All you need to know about Fireproof

Whew, now I don't have to sit through it anytime soon.

The overriding problem is Caleb’s Internet porn habit. “That’s the kind of man you’ve become,” Catherine shouts at him. “There is nothing honorable about it.” Caleb can save lives every day, but he will never be a decent human being as long as he follows the Way of the Masturbator.

After Catherine makes an appointment with a divorce lawyer, Caleb turns to his father for advice. To Caleb’s surprise, the older man reveals that there was a time when he and Caleb’s mother were on the verge of divorce, until “the Lord did a work on us.” Caleb is an agnostic and has no patience for Christianese. Still, he accepts as a gift a book of spiritual advice called The Love Dare, which his father promises can save his marriage if he follows it for 40 days.

Since real men never back down from a dare, Caleb finds himself checking off the book’s marital-rescue boxes: “Say nothing negative,” “Do one act of kindness.” Halfway through, he gets to “Watch out for parasites”—addictions that can hollow out a relationship from the inside. Chastened, he not only deletes his Explorer bookmarks but smashes his entire computer with a baseball bat, just in case God hates spreadsheets and Minesweeper too. On the now empty desk, Caleb leaves Catherine a note that says, “I love you more.” If he hadn’t destroyed the computer, he could have instead sent her a real-life pornography addiction e-card.

Eventually Caleb learns the real lesson of The Love Dare, which is that you can not truly love your spouse until you love Jesus. He learns this in a park where there happens to be a giant wooden cross under which to fall on his knees. In the Christian movie racket, this is known as the Billy Graham scene, having been codified in the films Graham produced in the 1950s. This is followed by a montage of Caleb praying in various light-infused settings.

Cheesy? Heavy-handed? Yes, and intentionally so. In films like this, an evangelistic and ministerial mission do much more than a good script to assure commercial success. Not only has Fireproof made a handsome profit, but The Love Dare, a book which did not even exist until it was created as tie-in to the movie, is now at the top of The New York Times bestseller list. A Fireproof Your Marriage study kit and other products are also selling briskly.

But in making evangelism—and acceptability to the most insular Christian audiences—a priority, Christianese films all but guarantee artistic failure. Art demands an honesty that the evangelical bubble would find intolerable. Committed to promoting an unambiguous message that God solves all problems, Fireproof never portrays Christians doing anything untoward, or even experiencing any sorrow. Caleb’s parents’ marital struggles pre-dated their Christianity. When Caleb’s best friend reveals that he divorced his first wife, he not only says it was before he found the Lord, but adds that after he did, he would have gotten back together with his ex had she not already remarried. In the perfect world of Fireproof, good Christians do not have bad marriages, any more than they drink, gamble or swear.

And unlike in real life, when Christians in Fireproof share the Gospel they never search awkwardly for the right words and they always find a fertile target. In this respect, the film validates every pep-talk promise of The Way of the Master. At the end of Fireproof, after Caleb has been transformed by Jesus, he no longer even needs to open his mouth to proselytize. “Something has changed in you,” Catherine tells him, “and I want what happened to you to happen to me.” They are words straight out of every starry-eyed fundamentalist’s wet dreams.

Indeed, it’s possible Fireproof is so obsessed with stamping out pornography because it recognizes the competition. Fireproof is a porn version of Christianity—a ludicrously contorted, heavily airbrushed fantasy of the real thing, and ultimately every bit as unsatisfying.

You might think a number of Hollywood-style movies are "porn versions" of real-life as well, insofar as they depict unrealistic scenarios -- such as pretty people with better dialog than what more ordinary people would actually say in real heroic or tragic situations.

But of course porn doesn't have good dialog. A more accurate analogy is to think of such Hollywood movies as being like a good sermon. Not a "porn version", but a "heightened quality" version of the world as we wish it to be.