on Sunday, lightly hungover from a wedding at which I was, thank God, only a secondary guest, Julia and I watched two movies in one day, something I always want to do but rarely get the chance to. the first movie is one I’ve seen countless times; the second I knew by reputation but had never seen. both are “hangout movies,” ensemble productions with little in the way of plot and heavy on dialogue; both deal, in divergent ways, with nostalgia; both are about everyone’s favorite generation, baby boomers. and both made me think a lot about youth, idealism vs. cynicism, and the urgency I feel to find something to be committed to, now, so that I don’t regret my choices later.
Dazed and Confused (dir. Linklater, 1993)
there are a handful of cultural works that so shaped what I expected life to be like that had I not encountered them, I would be an entirely different person. for better or worse, Dazed and Confused is one of those. I remember watching this movie in college (not for the first time) and someone saying “that’s Cody” when Slater shows up on screen asking if he can buy weed from Pickford after school. I still quote about a dozen of lines from it all time. so I’m going to try my hardest to do a detached critical assessment of the movie’s engagement with its themes, but it is entirely possible that my appraisal is a post-hoc justification for how dearly I love this movie.
the vast majority of people who love Dazed and Confused think it would be awesome to spend the summer in Austin with these kids. I felt the same way, many years ago as an aimless white suburbanite. this is I think the opposite of what Linklater was shooting for. Dazed and Confused so effectively depicts what nostalgia does to your memory of the “best days of your life” that it’s pretty easy to miss how boring and shitty it must feel to be one of these suburban teenagers. the negative reviews on Letterboxd actually clock what makes this movie more than just a teen stoner flick better than the ones that gush over how immaculate the vibes are. yes, the hazing rituals are brutal and nasty; yes, plenty of the characters are meanspirited and unlikeable. but where the negative reviews go wrong is in thinking that the movie is somehow glorifying youthful boomer stupidity. what it is doing is being honest about how when you look back at those aimless days of youth, when the biggest conflict was wondering whether or not there’s going to be a party that night, even all the shittiness gets cast in a hazy, affectionate glow.
as inconsequential as it may actually be, there’s real gravitas to Pink’s struggle over whether or not to sign the anti-drug pledge his football coaches are demanding. it’s silly and pretentious, but not inaccurate, when Mike calls the whole thing an example of “neo-McCarthyism.” Wooderson is no doubt the most pathetic character, a 20-year-old still hanging around his high school haunts, but he’s also right when he says, echoing the more famous line about high school girls staying the same age, that “The older you do get, the more rules they’re gonna try to get you to follow.” as I get older, day by day even, a vice tightens around my once boundless sense of wonder and possibility—not because I think those possibilities disappear, even though they do, as a necessary result of making series of choices. but the feeling is because so many of those choices seem to be made for you in advance, and if you aren’t constantly and vigilantly defending your freedom, one day you look around and realize how much of it you’ve lost.
which is to say, boy do I feel it of absolutely critical importance that I “keep livin’, man. L-I-V-I-N.”
The Big Chill (dir. Kasdan, 1983)
now, with The Big Chill, I sympathize a little more with the negative reviews on Letterboxd. not quite with the one I saw that says this movie is “as evil and anodyne as the white supremacy it depicts.” that seems a little excessive to me. nonetheless, The Big Chill could accurately be responded to with the classic online rejoinder: OK, Boomer.
as a bit of a gambit here, I want to publicly declare that I think the hate for boomers is overblown, misguided, and, frankly, often seems like projection on the part of millennials. no question that many many many many many many of the problems we face now are a result of boomer complacency, selfishness, cruelty, and narcissism. the ideals of the sixties were coopted and betrayed by the very boomers who espoused them—this is the cultural context of The Big Chill. but, boomers also at least had those ideals, and many even fought and died for them. to me, the major advantage (early) boomers have over we millennials is that at least they can look back at those days of youthful passion and conviction with wistfulness, while most millennials jumped straight to being cynical yuppie sellouts without the detour through radical playacting.
this is what watching this movie made me think about. I don’t want to excuse or minimize the shortcomings of the 60s counterculture and the backlash it inspired, which culminated in the Reagan Revolution and, later, the introduction of the noxious Clintons into the national political consciousness. but I am envious that those who came of age in the late 60s and early 70s had the opportunity to genuinely feel that the times were a-changing, compromised as that prospect may have ultimately been. (I really could go on and on about this subject, throwing barbs at those online parapolitics leftists who argue that the 60s were actually an op orchestrated by the CIA or whatever, but we’ll never get anywhere if I follow that thread).
I don’t actually have that much to say about The Big Chill because while it is an enjoyable movie, I don’t think it really grapples with the questions it raises. but during dinner at the wedding I attended, I was seated next to a friend of mine from high school who I haven’t seen in about 15 years—the same span of time that precedes the reunion depicted in The Big Chill. my old friend and I were cordial, almost painfully so, and the interactions made me think about a distinction Nick makes during an argument between the cinematic friends: Sam says that he and Nick “go way back,” and Nick retorts “Wrong, a long time ago we knew each other for a short period of time.”
how is it that someone you shared so many formative experiences with can one day be functionally a stranger? is that the real significance of entropy, that as time marches inexorably forward, a subtle force insinuates itself between bonds too weak to maintain cohesion, until by chance one day those constituent parts reencounter each other only to find themselves utterly incapable of activating whatever mechanism brought them together in the first place?
anyway, one “advantage” we millennials have over boomers is that as we get older, we are not finding a world abounding with opportunities for a comfortable life. as material conditions continue to deteriorate, we may not have the luxury of selling out our ideals. thank God.
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