by Gary David Stratton

One of the primary reasons why Academy Award-winning films are so effective for exploring worldview is that a worldview is often best expressed as a story.  (See Teaching Worldview through Film and Using Worldview in Filmmaking) Students tend to accept this as a self-evident starting point, but it is not always instantly obvious to others. While philosophers and theologians are likely to express their own worldview as a set of propositions, doctrines, or values it is just as critical to understand worldview as the stories we live by.

These world-interpreting stories provide a “foundation or governing platform upon which people think, interpret and know.” [9] Whether one views a worldview as the tapestry out of which we weave our interpretation of the “strings of experience,” [10] the picture on the box of the jigsaw puzzle that shows us where all the pieces of life should go,[11] or “a conceptual scheme by which we consciously or unconsciously place or fit everything we believe and by which we interpret and judge reality,”[12] it is stories that articulate, legitimate, support, and modify our worldviews. [13]

Philosopher James K. A. Smith puts it this way.

Much of our action is not the fruit of conscious deliberation; instead, much of what we do grows out of our passional orientation to the world— affected by all the ways we’ve been primed to perceive the world. In short, our action emerges from how we imagine the world. What we do is driven by who we are, by the kind of person we have become. And that shaping of our character is, to a great extent, the effect of stories that have captivated us, that have sunk into our bones— stories that “picture” what we think life is about, what constitutes “the good life.” We live into the stories we’ve absorbed; we become characters in the drama that has captivated us.

The Power of Personality-Shaping Story 

We make ourselves by subconsciously composing a continually evolving “heroic story of self” that forms the foundation of our identity.

What I quickly discovered was that story served not only as the foundation of the philosophical macro-worldviews of societies and civilizations, they were also the primary basis for the psychological micro-worldviews out of which my individual students constructed their identities. Narrative psychology recognizes storytelling as the fundamental way in which human beings package our ideas and express ourselves. We do not so much discover ourselves through story so much as we make ourselves by subconsciously composing a continually evolving “heroic story of self” that forms much of our identity. As Dan P. McAdams, the father of narrative psychology asserts, “If you want to know me, then you must know my story, for my story defines who I am. And if I want to know myself, to gain insight into the meaning of my own life, then I, too, must come to know my own story.” [14]

Novelists and other creatives often capture this story-based idea of personal worldview in more poetic terms. Sue Monk Kid explains in her memoir, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, “In a way humans are not made of skin and bone as much as we’re made of stories.”[15]  In Barry Lopez’s children’s classic, Crow tells Weasel, “The stories people tell have a way of  taking care of them.”[1] And in Patrick Rothfuss’s novel, The Name of the Wind, Bass tells the Chronicler, “It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. We build ourselves out of that story. That story makes you what you are.” [16]  As Hollywood story guru, Robert McKee argues:

(A)ll fine films, novels, and plays… give the audience a fresh model of life empowered with affective meaning… Our appetite for story is a reflection of the profound human need to grasp the pattern of living, not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a personal, emotional experience. In the words of playwright Jen Anouilh, ‘Fiction gives life its form.'[17]

The Intertwining Stories in Macro and Micro Worldviews

Fiction give life its form.

Of course there is a complicated relationship between the stories of our personal micro-worldviews and those of the corporate macro-worldviews that surround us. The raw materials for constructing our own life story are found not only our personal experiences, but also in the stories passed down to us by our families, churches, teachers, writers, and filmmakers.

At a very early age we begin to form our own identity by identifying with the heroes of the stories we hear.  Screenwriter Christopher Vogel rejoins, “Stories invite us to invest part of our personal identity in the Hero for the short duration of the experience. In a sense we become the Hero for a while. We project ourselves into the Hero’s psyche and see the world through her eyes.”[18] The power of these heroic (or non-heroic) stories is nearly impossible to overstate, and difficult to separate from the world around us. As McAdams’ research demonstrates:

“The stories we create influence the stories of other people, those stories give rise to still others, and soon we find meaning and connection within a web of story making and story living… [W]e help to create the world we live in, at the same time that it is creating us.” [19]

Disney to Tarantino

We help to create the world we live in, at the same time that it is creating us.

Perhaps this is why I found Academy award-winning films [20] such a perfect vehicle for exploring the stories my students live by. Raised in a culture dominated by Hollywood storytelling—from the Disney Channel to Quentin Tarantino—my students often know Hollywood’s stories better than they know their own (and much better than they know epistemology.) By helping them grasp the worldview-shaping forces in the stories of their Hollywood heroes it became relatively easy for them to gain a reference point for exploring both the macro-worldviews that have influenced them, as well as the micro-worldview of the story of their own life.

If Hollywood provides us with much of the raw material of the stories we live by, why not return the favor? By teaching students to reverse engineer films using Hollywood’s approach to story structure, they quickly learned the structure their own life story so they could see the recurring patterns in the complicated web of meaning connecting their micro-worldview with the macro-worldviews around them. By teaching them Hollywood’s approach to heroic character development they learned to better cooperate with the story their divine author was crafting in the development of their own heroic character.

A Continuing Story

Raised in a culture dominated by Hollywood storytelling—from the Disney Channel to Quentin Tarantino—my students often know Hollywood’s stories better than they know their own.

Fifteen years, over sixty worldview classes, and nearly 2,500 students later, I consider this unusual guidance from God to use films to explore the stories my students live by as one of the greatest answers to prayer in my professional life. I have used academy award-winning cinema to teach worldview to elite liberal arts students, über conservative Bible College students, pragmatic adult learners, and seasoned Hollywood film students and professionals. Nearly without exception the use of film has greatly heightened students’ grasp of the subtle nuance of worldview.

Along the way I have learned a things or two about both using film to teach worldview and using worldview to create films as well. Over the course of the next year, I will try to keep an ongoing series going relating some of the most useful insights I’ve had to date.

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Next Post in Series: Casablanca and the Four Levels of Worldview

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Notes

David K. Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids, Mich: W. B. Eerdmans, 2002), 297.

Robert A. Harris, The Integration of Faith and Learning: A Worldview Approach (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2004), 78.

Mark P. Cosgrove, Foundations of Christian Thought: Faith, Learning, and the Christian Worldview (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2006), 19, 20, 24.

Ronald H. Nash, Worldviews in Conflict: Choosing Christianity in a World of Ideas (Grand Rapids, Mich: Zondervan, 1992), 16.

James K. A.Smith, Imagining the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): How Worship Works (Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, 2013), Kindle Locations 828-834.

N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 116.

Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting (New York: ReganBooks, 1997), 12.