Summary of Chapter 4: "Life, the Movie"

Welcome to life as a movie. At weddings in the past, the bride and groom were merely bit players in a community event. But approximately twenty years ago that changes, and weddings became more about the wants and desires of the bride and groom. Today, they are full-blown media events in which the lines between entertainment and real life become blurred. They are now about delivering a celebrity-for-a-day experience - attempting to bring the mythology of movies into everyday life. And this is not just happening with weddings.

The advent of the cinema was key in destroying the line between stage and real life. Today, Hollywood starlets will sometimes spend days preparing for a red carpet appearance. It is a major preproduction. The combined effect of this makeover is that the starlet looks very different than she does in her normal, everyday life. Pretty much all celebrities are actors these days, whether they make a living acting or not. Celebrities play a key role in our culture today. They offer a framework for how we should behave. As with the saints of the Middle Ages, their lives are held up to be emulated. However, as a result we fall into a trap that celebrities have been experiencing for years: the split between the public self and the private self, a sort of identity confusion.

In our culture today, once a camera is turned on, everything changes. Almost subconsciously we begin to act differently. Put simply, people tend to act out what they see on the screen. Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls this a "media loop": we are influenced by the media we watch and consume, so we start to act ourselves and turn our lives into media events. Both feed of each other: our media reflects our culture, but it also shapes our culture and us.

The entertainment age and the horizontal self have led us to divorce what we believe from what we experience, see and feel. The elephant in the living room of contemporary Christianity is people's ability to simply sit in church, to consume the experience the way one would a great sporting event, a thrilling movie, or an exciting theme park ride, and then to dispose of it, totally unchanged at the soul level. Christianity becomes just another social self to put on and take off - like a pair of jeans. We, as the church, will find ourselves in the same predicament as those with the worldview of the horizontal self - focused on the external and the temporal, engrossed with sensation, obsessed with refining our image - all the while forgetting that we are created in the image of the Creator.

Source: Mark Sayers (2010), The Vertical Self, p. 36-53