A while back, while killing some time before a rehearsal, I found myself wandering around the Film/TV/Radio section of Barnes & Noble and briefly skimmed a book about the greatest flops in Hollywood history. I was momentarily chagrined to find that I had seen and thoroughly enjoyed four of the fourteen films listed in the table of contents, then realized that any book that has a harsh word to say about Hudson Hawk is not a book I care to read. This, perhaps oddly, made me think about Kirk Cameron.
Kirk Cameron was the star of Growing Pains, one of my favorite sitcoms as a kid. He played a character named Mike Seaver, the oldest of a group of siblings (which I am) and a fast-talking, unflappable rebel (which I perceived myself to be, despite being eight.) As such, I identified very strongly with the Mike Seaver character, as much as one can identify with a character whose exploits stopped being broadcast shortly before one reaches puberty. I liked the show for other reasons, among them that an entire season (1989) was erased from continuity when it was revealed to be a dream of Mike’s. This was the season where Mike dated and almost married a blond girl named Julie (played, in what I suppose could be considered an advanced form of method acting, by a blond girl named Julie.) I disliked this development, as I was still about two years from realizing why anyone would want to hang out with a tall-ish, blond Playboy model. Another of my favorites was the 1991 episode called “Meet the Seavers,” in which the younger son -Ben Seaver, played by actor Jeremy Miller- dreams that he is an actor named Jeremy Miller appearing on a television sitcom called Growing Pains about a family named Seaver. I like to think I enjoyed this episode because even at the tender age of eleven, I was into postmodernism and satire, but really it was probably because I thought it’d be kind of cool to find out I was in fact the star of a sitcom. Growing Pains was a great show (and just sitting here typing this, I’m amazed I don’t own the DVDs), and I remember privately drawing comparisons as a kid to Family Ties, and longing for an episode of either show where Mike Seaver would meet Alex P. Keaton and teach him how to be cool. Because apparently I disliked Republicans as a kid, too.
Then in my senior year of high school (1999) I re-watched the show in syndication. I didn’t go out much, so I probably managed to watch the entire run of the show in a half a year or so, as there were two episodes on every afternoon. Upon my second long-term exposure to the show, I noticed a striking dichotomy between Mike Seaver’s behavior and personality in early episodes and his behavior and personality in later episodes. For the first seventy episodes or so, Mike is a habitual liar and troublemaker, forever being called to Principal DeWitt’s office or being scolded firmly but fairly (and hilariously!) by father Jason or mother Maggie. Then, all of a sudden, Mike becomes a model citizen. He stops lying to his parents, cleans up his act, takes a stab at acting and, when that doesn’t work out, finds his way into a job teaching underprivileged children and eventually half-adopting one (played by Leonardo DiCaprio, but that’s neither here nor there, really). I was surprised at this to say the least, and saw no compelling storyline reason for this sudden shift in Mike’s character arc. I don’t know if watching the show at, basically, one clip accentuated it more than watching it with a week in between episodes and a summer in between seasons would have, and barring the acquisition of a flux capacitor, I suppose I never will.
A few years later, the E! Network aired one of their trademark True Hollywood Stories covering Growing Pains and its cast. I of course watched this episode (possibly the only full episode of E!THS I ever watched, including the one on Saved by the Bell) and my mystery was solved. Apparently between the 1989 and 1990 seasons of the show, Kirk Cameron embraced born-again Christianity and insisted that Mike Seaver straighten up and fly right as well; no more lying to Jason and Maggie, no more slacking off at school and having no direction, and certainly no romantic relationship with Julie, who got fired (possibly at Cameron’s insistence) when she posed for Playboy magazine. At the time, this confused the producers and, eleven years later, angered me; ”Mike Seaver has to stop lying to his parents?” Excuse me? Lying to his parents was the entire point of Mike Seaver. Lying to his parents was what made Mike Seaver cool, damn it!
Back in 2001, I thought about this newfound knowledge for what can safely be classified as an excessive amount of time. Here’s the thing: a lot of social critics claim that recent generations of kids have been raised by television. This theory does not apply to me. I was not raised by TV, but by my sainted mother and my selfless, hardworking father, with a moderate amount of assistance from two sets of grandparents. For better or worse, all our fathers are our (in my case, utterly unattainable) models for manhood, which is as it should be. But, in my case, I had no model for childhood.
I am, as I mentioned, the oldest of three children. The sole older male influence of my generation was my cousin Kevin, who is two years older than me and, as far as I was always concerned, more a peer than a role model. I had no big brother to show me how I was supposed to act between the ages of, say, five and sixteen (to arbitrarily define the ages when, respectively, infancy ends and young adulthood begins). By the time I was three, I was the big brother; my sister Alicia was born in 1984, and Veronica came along in 1989, just when I’d gotten used to Alicia.
Enter Mike Seaver. Despite being a fictional character, he had enough years on me that I viewed him as a role model (subconsciously, of course; no seven year old thinks about this stuff... hell, twenty-five year olds only think of it while dealing with bouts of insomnia) of how a pubescent American male should act. Through my observations of his behavior, I patterned my own development as a member of youth culture. But what initially attracted me to the concept of Mike Seaver was his (admittedly G-rated) rebelliousness. I admit to speculating here; there is no way of telling what I thought when I first watched the show, but I can theorize. Mike misbehaved and everyone in the studio audience loved it. He got into trouble, but it was never lasting trouble, the punishments were always supposedly severe but never harsh (and certainly never physical; Jason and Maggie Seaver never raised a hand to their kids... my parents did on occasion, but when it happened it was because we goddamn well deserved it) and always forgotten by the time the next episode rolled around. Mike lived in a world without consequences for his troublesome actions, and even when caught, scolded and ultimately punished, usually got the last word anyway, before the credits ran over a freeze-frame. There is no way anyone can tell me this is not an attractive concept, even (especially?) to an adult.
But herein lies the rub: by the time I was of an age to do any serious, Mike-esque rabble-rousing, Mike mutated into a good kid through Kirk Cameron’s backstage, Jesus-driven machinations. He was nice to his brother and sister. His grades picked up. He stopped spinning outrageous fabrications to mom and dad. He was still funny, and he was still kind of cool, but in a different way. Watching this and not knowing about any of the religious awakenings or power plays going on out in Hollywood, I came to the only logical assumption I could: “Well... I guess that’s just what happens.” You hit a certain age and you just, over one summer, grow the hell up. You graduate high school and go to the only college that’ll take you because you were such a screw-up over the last few years (seasons… whatever). You get dumped by the blonde and end up dating the (in my opinion) hotter brunette. (If anyone thinks I’m overdoing it here, I should make it clear that I fully expect to have two girlfriends in my entire life; the one I won’t marry, and the one I will marry. I have believed this, for all intents and purposes, for my entire adult life. I realize now that this is Mike Seaver’s fault.) You become responsible and trustworthy and virtuous by the time you turn twenty and that’s that. So (again, subconsciously), this became my model for what the next eight to ten years of my life were supposed to be like. I never got to do any of the troublemaking, because by the time I was old enough to start, my model for troublemaking had evolved beyond that. I skipped it altogether and did well all through high school, got accepted with a full scholarship to a good college, and ended up going to an okay one.
Now, however, with the power of E! and the internet at my disposal, I know that Mike didn’t evolve at all. Kirk Cameron evolved, and forced a thoroughly inexplicable metamorphosis on Mike. (That sentence, in a way, espouses the concepts of both evolution and intelligent design/creationism, because I am awesome.) So my decision to not become a rakish ne’er do-well was not an organic one at all; it was forced on me by some actor out in California. The entire last seventeen years of my life have been shaped (albeit vaguely and indirectly) by the older brother of the chick who played DJ Tanner.
Which leads me back to why skimming this book about movie flops makes me think of Kirk Cameron. Despite my general interest in film, I’m never going to buy and/or read this book lest my way of thinking about movies like Hudson Hawk and The Last Action Hero be tainted by someone else’s opinions. I know myself to be very impressionable and open to outside ideas, and this is the exact same reason I won’t read a book called Left Behind. This book is the first in a series of Christianity-themed adventure novels, and there is a series of films based on them, which star (you guessed it) Kirk Cameron. Set after the Biblical “Rapture”, during which all the good and faithful people in the world are taken bodily by God into Heaven, the series focuses on those “left behind” and focuses on their coming war with the Antichrist; it sounds kind of like The Stand, only the deus ex machina comes at the beginning of the story. I only know this because of an essay by Chuck Klosterman and liberal readings at the IMDb and Wikipedia. I have never read any of these books nor seen any of the films (which - surprise!- all went straight to video), nor do I intend to despite my sincere, purely intellectual curiosity about the subject matter and why it is so popular. As far as I can tell, there are roughly four hundred books in this series, and they all spend significant periods of time on the New York Times’ bestseller list. As a fan of popular culture in general, the concept of these books intrigues me; there’s this whole subsection of entertainment that’s never explored by the majority of the world because it is classified as being for born-again Christians. They could be the most entertaining, engaging reads this side of the Harry Potter novels, but no one knows except the (relative) handful of hardcore evangelical Christians at whom they are aimed.
So why don’t I read them? Or at least watch the first movie and give it a chance? Well, reader, here’s why:
I am terrified that if I do so I will become a born-again Christian.
To be clear, I’ve done things out of intellectual curiosity before. Several years ago, I watched a professional wrestling event- something I had literally never done before- solely because I was curious to see what the big deal was; I ended up writing television recaps for a wrestling fan website for close to a year. A few years after that I watched the 2003 American League Championship Series between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees because I was interested in baseball as “an American mythical construct.” (Quoting myself there. How obnoxious, both the statement and the fact that I’m goddamn quoting myself.) Now, in 2006, close to half of the conversations I have with my closer friends center around baseball and how I really hope the Angels don’t make the playoffs, because if they do, they will eliminate the Yankees (again) and this will irritate me. So, I have a history of approaching things from a dispassionate, intellectual standpoint and ending up completely sucked in by them. Pro wrestling and baseball are one thing; becoming a Bible-thumper is just something I’m not willing to risk. One could argue that the three things are completely different, or at least that the first two are completely different from the third; pro wrestling and baseball are things you watch on TV, whereas born-again Christianity is a serious life choice that alters your entire perspective on life and the world. And I grant that this is true. Also, it would take a hell of a lot more effort on my part to become a born-again Christian (as opposed to a very cynical though usually practicing Catholic) than it did for me to become a baseball fan; born-again Christianity doesn’t have a TV network devoted to it, and baseball didn’t force me to develop opinions on abortion and gay marriage. If there’s one thing I cannot stand, it’s having to put an effort into anything.
But these Left Behind guys have Kirk Cameron on their side. Quite frankly, I’m not willing to take the risk of him throwing a wrench into my development as a person ever again. Fool me once, Mike Seaver, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
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