I went to dinner the other night and decided to go to a
movie after. To be honest I didn’t even know what movie I was going to see. I
knew that whatever movie it was, the time would be convenient. As it turned out,
of all the movies I wanted to see, Spotlight
felt the best. As a pro psychic, I often make decisions by feel and intuition.
Turns out it was just the movie I needed to see.
Spotlight focuses
on the uncovering of sexual abuse by priests and the cover up that followed.
The story follows the team of investigative journalists at the Boston Globe who
had the challenging task of digging to see if there was a story in the idea
that the church was covering up systemic sexual abuse of children. This was not
a glamorous story, almost nobody wanted to touch it. Not only is there the
obvious challenge of the tough topic (child sex abuse by trusted people in
positions of power) but also the readership of the magazine publishing the
story was 53 percent catholic. Nobody wanted to believe this. Everywhere they
went, the reporters were blocked and told not to pursue it. Thankfully for the
victims, the public, and future potential victims, they continued and this
terrible situation was brought to light.
Through the movie I learned that billions of dollars has
been paid by the church worldwide to silence victims. Most of the victims
signed contracts that they wouldn’t prosecute. This meant that the church could
easily hide their dirty secret for decades since sexual abuse victims are also
not likely to want to openly talk about the abuse. What this article did was
make people aware that not only was the abuse happening, but the church was
shuffling around the priests that prayed on children to different parishes
while telling the victims’ families that they were going to be kept from children.
In actuality, many of the priests continued their patterns in different cities
for decades. After the article in the Spotlight
section of the Boston Globe, the church could not deny that they had known
about the extent of the abuse. In Boston alone, 87 priests had been molesting children
that the church had known about and relocated. This shocked the nation.
The movie itself was superb. Michael Keaton was excellent as
Walter “Robby” Robinson, the leader of the spotlight team. What I liked about
him and the rest of the characters and portrayals is that they felt like real
people. This was not a black and white story. The “good guys” were not perfect
people. They did the best they could but they were human. The same was true
about one of the “bad guys” in the story, a lawyer who worked on contracts to
silence the victims. Yes he was doing something that wasn’t good but he had
tried to help in his own way through a surprising twist in the story. Even one
of the priests they interviewed had been abused himself as a child. This film
shows how there is often not one bad guy responsible for these problems but
rather society that is contributing in one way or another to it by looking the
other way and people just doing “their job.” That was a line used in the movie
a lot, “I was just doing my job.” Individually it is easy to defend but
collectively, it leads to large scale damage and abuse.
Another topic this movie she light on is that with the
dismantling of traditional newspapers, the kind of investigative journalism
that exposed this topic is not very likely any more. This kind of story took
months to uncover. With more and more newspapers going under or cutting staff,
there are fewer investigative journalists that can go in deep on a story like
this. In an era of soundbites and tweets, thorough investigative journalism is
quickly becoming a thing of the past.
This movie addressed something I’ve been feeling for some
time. As institutions get so large, they have vested interests in protecting
themselves and that interest is often directly counter to the interest of those
they serve. Basically, they develop a sort of mind of their own and while the
original intent may have been good, what happens over time may not be. I see
this happening with government, the educational system, medicine, and many
religious institutions. It is important for each of us not to just blindly
follow and trust but to be aware and let others know when something fishy is
going on.
I do recommend the
movie and though I knew a little about the story, I came away with a new
understanding and also a great appreciation for the wonderful way that film can
share powerful messages without hitting you on the head with them.
