1. Britney Spears
2. 50 Cent
3. Cartoon Network
4. Mariah Carey
5. Green Day
6. Jessica Simpson
7. Paris Hilton
8. Eminem
9. Ciara
10. Lindsay Lohan
This isn't going to be a post that bashes pop culture or even the people who searched Yahoo! for more information about these celebrities. Instead I want to talk about a specific instance in which pop culture embraced redemptive art.
By now, I hope you've seen and/or read The Notebook—the powerful love story of two characters named Noah and Allie. He was a pauper. She came from money. He lived his life quite freely. She lived a structured life. Both were content until they met one summer. They quickly became the perfect complement to each other. But when summer was over, Allie's family left their summer home and the romance was over.Well, it was never really over. Noah wrote to Allie every day for a year. Allie's Mom intercepted the letters and eventually Noah and Allie did their best to move on. Years later, Allie sees an article in the paper about Noah. He'd restored an old house to the exact specifications that he and Allie had spoken about many years before. She takes a trip to see how he's doing and they fall for each other all over again. After a lot of struggle, and pain, and turmoil, they decide that they want to get married.
As touching as all of this is, by far the most touching scenes in the movie are those shared by the older versions of Noah and Allie after Allie has developed dementia. But before she lost her memory, she handwrote their love story in a notebook and she told Noah to read it to her when she loses her memory and she'll come back to him. And read to her he did—day after day with the hope that she'd remember their love for a few minutes at a time before slipping back to a place far away from him. During one touching scene, after she did remember him, they shared a danced in her nursing home room.
At the end of the movie, Allie is near death, and she asks Noah if he believed that their love was strong enough to take them away together. He said it was strong enough to do anything they wanted it to do. The next morning, a nurse finds them deceased—still holding on to each other. Their love had transcended everything. It's one of the most powerful movies I've ever seen.
But apparently I'm not the only one who saw such great power. I was flipping through television channels a few weeks ago and ran across a program in which two characters were watching The Notebook. The guy wasn't all that interested in the movie at first. He was more interested in the woman. But once he settled in and started watching the movie, he got a taste of what real love looked like. When he was really involved in the movie, the woman leaned over to kiss him and he backed away. He wanted to watch the rest of the movie. Later, the woman called one of her female friends and proudly declared, "I Notebooked him."
The movie so accurately depicted what love really is that the title of the movie can now be used as a verb.
