Monday, March 14, 2005
MTV's 'Spiritual Windows' mix faith with rock 'n' roll
It looked like a few seconds of footage taken in a room of Muslim men, bowing in prayer, with some funky Eastern-type music playing in the background.
And then words appeared in the middle of the screen: "Rejuvenate: MTV."
... at the next commercial break, another one of these dealies appeared.
It was about 10 seconds long and showed gondoliers rowing in the canals of Venice, Italy, while a Latin-sounding man's voice said: "Your heart is where your treasure is, and you must find your treasure in order to make sense of everything."
And then more words appeared on the screen: "Everyday grace: MTV."
It turns out that in late January, MTV, the arbiter of all things hip, quietly launched a campaign of 24 of these little films, known in the biz as "promo spots."
They call the campaign "Spiritual Windows."
"We wanted to create little, short moments, almost breaths of peace, for the channel," Kevin Mackall, the ponytailed 37-year-old senior vice president of on-air promos for MTV, explained as we sat in his 24th-floor corner office, a pair of electric bass guitars standing at attention near his cluttered desk. "There's a genuine appetite for spirituality these days. And that was the mission."
According to a little-known poll that MTV (in conjunction with CBS News) took of MTV viewers during the presidential election last fall, 53 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds said "religion" was "extremely important" or "very important" to their daily lives. Another 31 percent said it was "somewhat important," and only 14 percent said religion wasn't important to them at all.
(Only 23 percent of those MTV viewers said they would describe themselves as "evangelicals" or "born again," but 46 percent said they attended religious services once a month or more.)
Together, the "Spiritual Window" spots Mackall created paint a picture of modern religiosity that reflects something of his own spirituality and, I would argue, that of many other people his age and younger.
They're finding genuine spiritual guidance and expression inside and out of institutionalized religion. In traditional and unexpected places. It can be subtle, or in your face.
One spot, with the tag line "Consume mindfully," shows a Tibetan nun hauling two plastic garbage bags to the curb in front of her Buddhist temple.
One of my favorite spots, tagged "Meditate," has a barber in what could be Anytown, U.S.A., carefully shaving the neck of a customer with a straight razor.
Then there's "Everyone," with a Chinese dragon dancing in the foreground accompanied by a voice-over that says, "We need other human beings to be human. I am because other people are."
And one of the longer spots -- it lasts 13 seconds -- shows the sun setting over a pyramid in Egypt as the Brazilian magical realist author Paulo Coelho's voice announces, "The desert will give you an understanding of the world. How do I immerse myself in the desert? Listen to your heart."
What's missing from the "Spiritual Windows" are explicitly Judeo-Christian images. Producers did shoot some footage inside a church with a Catholic nun, but it ended up on the cutting-room floor. Something about the expression on her face being too . . . something.
"That's, I think, one of the things that is like a turning point, a next step for us," Mackall said.
He insists the "Spiritual Windows" are no gimmick.
"It really, truly is answering a call from our audience," he said. "Hopefully it's a first step into some other content like this."
BY CATHLEEN FALSANI RELIGION WRITER
Permalink
