Class Conflict Spring 2001

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"Hey, there's Kirk Cameron … when does Tracy Gold come in?"

For the first time in my life, I was glad to hear someone talk during a movie. Twenty minutes into a screening of Left Behind: The Movie for a group of non-Christians, the tension in my living room had reached near-fatal levels.

On the screen, chaos followed the rapture of the saved. Bodies disappeared in the twinkling of an eye; cars and planes, lacking drivers and pilots, crashed; babies evaporated from their strollers. Individual piles of clothing and jewelry lay everywhere, the only remains of the recently heaven-bound.

These scenes, intended to be scary and moving, were awkward and strangely flat. But as Kirk Cameron, the former teenage heartthrob from Growing Pains, strode across the screen in the role of the story's hero, Buck Williams, the Tracy Gold joke broke the tension and filled the room with laughter, followed by another joke. Then another. Then someone said, "I'm sorry, Patton. We'll try to take this seriously"-right before someone else made another joke.

They were trying to take it seriously because of what I had asked them to do: watch a Christian movie for which they were the intended audience, and respond to it afterwards. They knew, because I had told them, that Left Behind: The Movie was the biggest Christian movie story in years. Not only was it based on the New York Times best-selling novel series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, but it involved one of the strangest marketing campaigns in movie history.

On October 31, 2000, Cloud Ten Pictures, in association with Namesake Entertainment and Impact Entertainment, pre-released Left Behind on VHS and DVD. In what amounted to an extended sneak preview, the producers of the movie, Peter and Paul Lalonde, ...

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