What Liberals Missed In Sound of Freedom

Our ideological boundaries are narrowing our moral and artistic field-of-view

This is the last newsletter about movies I’m writing for a while, but this one is probably the most important. I’ve previously talked about the artistic importance of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah and the human importance of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.

Now I want to talk about the cultural and political importance of Alejandro Gomez Monteverde’s Sound of Freedom.

The Movie

On the surface, Sound of Freedom is about a law enforcement agent’s crusade to not only shut down child sex traffickers but to rescue the children held captive in this awful trade. It is based loosely on the life of Tim Ballard, who started an organization called Operation Underground Railroad (OUR) targeting the perpetrators and victims of child sex trafficking.

As a movie, Sound of Freedom was remarkably effective. It tells a story of the exploitation of the children of poor families in South America (our child protagonists are two Honduran children stolen from their working-class father) and switches between their story and the story of Tim Ballard, a Special Agent with Homeland Security who decides that arresting child pornographers isn’t enough; he needs to save the children in the photographs. The remainder of the film chronicles Ballard’s efforts to set up a sting operation luring traffickers to collect as many children as possible into one place so they can raid the fake event and rescue the kids.

Because of the reputation that often follows “conservative” or “religious” films, I was suspicious that this would be yet another middling-quality production but I was very wrong on that count. It was well-shot, well-lit, and well-acted. The story was compelling and moved along at exactly the right pace for the material. If this had been financed through a Hollywood studio, it would have had a slightly more famous cast and would have cost three times as much to make. As it stands, this was a perfectly solid example of independent filmmaking.

But what has made this film such an astonishing story this summer has been the fact that this little independent film became one of the highest grossing movies this summer, beating out huge tentpole features from monster franchises like Pixar’s Elemental, the latest Fast and the Furious, Transformers, Mission: Impossible, and the Indiana Jones. This tiny little movie about sex trafficking (it’s the feel-good movie of the summer!) became a monster blockbuster. How on earth did that happen?

The Making of a Phenomena

Perhaps the reason that Sound of Freedom looks like a quality production is because it is. It wasn’t made with politics in mind or intended for any particularly political audience. Originally financed with Mexican backers and intended as a thriller targeting Hispanic audiences, it was shot in 2018 and set for release in 2020. However, the distribution rights were held by the Latin American subsidiary of 20th Century Fox. The Walt Disney Company purchased Fox in 2019 and shelved the film during the collapse of theater-going in 2020.

The film producer, desperate to release the completed film, made a plea to Angel Studios (famous for financing production of the epic Gospel-themed series The Chosen) to help him purchase the rights. Angel Studio set up a crowd-funded project and raised the $5 million necessary to secure the distribution rights for this film.

Which brings us to the most interesting part of this film’s history. Angel Studios scrounged up almost 7000 investors with an average investment of over $700. That’s not enough money to make or break any individual, but it is certainly enough money to inspire investors to harass family and friends into seeing it.

To address this, Angel Studios put together system in which people could pre-pay for tickets to the film and then others could request a free ticket to watch the movie. This was a brilliant move. Even now, you can request a free ticket to Sound of Freedom at your local theater through the Angel Studios website.

It’s hard to say how much this contributed to the success of the film, but as someone who wishes dearly for theatrical success to re-invigorate our cultural practice of going to the movies together, I will take every win I can get. If this strategy gives fans a way to share their love of a film with others, I say we should encourage this strategy to become a standard practice.

The Politics

If you came to this story entirely unaware of this film, you will be surprised to discover that the success of this movie has made many people deeply upset. Since I saw the movie and read up on the fascinating story of its unlikely success, I feel increasingly bewildered as I read the furious objections to the film.

The core vocalized objection seems to be: This movie has to do with child sex trafficking and QAnon conspiracy theories have to do with child sex trafficking, therefore this movie is a movie about the QAnon conspiracy theories.

Rolling Stone in particular has been on tear about this particular topic, calling this movie “a box office triumph for QAnon believers” and insisting that both the lead actor Jim Caviezel and the movie protagonist Tim Ballard are neck deep in the QAnon community.

Having looked into these accusations and having followed far too many links down to the source material, I believe this effort to cast this movie as a QAnon is fevered, frantic, and fake. Caviezel is (in my opinion) a decent actor with fairly fringe political beliefs… which describes about 80% of all actors. Ballard, however, is an incredibly intelligent and focused man and his focus is on promoting his OUR endeavors. When people say “he has far right affinities,” what they mean is “Ballard knows the demographic most likely to give him money and is incredibly effective at targeting them”. My perspective is that he’s got a good heart and his focus is on a real problem and, in pursuit of that goal, he is a brilliant salesman.

But the actual objection to this film isn’t the one that is verbalized. The actual problem is that so many people (especially people who work in media or in the “clicks for money” business) have fallen into a very dangerous and relentless position that everything that happens in the world must be seen through an ideological lens.

To that end, they see the astonishing box office success of this film happening outside their political and social context. The true story of this film and how it was made is fascinating and important but it doesn’t fit inside that context. Instead of celebrating this story, they have to lay a new context on top of it that demonizes the filmmakers and re-aligns the story to fit inside their political worldview. In doing so, they are not only robbing themselves of the ability to watch a compelling and important film and appreciate an interesting underdog story, they are signaling that they are against anyone who disrupts child trafficking because they might be on the “wrong team”.

This is exceedingly dangerous.

It almost seems fitting that a beleaguered, tenuous little independent film would, through its astounding success, become an avatar for the danger of our fracturing society. Due to this strained and desperate political posturing, an entire class of (mostly online) people are aligning themselves against the idea that we should save children from sex trafficking.

In their attempts to squeeze every story into a pre-determined political mold, multiple media organs have made it their goal to destroy a man and an organization that, by all accounts, is actually finding success in this work. Even the hit pieces admit that this is what they do; their big complaint is that they are doing it the wrong way.

When I start thinking about ideological tribalism, I end up with example after example of how it has warped our minds and our thinking. We’ve taken so many topics and demanded that they only be considered from one of two ideological frames. From Covid to educational policy to sex trafficking to free speech to LGBT issues, we’ve drawn our lines in the sand and demanded fealty to one side or the other as the price of inclusion. It always has to be right vs left, red vs blue. We must always see every issue in the world within these lines and, if the outgroup approves of something, we must find reasons for the ingroup to despise it.

Sound of Freedom is only one example of this but it is such a perfect one because the stakes are so small. Who cares if an indy film made almost $200 million? Why do we need to be angry at it? Why does it need to be turned into a political pinata?

It is because everything must be cast along ideological boundaries. We have a chattering class whose ability to talk about anything outside of an ideological context has atrophied so thoroughly, it has become a vestigial limb. Writers at nationally influential publications employ professional take-makers who literally cannot discuss something without applying the “red vs blue” lens to it.

This is breaking our ability to think, to discuss, to find compromise. But it’s also breaking our ability to come together on important topics. We should be united on things like “saving children from sex trafficking”. We should be able to easily break out of our ideological boxes when such an occasion arises.

If I had an answer for this, I’d give it. My main consolation is that I see an enormous yearning in people to break out of these political demands. People hate these ideological shackles. They want this system to collapse.

Everyone just wants to enjoy their movie without the chattering and disdain and nonsense. Everyone wants to find a cause to endorse and people to support that will make the world a better place with being lectured or scolded for it. You would have thought child sex trafficking was one of those causes, but as politics and ideology become our core idols, we are losing our ability to find that common ground.