The Inevitable 2014 List: Books, Movies, and TV Shows Worth Noting

As this year wraps up, I offer the following retrospective on entertainment that stood out to me in 2014. It's not necessarily a list of things I recommend (though that is true of some of them). It's simply meant to provide insight into the cultural stories that are reflecting and/or shaping our worldviews, particularly those of a young adult audience. In addition, they all offer some great talking points about some of the most profound questions in life.

FIVE BOOKS (or series) WORTH READING

• Jonathan Maberry's Rot and Ruin series offers one of the best YA stories I have read. Maberry offers great characters, intense story lines, philosophy, ethics, honor, love, and sacrifice embedded in books that will make you reset your alarm. It's pretty grim - it is a zombie apocalypse - but it's saturated with goodness and hope.
• Neal Shusterman's Unwind series presents a dsytopic world that is uncomfortably connected with ours (he includes actual news clips between many of his chapters). It is a mesmerizing, sobering look at not only what it means to be human, but also what happens when a society agrees to give up on those declared to be unwanted, broken, or simply unnecessary. My students at the Christian school where I teach love this series - and that's a good thing. For an overview, check out my reviews of the first three books in the four-part series: Unwind, UnWholly, and Unsouled.
• Dean Koontz's Innocence is the latest from perhaps the most famous Christian author alive today. He has sold over 450,000,000 books, with 17,000,000 added each year.  He's moved more books than Stephen King, which is no small feat. Since he’s not published by a Christian publishing house, he flies under the radar in Christian circles. That’s a shame. He is writing about horror, hope, good, evil, nihilism and purpose in a way that is captivating, true, and broadly accessible.
• Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking series has its flaws and the worldview was decidedly more secular than the previous three recommendations, so this recommendation is a qualified one. Still, there was a lot to like about this clever, thought-provoking sci-fi dystopia. It's a good discussion starter for topics involving war, human nature, the importance of the individual  vs. the community, and the pros/cons of consequentialist ethics. And it's on its way to theaters, so you might as well know what's up.
• All You Need Is Kill/Edge Of Tomorrow is violent, vulgar, epic, mesmerizing, and at times strangely moving. After I finished reading All You Need Is Kill, I spent days thinking about both the cost and necessity of self-sacrifice. The book may be marketed to a YA audience, but it's certainly adult in its content (the manga version both cleans it up and drains it of its power, and Edge of Tomorrow is cleaner but butchers the ending). It's neither the best nor most wholesome book on the list, but it gives a profound view of heroism and nobility from a Japanese perspective. Considering the massive popularity of manga and anime, I suspect we will see similar stories increasingly making their way into mainstream Western storytelling. 

THREE TV SERIES THAT BLEW UP THE RATINGS IN 2014

• The Walking Dead has taken cable TV by storm. It's one of the most gruesome shows, but it's also one of the most thought-provoking. Who knew a zombie apocalypse could provide so many opportunities to discuss morality, politics, religion, loyalty, evil, hope and love? This link to "Who Are We? Reflections on the Walking Dead, Season 4" will provide an overview of the series as well as links to more articles.
• George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series is truly epic. Mr. Martin did his homework in the medieval era before writing, and his portrayal of human nature in a world where life, death and thrones are all a game is unrivaled in popular fiction. However, I'm being kind if I say it offers a pretty grim view of the world in which the brutal reality of evil leaves no one unscarred. Rather than reviewing the books (which I have read) or the show (which I have not watched), I posted a series of articles based on the essays found in Game of Thrones and Philosophy. Here's a link to one which will lead to the other articles in the series.
• HBO's True Detective.  This is one of the most brilliantly acted shows I have seen. It's also one of the most vulgar, so don't read that first comment as a recommendation. In spite of that, True Detective's Season One offered an honest look into the heart of nihilism. If you are a fan of seeing what it looks like to take a philosophy and live it, you will be mesmerized as Rust embraces the void in which he so earnestly believes. How does one fight evil if the world is really that meaningless?  This series offers a great conversation starter between people of different worldviews who want to wrestle with topics of good, evil, morality, and God.

5 MOVIES FROM 2014 WORTH WATCHING AT LEAST ONE TIME (or three, if it's Guardians of the Galaxy)

• Guardians of the Galaxy. Marvel can seemingly do no wrong right now. I saw this movie three times in the theater, and it got better each time. If you want to know why the superhero genre is flourishing,  Guardians is as good a place to start as any. 
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a great film, maybe better than its predecessor. I spent days yelling "Apes!" randomly, which may or may not be a good sign. Entertainment value aside, Dawn offers a serious story that felt ripped from current headlines in the Middle East. 
• Maleficent. If you think Disney's earlier portrayal of Maleficent should be set in stone, you won't like this movie. If you think fairy tales are a flexible vehicle for insight into the human condition, you will probably like this movie quite a bit. It's not a perfect story, but it offers a surprisingly moving narrative on honor, love and hope that intersects with real life more than you might expect. 
• Days of Future Past. An older Xavier tells his younger self, “Just because someone stumbles, loses their way, doesn’t mean they’re lost forever.” It's easy to believe that the brokenness within us will inevitably result in devastation around us. Days of Future Past reminds us that it's never too late to turn around. Oh, and it's a superhero movie. Surprise.
• The Equalizer. I never saw the show, so I don't know how the movie compares. If you like Jack Reacher, Liam "Special Set of Skills" Neeson or Joe Ledger, you will probably like The Equalizer. Robert is an honorable man who can't sit by and watch evil unfold when he can do something about it, particularly when the honor and integrity of women is in question. It's interesting that, in a world of increasing moral relativism, you can still find popular stories that declare some things worthy of judgment. (Note: it definitely earned its R rating.) 

Obviously, I am only scratching the surface. For more great insight into worldviews and entertainment, check out Focus on the Family's Plugged In, J.W. Wartick's Always Have a Reason, Austin Gravely's Another Ascending Lark, and James Harleman's Cinemagogue.

UnWholly: More Than The Sum Of Its Parts

In Unwind, Neil Shusterman began a brilliantly disturbing look at a culture in which parents can have teenage children “unwound” – a process which kills tham as every part of their physical body is separated and given to someone else. Perhaps because this cruelty is so counter-intuitive, the government floods society with manipulative slogans (“Experience a world outside yourself: Embrace the divided state.”)

As if the story weren't disturbing enough, Shusterman connects the issues with some current trends in the world. He cites current news stories about children abandoned under Safe Haven laws, exorbitant organ prices on the global market, and surgeons who profit by harvesting organs from euthenized patients. It's not the same as unwinding, clearly, but seeing the real world juxtaposed with his fictional world is sobering.

Shusterman introduced some weighty concepts in Unwind: Do we have souls? Do people have intrinsic worth? What makes human life valuable?  Fortunately, UnWholly continues with the same skill and depth offered in Unwind.

Cutting The Baby In Half: A Review of Neal Shusterman's "Unwind"

“In a perfect world mothers would all want their babies, and strangers would open up their homes to the unloved. In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn’t a perfect world.”

To help us better understand the entertainment shaping today's youth, I offer my latest review of books effecting a primarily YA audience. My goal is not to critique the art form as much as look at the worldview in the story.

This review will feature Unwind, the first book in an unfolding trilogy by Neal Shusterman that has justifiably earned an unbelievable amount of critical acclaim. It's set in a dystopic culture that has embraced the killing of innocent human life for the greater good. As Shusterman so adeptly shows, it's neither great nor good.
_____________________________________________

In the not-so-distant future, the conflict over abortion has worsened. The pro-life crowd is killing doctors at a regular clip; the pro-choice crowd is flaunting their freedom by getting pregnant just to sell fetal tissue. The inevitable war fractures the country and threatens to topple the nation.

The two sides reach a compromise: there will be no more abortion, but parents can have the government Unwind their children when they turn 13. Unwinding is a process made possible by a recent medical breakthrough called neurografting, in which every part of a human can be detached and placed into another human. Since all the parts of the Unwound person are still alive, that person is still alive in some sense – or at least that’s how the argument goes. Abortion without death. All the pleasure of choice with none of the burden of responsibility. It's all very tidy.

It was meant to be a Swiftian compromise designed to shock both parties into sanity, a cultural version of King Solomon's suggestion that two mothers fighting over a baby should cut it in half. In the Biblical story, the real mother begs Solomon to spare the life of the child and give her baby to the other woman - which was exactly the outcome Solomon anticipated. Shusterman stated in an interview with The Trades that he wanted to look at what would happen if a baby's life was on the line and neither side flinched.

“When I go and speak at schools, one of the first things I talk about is the King Solomon story -- how the two women are fighting over the baby, and how Solomon proposes the idea of cutting the baby in half. What if one of those women didn't let go? What if the two sides were so entrenched in their positions that they would rather see the baby cut in half than ever compromise? Unwind is what happens when society decides to cut the baby in half -- figuratively and literally.” 

This kind of horror must be hidden behind a wall of ideology and propaganda. As the kids targeted for Unwinding find out about their doom, they reflexively repeat the mantra that has been droned to the damned: “I’d rather be partly great than entirely useless.”