1. Good article. I agree that in order for light to truly shine you have to see the darkness first. There are ways the filmmakers could have done that with the beating without actually showing the beating. I haven’t seen the film, btw. But I also understand that they wanted the movie to appeal to a very wide audience so they’d be able to make future films. Don’t even get me started on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader… I disliked it more for how far it strayed from the book.

    • Travis Perry says:

      Yeah, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was inexcusably bad in many ways…

      As for wanting to appeal to a wide audience, yes, I know that’s what they were doing. I do think they made a mistake in how they told the story, but I totally get why they did it.

  2. notleia says:

    Or is evil more mundane than we figure?

    I guess it’s human nature that we prefer the more dramatic stories rather than “I was kind of a jerk but then I came to Jesus.” It could be that they were emphasizing character over thematics, trying to make the dad seem like a more like a real person and less like a stereotype.

    • Travis Perry says:

      Evil IS more mundane in that there are more people beating the heck out of their kids than we like to imagine (and committing other kinds of extreme evil behind closed doors). Evil is also more mundane in that not all evil is so evident as someone who beats their kids–yes, sometimes, people are just jerks in anything but their own minds.

      As for the dad seeming like a real person–I think that’s the crux of the problem I’m having. Do real abusers routinely cry all night after abusing someone? I would say, in general, no. My father did not cry at all that I know of the he quite literally kicked me again and again over 100 yards to the house (the one severe beating I referred to in the article) and he wasn’t even a routine abuser. My mother beat me and my sisters routinely until I was about ten, after which she stopped (and with terrible ferocity–my mom when she was young was bigger and stronger than most men) and she did in fact expressed regret many times before she quit, often immediately after beating us. But I don’t think she ever cried all night from, say, knocking me from one side of a room to the another so hard my feet left the ground and I bounced off the wall. Real abusers are not so sensitive, not usually.

      Of course, this film is based on a real person and perhaps the real Arthur Millard really DID cry all night. Though he may or may not have mentioned it to his son at that particular moment. And even if he did mention it, the filmmakers did not have to include it–but they did.

      So why did the filmmakers want to portray this particular abuser that way? I think (not sure, but I think) they thought people would have a hard time dealing with the actual level of evil that’s routinely possible in people. You seem to be implying the opposite–that since it’s a Christian stereotype that sinners are bad, if anything the dad was NOT a monster, just a jerk, and if anything the story is overemphasizing how bad he was. In this particular case, perhaps I’m right, perhaps you are, or perhaps neither of us are right.

      But I can’t say I have seen much of Christian fiction portraying truly abusive people, of the type who would beat someone severely and not shed a tear, coming to Christ. No, I’ve only seen people kinda partially bad coming to Christ–the really bad ones stay lost. (Though Christian fiction actually tends to fall short of portraying ANYONE as evil in the way people often are.)

      Maybe though I’m just not familiar with enough Christian fiction, because I don’t actually read a lot of it. Maybe it IS a Christian stereotype to have a story show a depth of true evil in a character and have that character find redemption. Feel free to give me some examples of that if you know them.

      • notleia says:

        Eh, I don’t think it’s that far out of the woods to have an abuser feel SO SORRY (for themselves) that they just HAD to do a horrible thing (spoilers: they did not have to do that horrible thing).

        Or the filmwriters don’t know how abusers work and pulled stuff out of their butts. (Which is the more likely, TBH.)

        • Travis Perry says:

          I’m quite sure some abusers feel sorry for themselves.

          But just for the record, my mother felt remorse for what she did and said she was wrong to do it. Which she was. but then she’d do it again. Maybe in only 30 minutes. But she never gave us the “you made me do it” line. Though I know of people who do. It’s in fact probably more normal than my mom was…

      • I’m very glad you wrote this article. And I agree with your points – in general about the movie and about too much Christian fiction.

        In my speculative fiction novel ”Mindfire” (Summer 2019), I purposefully did not avoid evil characters and people’s sins on the path to redemption. It may make some parts seem “dark” to some readers but it also makes it more real. And as the characters change for the better, my hope is that it’s more believable. Time will tell.

        Thanks again for your insights. I appreciate them.

  3. Tammy says:

    I only saw it once and while I cried and related as you did, I didn’t dwell on the story dynamics too awful much because I knew it would have ruined the experience for me. More than redemption, I think the story was about how the song came to be and Bart’s incredible ability to remain faithful in the storm around him. The line “I cried all night” stood out to me, too, as an obvious tool used to offer credibility to Quaid’s change. The dad’s story alone could have been a two hour movie, which makes your point even more interesting. It’s easy to skimp on the power of redemption for the sake of story, but If we only get one shot to speak to a dying world, which story should be told? Great post, btw.

    • Travis Perry says:

      Thanks for your positive comments. Yeah, it may be the “I cried all night” line was supposed to show a change, but the crying referred to was from BEFORE he changed. So that’s why it stuck me as a dissonant note. Though not right away.

      • I don’t know how true to life that line was, but it seems consistent with other things that Arthur was described as doing and saying in the movie. Threatening the (even more) abusive guy his ex wife ended up with, for instance.

  4. Anonymous says:

    I see your point, and I agree that there ought to be more stories where evil is redeemed in bold contrast, but I think using these two movies as example is kind of a poor choice. As you yourself said, straight on violence would have ruined the movie for families (and there are a lot of Christian families in need of good and safe movies) or triggered people with trauma. As for him saying “i cried all night” I think there is actually a point to helping the audience understand that even the worst humans can have regret and guilt…that they are not too far from the rest of us all. Seeing that in stories helps encourage us look for it in real life.

    There are other stories of bolder contrast in redemption, and better yet, we can write them.

    But frankly, good points in this article aside, this article irritates me. I’m tired of seeing Christians nitpick each other in an effort to look smarter. I’m tired of all the complaining. It was a well done faith-made movie (of which there are precious little). It didn’t even have to do with speculative fantasy.

    I just wish there were more articles on this site encouraging and supporting authors and sticking to the actual subject genre, rather than waxing eloquent on what everyone else does wrong.

    • Travis Perry says:

      Hannah, I’m sorry to have irritated you. I can be really analytical but it’s totally not personal. I liked the movie, I thought it was a positive thing, and it was only (as I mentioned) after seeing it the third time that this particular issue stood out to me.

      I don’t agree that supporting someone else implies always agreeing or avoiding any statement that could be seen as critical. In fact, I see your comment here as essentially positive and helpful–and you are essentially criticizing my thoughts in the same sort of way I did the movie.

      As for “speculative fantasy” I did in fact think the same thing happened in the portrayal of Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Though I spent a lot less time talking about that, that’s true. But which you had to have seen–so I don’t know why you made the comment you did.

      I’m also sorry if you dislike me “waxing eloquent.” I was only trying to write the best article I could based on something that was on my mind. I was just trying to make a meaningful article that will catch people’s attention–I was not consciously trying to be eloquent or falsely “wax eloquent.”

      I think offering criticism is a legitimate thing to do. It does not have to imply tearing anything down.

  5. Tiger Hebert says:

    Good article, and I agree.

    I know that it won’t resonate with everyone, but the the concept of the darker the night, the brighter the light is the whole point.

    Yet as an author, I have had non-believers leave reviews on my books saying that the character’s change of heart was too unrealistic. Hey, you can’t win ’em all. 😉

    • Travis Perry says:

      I think real redemption can be quite surprising. People actually expect folks to gradually get better–which is in fact how things are much of the time with people. But sometimes repentance brings shocking and immediate changes. I thought that’s what I Can Only Imagine was saying happened with Arthur Millard–but then they failed to fully show those changes.

  6. The line about Arthur crying all night isn’t necessarily humanizing and pity inducing in every case, regardless of how the film makers meant it. To me it was humanizing, but I know other people would have seen it as Arthur making excuses or trying to make himself look better. Personally, I found it to be a very important piece of characterization for him. That’s how people talk in arguments sometimes, and regardless, it hints at why he was abusive(anger issues, alcoholism, or something of that sort). An abuser with those traits is way different than someone that is abusive due to a personality disorder like narcissism or antisocial personality disorder.

    That said, there are definitely a lot of cases where showing the character’s previous depravity is extremely important for truly expressing their redemption later on. One of my chars in particular comes to mind when I think of this. I will hold back in some parts of her story because it would be too graphic otherwise, but those things are still heavily implied. And even if some parts of her story aren’t shown directly, there’s plenty of other things she does that would make the audience see her as a very horrible person at the beginning.

    With her story, there’s actually something really interesting I’ve learned. When writing a character, it’s possible to humanize them with actions that show they care about others, but later on show how even those behaviors are very unhealthy. This character I’m talking about, for instance, is an angel descendant, so at times in her youth she is seen as being kind to a particular human sometimes, but a few centuries later she reflects and realizes that she almost treated him like a child or a pet sometimes and feels yet another wave of guilt over who she used to be.

    As for Voyage of the Dawntreader, yeah, they did a bad job with that movie. Part of it may have been that they didn’t understand how important Eustace’s redemption was for the story, or they felt that audiences would prefer a story driven by ‘action and plot’ rather than a character arc.

  7. julie d says:

    I see this sometimes with Christian reviews of films… it’s like “villain does bad things” under objectionable content and I’m just …like… it’s in the word.

What do you think?