theology and cinematic culture: contextuality, intertextuality, interdependency

That films may be addressing questions that churches are no longer meaningfully asking is of course an important issue, but it tends to overlook  the very real and vital sense in which theology is an intensely contextual discipline that has always ... depended upon an analysis of the close and inescapable interplay between theology and culture.  ...

... Not only is it impossible ... to do theology without constantly finding an intersection with popular culture. ... But [sic] we cannot even watch a Tim Burton film without encountering a critique of Bultmannn's program of demythologization, which is no less insightful than what Karl Jasper and John Macquarrie were espousing half a century ago.

[my italics]

Christopher Deacy, 'From Bultmann to Burton, Demytholigizing the Big Fish', in Robert K. Johnston (ed.) Reframing Theology and Film (Baker Academic, 2007), 238-258; quotation from p. 254.