I had a mission companion who was convinced that the Patrick Swayze film Ghost was written by members of the Church. His reasoning? Because when the movie’s villains are fkilled and become ghosts themselves, they are–like Korihor the Anti-Christ in Alma 30:60–quite literally “drag[ged] speedily down to hell” by a horde of demons.
This is all of course completely silly, and the idea that devils drag one down to hell is hardly novel to the Book of Mormon (certainly no one claims that Christopher Marlowe’s 1597 play Doctor Faustus was secretly written by Mormons). At the time, I only nodded politely; and as the years passed, the memory of his comment (and he was even one of my favorite companions!) caused me many times to cringe, as perhaps my quintessential example of immature young missionaries projecting themselves onto their favorite films.
But lately, I’ve started to regard that memory a little more charitably (for “If ye have not charity, ye are nothing”). I mean, do we not all project ourselves onto our favorite media? (“Are we not all beggars?”) Is that not why we watch movies in the first place? As we wrote recently about Pop Music, “Taking lines out of context and making them your own is a feature, not a bug;” so, too, with movie scenes. My blessed old mission companion may’ve been a touch naive at the time (and who of us hasn’t, and he has surely since long grown out of it since then), and certainly no one joined the Church because of Ghost; but he was still well within his rights to read a popular film through an apologetically LDS lens.
That is, the issue isn’t that he read too much into Ghost, but rather that he didn’t read far enough! Don’t just tell me how the shadow-demons are reminiscent of Alma 30:60, but also tell me how the titular disembodied ghost behaves like D&C 129:1-3, or how the love that transcends death is consistent with D&C 131:1-2, or how Patrick Swayze’s shock and sadness at Carl’s sudden death is straight out of Ezekiel 18:23! The intentional fallacy isn’t a fallacy at all, but an all-or-nothing proposition. I used to cringe at an LDS reading of Ghost; now I only get frustrated when the LDS readings doesn’t go all the way with it!