One of the most unfortunate events that deterred a healthy development of a motion picture industry is that its childhood tragically coincided with the childhood of Communism. The Soviet era of Communism was the first totalitarian regime that recognized the power of a moving image and used it fully to align masses with its party line. Not unlike the liberal-Democrat film and media machine that so disgracefully uses it today and by far exceeds the standards of tasteless social realism initiated by their Soviet forefathers.
Understandably, I float in a much generalized stream but nevertheless the essential point of this thought is well anchored in the truth. Let me try to substantiate myself with an example.
Did you notice how often when one prays in the movies or TV something of a terrible nature, usually involving lots of blood, happens to him or her?
It seems that prayer is the most dangerous human activity on the screen. See it for yourself – see how many movies you can count from 1971 till present where a hero was able to complete any prayer, even a short one, without being interrupted by some kind of a life threatening attack.
It becomes habitual; as soon as someone kneels to pray you know something bloody is on the way to happen. So after seeing someone attacked by some horrifying creature as they pray, one simply concludes that prayer is a dangerous activity to be avoided, at least in public.
Our image addicted mind being systematically exposed to the variation of the same image, subconsciously creates a simple defense mechanism such as “prayer=danger” or “prayer is not safe.” The more natural the image of someone’s skull cracked during the prayer becomes to us, the more the defense mechanism solidifies itself regardless of our will.
We are being indoctrinated image by image. Even the knowledge of it being a manipulation cannot resist the logic of an imaginative mind, which believes what is sees not what it’s told.
Well, one can argue that it is not done on purpose but simply to add dramatic effect. This explanation can make sense within the pathetic frames of our contemporary culture where the only way to achieve anything close to dramatic is by mocking the sacred and meaningful, and the only way to be courageous is by ridiculing a sacred ritual or a tradition, (with no repercussions, by the way).
Prayer used to be considered a powerful weapon against everything evil, in fact, the only secure weapon in this uncertain universe of ours. Prayer used to be the impregnable castle of our higher being, a castle where we could safely retreat from the injustice and vanity of the world. It used to be until 1960’s when the movie industry in the United States became fatally infected with the virus of Christ-hating Communist scum imported from the Soviet Union and Europe. The virus was injected in 30’s and took only three decades to fully destroy the immature and naive imaginative immunity of the American cinema.
That miserable demon Lenin said once, “Cinema is the most important among the arts” and this, in turn, became a mantra of Communist infiltrators who systematically invaded Hollywood in the 1930’s.Lenin’s atheist-demons demolished thousands of churches and hanged clergymen all over Russia. Within twenty years after the revolution, the Bolsheviks successfully removed everything sacred from the landscape of the religious Russian soul. Now it was time for America.
They knew that America communicated to the world and within itself through cinema. Being a young culture not equipped by an extensive mythology, America, more than any other land, was deeply rooted and dependant on the movies as a source of a national imagination. Movies for America were as important as the Iliad for the Greeks — and planting Commies in Hollywood was nothing short of sending a wooden horse to the Trojans.
The scope of the Communist infiltration is immense and frightening. It was one of the most effective, cheaply done and brilliant political moves ever executed. In fact, its impact was so powerful and enduring, that till this very day, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we still see its destructive tendencies rolling in our movies by the inertia of ignorance.
Unbeknownst to many well-intentioned filmmakers, it is still the same Trojan horse of nihilist-demonic religion, of ugly antichrists that is peacefully parked in the castle of our imagination. And because some of us still reject our staggering defeat and stupidity and naivety that let us accept the gift of our enemies, they still make movies trying to glorify those who came to destroy us just as they destroyed the God-fearing and God-Loving Russian peasant who was not allowed to go to church anymore and upon witnessing the horrors of Christian persecutions was now afraid to pray at all.
They tortured and murdered Christians in Russia and unable to do so in America, using the imagination of sick and hateful writers and directors, they tortured and murdered them in the movies.
Mutilating praying people in the movies was just a preview of this gruesome historic series. But it was powerful enough to inspire many sequels. And these sequels were not produced by Communist spies but by our “own Homers” who were not only as blind as their Greek forefather but also stupid and desperately ignorant of the fact that they were telling the story of their enemy.