana Jones: 

Indiana Jones is a cowboy archaeologist who goes finding the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail and a pachammomy-style magical stone belonging to an Indian village After reading about it and remembering it, I am surprised some people let their children watch it since it has quite a lot of horrible scenes, including innocent people being thrown into pyres of fire, a man is sucked by a plane motor and the heads of three nazis melt down and explode in grotesque manner. But, well, it happens. It was so easy to find problems with the saga that it toook me 2 days to finish writing about them down: 

 

- "Indy" is an atheist. Belloq tells him they both have lost the Faith, and he dismisses the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail as myths. Even tough he always finds supernatural happenings in his adventures, he shows the same skeptical, naturalist attitude at the beginning of the movie. 

- In The Last Crusade, Indy blasphemes and is punished by his father yet he is somehow able to distinguish the Holy Grail. You may argue that he repented, but finding the Holy Grail would have been a Grace given to someone extraodinarily Holy, not someone who didn't really repented. Indy's repentance (if there was any) should have been shown. It is true that sometimes God gives His greatest graces to people who commited the worst sins (eg; St. Mary Magdalene), but they first repent. 

Dr. Jones should have repented like Dismas at Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ: lots of tears, a serious attitude, breast-striking, contemplative way of acting. But "Indy" doesn't do that. His repentance is merely hinted, not shown. Donovan dies after chosing the wrong grail and Communicating in mortal sin, yet Indiana Jones drinks the Blood of Jesus without confessing his sins, or preparing to do so: even the sinless, purest Blessed Virgin prepared to receive Holy Communion, yet a cowboy archeologist doesn't even say a Hail Mary and can Communicate without sacrilege, in front of a devout crusader soldier who doesn't bat an eye. 

The Holy Grail, if ever found, would have been an important relic. Every time a Saint finds anything related to Jesus Christ, whether it's a piece of the Cross, the Crown of Thorns, or His Nails, the Relic is treated with great veneration, placed with celebration under a golden altar, and there are even feasts to commemorate it's finding. But in The Last Crusade, the Grail ends up in the ground after being robbed by a greedy Elsa and we are told that it's all right, that's were the Grail should be. The knight told "Indy" that the Grail should not pass a Seal, but that was no reason for not rescuing the Grail from the ground, kissing it, retreiveing it to the knight, and that's it.   

Also, Dr. Henry Jones claims that if the Nazis posess the Grail, "the armies of darkness will march all over the face of earth". But the whole Holy Land is under posession by muslims and jews, and albeit that's a great tragedy, that's not the reason why the armies of darkness march around the eart.  

During the "Word of God" challenge, Indy must spell the Name of God. Of course, he must step on the letters first. This is the Name that makes Seraphs shiver with awe and fear, yet a cowboy archeologist can step over it like nothing. Do you really think Crusaders would have made such a sacrilegous challenge? No, they couldn't, but Stevie did. His personal intentions or the degree of his sin are to God's judgement, but your children may lose reverence due to Sacred Relics if you let them watch "Indy's" adventures. 

- In "The Cursed Temple", the members of the sect (the "Thugees") force you to "drink the blood" of their idol, Kali. Once you drink the blood, you became brainwashed into their cult. Why are they drinking the blood of their idol, just as we drink the Blood of Jesus during Communion? 

Now, Thugees were a real cult, but they didn't have voodoo dolls, and they didn't burn their victims. They strangled them with a yellow handkerchief. I don't think they drank the blood of Kali, but even if they did, if Spielberg were Catholic, he would have hesitated to put this in the movie, for little is known in the west about the Thugees, but people know Catholicism better, and they would have related it with the Church. Makes me think. On the other way, why put a Catholic ritual into a satanic indian cult in a movie about a cowboy archeologist and his friends?  

This sect has stolen a magical stone from a village, and Indy must retrieve it, for the stone gives food to the people. The old guy from the town they find tells Indiana & co that "Shiva" made them crash so they could retrieve the Pachamommy-style stone. 

Indiana Jones manages to saves the stones by accusing Thugee priest Mola Ram of "betraying Shiva". O yeah, so the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant are myths, yet some years before, Indy invoked Shiva and manages to save people from starvation by retrieving magical stones. I didn't know Kali hated Shiva, though, being that they are both worshiped by the Hindu. 

- Indy was supposed to be a James Bond-style playboy. He is never seen in explicit scenes, but every movie he has a different girl: Marion Ravenwood, Willie Scott and Elsa Schneider. Now, Marion Ravenwood was supposed to be very young when she first met "Indy". The script says that she was 15th when their first affair started, but fortunately that was later changed. Of course, Marion still tells Indiana Jones that "I was a child, I was in love. It was wrong and you knew it", and her father's friendship with Dr. Jones finished after this, which suggest their affair was rather sordid. Not very cute, mind you.    

 - It is little known that "Indy" is an expert in the occult, as mentioned in the Raiders of the Lost Ark. It  really makes me wonder. Now, one can argue that one can be an expert on the occult without being an occultist, like St. Irenaeous who wrote against the gnostics. But Dr. Jones is not St. Irenaeous. Would he be an occultist? That's and interesting theory. 

The Goonies 

The Goonies was not directed by Spielberg, but it was produced and the story was written by him. It's about some boys finding a lost treasure while being pursued by three robbers. Everything would be fine about this movie, if it were not because it includes some sick sexual jokes, one regarding the genitals of a statue. C'mon man, it's a movie for children, can you spare the obscenity please? 

CONCLUSION 

When Jaws come out, people were so afraid of it that many cancelled their vacations to the beach, fearing a big bad white shark would come out of nowhere and eat them. The shark from the film looks like a doll, and sharks tend to avoid busy beaches full of vacationists - otherwise you would have already multiple deaths in Acapulco - yet everybody panicked to death. This only tells you about the power of movies. If people cancel their pleasurous vacations on the beach because of a not-so scientifically accurate film, then, why wouldn't films influence their beliefs, their thoughts and actions? Particularly when you are a child who is just learning about the world, those special effects will turn you mad. 

I've got a very very bad feeling about this. Instead of having encounters of the worst kind with Stevie the Special Effects Guy, (and everything coming from Pollywood) maybe try to improve your relationship with the King of Heavens. His Power ain't no special effects.