Recent movies and television shows portray youth dealing with cancer and death.  Why now?

Love, relationships, death and diseased teens: These themes are part of recent movie and television releases, including The Fault in Our Stars, If I Stay, Red Band Society, and Chasing Life. 

The Fault in Our Stars

John Green’s bestseller has generated copycats in film and television.

The Fault in our Stars is about two teens with cancer, Hazel Grace and Augustus. Hazel has never enjoyed teen counseling because she thinks it’s a waste of time, yet when she meets Augustus at group therapy, everything changes. The spark that the two feel is no different than any other teen couple in love, but it is clouded by Hazel’s fear of closeness because she is dying.

Readers and viewers melted when Augustus Waters tells Hazel he is not afraid to love her, even in the face of death. “It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you, Hazel Grace.”

In the movie, Hazel reads a book called An Imperial Affliction. “I was trying to create a mirror to the story in TFIOS, so that Hazel would feel a deep connection to that story. Her fascination with what happens to Anna’s mother is, of course, really about what’s going to happen to Hazel’s own mother after she dies. I started thinking that maybe Hazel and Gus could be joined by a book that Hazel found particularly powerful, and that maybe their wish could be to meet the author of that book. I’m sure that was in my mind partly because I’d been part of my friend Esther’s wish,” Green concluded in an interview on BuzzFeed.

 In a speech at the Teen Choice Awards, actress Shailene Woodley talked about her role in The Fault in Our Stars, and what she got out of the movie and book.

“We’re all so lucky to be alive, let alone breathing together in this wonderful room celebrating all of  these really successful artists. But not everybody is; there’s a lot of people at home right now our age, younger, older, who are hooked up to [an] oxygen machine or who are hooked up to other various machines because they have certain illnesses and there’s no way to justify anything in life, there’s no reason why we’re here and they’re there, nothing is fair… So the biggest thing that I took from this movie is all we have is moments and it’s really our job to wake up each and every day and be so grateful for those moments. This is all we have,” Woodley said.

If I Stay

If I Stay is a little different than The Fault in Our Stars. They both have death and a captivating love story.  The main characters are complete opposites. Mia Hall loves playing the cello, and Adam is in a rock band. The one thing that brings them together is the power of music. Later in the movie, Mia’s family dies in a freak car accident, leaving Mia in a coma.

Mia’s nurse said, “Here’s the secret, even if you die it’s all up to you. Whatever fight you got in you, you got to pull it out now.”

The flashbacks to Mia’s life before the accident help the viewer (and Mia) to overcome the tragedy. The viewer deals with the deaths of the family members as well as her own choices.

Freshman Avery Long from Walkersville said, “[These movies drew me in because they] were relatable… these things can happen to anyone. No matter who you are, you can relate somehow, maybe your first love, having a family member that lost their life because of cancer or a driving accident.”

Red Band Society

Red Band Society is a new show on FOX that is about six teens who have all different kinds of long-term illness,  and they band together in the hospital to support one another.

The audience learns that the sick children do not want to be pitied.  They want to have as normal lives as possible.  They are not luck or unlucky.  Theo, who lost his leg to cancer, said,  “Luck isn’t getting what you want. It’s surviving what you don’t want.”

The red band is the hospital identifying wrist band that lists why the patient was admitted, but in the show they use the band to tie their friendship together. In the end of the season premier episode, Theo hands out all of his red bands to Emma, Jordi, Kara, and Dash to start the bond of the red band group.

 The creator of this hit TV series, Margaret Nagle, based this story on how she grew up in a hospital because her brother Charlie (same name as the “coma kid” in the show) was in a coma for a long time. The Red Band Society was inspired by her story.

“I was drawn to these movies and books because I wanted to know the stories behind them. The Fault in our Stars was about a love story with a twist and Red Band Society seemed to have an interesting topic, so I was drawn in immediately,” senior Denali Packard said.

Tune into Red Band Society, Wednesday nights at 9 p.m. on FOX.

Chasing Life

The hit TV series Chasing life on ABC Family is about 24 year old April, a smart aspiring journalist, who is working her way up the ladder at a Boston newspaper by trying to impress her hard-nosed editor. Just as things start to look up at home, at work and with her boyfriend Dominic, April finds out she has leukemia.

 “One of the best things about Chasing Life is that it’s a show about a girl who’s living life, but it just has a little side of cancer,” Actor Italia Ricci, who plays April, shared on an interview with E! Online. “Cancer doesn’t have to take over your whole world and that’s something that April goes through in deciding not to let it have the power that it could.”

Drunk driving, texting while driving, and reckless drivers are very common now. There have been many accidents due to three of those things.

Cancer is also very relevant now. There are many organizations that are trying to raise money to help find a cure for cancer. So these movies are teaching us something. They’re not just movies to get views; they have lessons to teach.

 “It taught me to not take anything for granted and live life everyday like it’s your last because anything could happen to you in a blink of an eye, so be grateful for the people and things you have in your life,”  Packard concluded.