When you’re a teenager, everything is the best – or worst – thing that’s ever happened to you. This is the blessing and curse of the years from age 12 to 20. What can match the all-consuming passion of your first crush, or the devastating assurance that no one has ever been through what you are going through, that no one could possibly understand how hard it is to be you? These emotions, in their painful, confusing, and worldview-altering messiness, are the subject of Once Was Lost, Sara Zarr’s wonderful young adult novel, out this year in paperback.I’ve been a fan of young adult fiction since long before I fell into its target audience and long after I outgrew it. In all those years of reading, rarely did I find a character asking the kinds of questions I was asking about life and especially faith. The tendency of Christian YA fiction is to veer toward the didactic; it’s risky to allow characters to question their spirituality. But that is what makes Zarr’s books (Story of a Girl, Sweethearts) such a treat: she uses the particular experience of being an American Christian teenager to explore the big questions that many struggle with long after high school.
Samara Taylor is definitely struggling. After a DUI lands her mother in New Beginnings, an upscale suburban rehab facility, Sam ends up home alone with her father, an overworked pastor who can face any problem except those in his own family. Then Jody Shaw, a 13-year-old girl in Sam’s church youth group, disappears, and Sam’s hometown and church take center stage of a national media circus. Sam can’t help noticing that the circumstances have led to a lot of alone time for her dad and her single female youth leader who keeps trying to get her to open up about her problems. And just as she is pulling away from her closest friends, Sam stumbles into a relationship with Jody’s older brother, Nick, who seems to be the only other person who knows what it’s like to have your life upended by tragedy.
There are things we tell ourselves when tragedy strikes, things that are true and good and meant to keep us afloat, but that can lose their power when the reality of tragedy sinks in. When Sam’s dad becomes the spokesman for the family of the missing girl, he addresses the national media to tell Jody, if she is out there listening, not to be afraid, because she has the love of her community and her God, and love drives out fear. His words are meant to soothe, but as they come out of her father’s mouth, Sam is forced to confront the fact that real, embodied truths are more complicated than the truisms we settle for. “Love can’t be the answer to everything,” she says.
If it was, us loving Mom should have kept her from falling apart. Her loving us should have made her want to change … I’ve paid enough attention to his sermons to know that what Dad said wasn’t exactly right. Perfect love drives out fear, is what it says in the Bible. Perfect love. And who, my Dad included, really knows anything about perfect love? Anyway, if God loves Jody so much, how could he let this—whatever it is—happen? And what else is he going to let happen to me?
These are not easy questions, and Sam doesn’t find easy answers, though she finds some resolution in her relationships with her parents and Nick. That is part of what it means to grow up: to find a way to deal when people whom you love fail you, and to see that despite these failures, God can still work in and through such broken people.
Once Was Lost is not a book that exaggerates or exploits the heightened emotions of a teenager. Samara is dealing at an early age with events that would rock the world of a person at any age. When her youth group gathers to plan ways to help Jody’s family, she says, “The last time the youth group got together on a non-Sunday was before most of them went on the mission trip. Nick had been there, I remember, playing Guitar Hero with Daniel. For some reason that memory makes me so sad, like it’s just another thing that will never happen again, because how can you sit around playing video games, that carefree, once you know how life really is?”
It’s difficult to write compelling fiction about a Christian character. It’s easy to turn her into a caricature, to rob what defines her and every decision she makes—her relationship with God—of its richness and mystery. With young adult fiction, in particular, the temptation can be to preach, to model an example for how people should act rather than how they do act. But Zarr offers a suspenseful, angsty, and rich contemplation of what it means to doubt and trust, to love and risk, to curl inward and to reach out. More importantly, she reminds the Christian community that it’s good to allow teenagers to ask questions and to wrestle with doubts.
As someone who works closely with teens in my church’s youth group, I’ve come to believe that we expect too little of teens. We ask them in school to dissect Shakespeare; what are we asking them to do with their faith?
In an online story last Thursday, TIME magazine discussed the future of 3-D technology. It reminded me of a sit-down I had last December with a couple other critics in the D.C. area and 3-D evangelist Jeffery Katzenberg, one third of Dreamworks Pictures. Katzenberg brought a half hour of footage for Dreamworks’ Monsters vs. Aliens, which appears in theaters this weekend. The 3-D rendering was amazing, but what was perhaps more amazing was Katzenberg’s announcement that all future Dreamworks animated films will be made in 3-D. Katzenberg and others truly feel that 3-D technology has evolved to the point that in a decade or so, every film made will be in 3-D, finally fulfilling the prophetic utterances of audience-strapped studios in the mid-20th century desperate for any ploy to get people out from behind their television sets and back into theaters.
Sound familiar?
Today, of course, the threat to traditional theatrical viewing comes from the web and millions of the sleek, innocuous portable media players we all have in our pockets. And so, 3-D is back in a big way.
How big?
TIME’s story focused on James Cameron’s upcoming fall release, Avatar. The story of an interstellar battle between humans and aliens, Avatar, the piece said, cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million! TIME has since amended the article, stating that the $300 million was a typo and the intended budget all along was “only” $200 million. But might TIME be bowing to studio pressure?
If the $300 million number is correct, that would make Avatar among the most expensive movies ever made, a feat for which Cameron is hardly unfamiliar. (His previous film, Titanic, was the most expensive movie of its day). While 20th Century Fox, the studio behind Avatar, has every right to be terrified by these numbers, if there’s one person in Hollywood who has proven he can make it all back and then some, it’s James Cameron.
TIME reporter Josh Quittner stated, “Spielberg predicts it will be the biggest 3-D live-action film ever. More than a thousand people have worked on it, at a cost in excess of $200 million, and it represents digital filmmaking’s bleeding edge.”
Beyond the production, Quittner was also floored by the film’s effects. “I couldn’t tell what was real and what was animated–even knowing that the 9-ft.-tall blue, dappled dude couldn’t possibly be real. The scenes were so startling and absorbing that the following morning, I had the peculiar sensation of wanting to return there.”
Hollywood is betting its future on a nearly 100-year-old hit-and-miss technology. Everywhere you turn, 3-D is taking over. Cameron has said that every film he puts his hand to in the future will be in 3-D (he will be releasing Titanic in 3-D soon). Likewise, George Lucas hopes to rerelease his Star Wars films in 3-D. This year alone, Disney and Pixar will be releasing five 3-D films. Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s next ones? Yep, 3-D.
It used to be that to create the 3-D effect, two 65-mm, 150-lb. film cameras – both shooting in sync – were needed. Today high definition, digital technology has changed all that, as the effect is rendered in a single projector. Still, in order to screen 3-D films, movie theaters will have to convert their projectors, a burden few are likely to embark on given this economy. (While Katzenburg was hoping for several thousand 3-D theaters up and running by this weekend, new reports show it will be far less as movie theaters continue to cut costs in this hemorrhaging economy). These same theaters, however, may want to consider these numbers: on average, 3-D equipped theaters generally report three to four times the box office gross of 2-D theaters. While shooting in 3-D adds about 15 percent to a film’s budget, the rewards appear to be well worth it. And since 3-D movies are worthless to camcorder pirates (have you ever tried looking at the screen without your glasses on?), the studios save even more money.
That $15 3-D movie ticket may have seemed expensive last year, but as Americans tighten their belts in this economic downturn, theaters have noticed a spike in attendance. $10-15 is still quite a bit cheaper than a vacation, sporting event or concert.
Avatar, which bows this December, just may force Hollywood’s hand for good. The film, which was shot in the 16,000 sq.-ft. “Spruce Goose” hangar where Howard Hughes built his wooden airplane, may also be a mammoth and unwieldy behemoth, destined never to get that far off the ground. Or it may be the colossal beginning of a whole new way of watching movies.
