Nostalgic about the Future

I distinctly remember one night in elementary school, sitting in our darkened living room, watching Ike hit Tina Turner. I was small enough that, rather than looking directly at the TV, I was sitting in my mother’s lap, facing her, watching the reflection of the movie reflected in her glasses.

This was not an isolated or even particularly notable incident. A big part of my childhood was the consumption of media—primarily movies—that were not strictly age-appropriate. I learned what a condom was on a road trip when my parents chose “White Oleander” as a book-on-tape (the 14-year-old protagonist has safe sex with her foster father). When, earlier this year, my blockmates watched “Being John Malkovich,” I realized that the first time I had seen John Cusack imprison a screaming Cameron Diaz in her pet ape’s cage was when my family watched the movie in the late ’90s. And you know the scenes in “Middlesex” where the hermaphrodite does it not-quite-consensually with her best friend’s brother and then with her best friend? The New Yorker once published those as a single short story, which I devoured during a sleepover at my best friend’s house. I was 13.

However, I can say with certainty that all of that precociously consumed literary kink failed to make even a fraction of the indelible impact of another relatively age inappropriate film genre—reunion movies. Specifically, “The Big Chill.”

If you haven’t seen this 1983 paean to the lost idealism and intimacy of youth, here’s what you need to know: seven college friends reunite at the funeral of their suicidal classmate and spend a weekend figuring out who they have become. If it sounds maudlin, that’s because it is. A key scene involves the cast (Jeff Goldblum, Glenn Close, Kevin Kline, still in the prime of early middle age) boogying to The Temptations as they clean up after dinner. They say things like, “A long time ago we knew each other for a short period of time; you don’t know anything about me.” This is ironic, given that all of the characters are types: the childless career woman, the unfulfilled TV star, the lecherous reporter, the golden couple rent asunder by adultery.

The movie’s message—as I perceived it at 10 or 11—was that promising young people grow up to be miserably flawed adults. Armed with that knowledge, I felt solemn, wise, a clear-eyed Cassandra in braces and pigtails. I filled a page of my sixth-grade English notebook with succinct, semi-tragic imagined futures for all of my classmates. “Mary will be an overly perky housewife,” I wrote, “struggling against the emptiness of her suburban existence...By 37, Joey will have divorced twice.”

In the ensuing decade, I mellowed out, but I still managed to develop a deep fondness for break-up songs before I’d ever had a boyfriend. In high school, I became convinced that one of my friends was destined for political greatness, which meant that I should plan on writing his official biography, and that implied a lot of guesswork about fatal campaign mistakes. It’s still too early to say whether this guy is the next Rahm Emanuel, but it’s relevant that at this point about 80 percent of his Facebook photos involve shirtlessness and beer.

A lot of people (read: at least four of my blockmates) enjoy imagining what it will be like to look back on the present from the otherwise difficult-to-fathom distance of old-ish age. At an Arts First jazz concert toward the end of sophomore year, prompted by the atmosphere of tents, haute HUDS, and elderly people, I started pretending that my friends and I were at our 50th college reunion. “How’s the law practice?” I asked my friend Dave, who quickly caught on and made something up about his embezzling partner, “Stevens.” We compared prospective retirement communities (New Mexico all the way) and traded withering assessments of today’s youth (no respect). “Remember the good old days?” we asked one another.

My roommate, who has been subjected to a lot of my future projections, calls them “prenostalgia,” which I think is pretty accurate. Not to get too philosophical, bro, but it’s sort of like an experiment in Hegelian history—I know what the present is like, but what will it mean in the context of various possible futures?

College is a particularly ripe time for it, since my sources (“The Big Chill”) indicate that now is when people lay the groundwork for their life paths, like getting discovered by a record label or real-life marrying that person they’ve been Harvard-married to since FOP. But when senior fall rolls around things get a little too real. Almost no one knows exactly what they’re doing next year, but everyone is asking, so imagining ideal, or even probable, futures seems like tempting fate.

Instead, my latest prenostalgic indulgence consists of figuring out what jobs people could feasibly get that would make them total sell-outs, or at least really unsatisfied. I know one guy who wants to direct cerebral dramas. But what if he could only make it as a porn director? The outdoorsy science concentrator is destined for a desk job at SeaWorld. The guy who wants to be a union organizer? Prep school admissions officer.

A variation on this game is coming up with weird superlatives that would never actually end up in a yearbook, and apply them to people you know. Most likely to be the subject of a wide-eyed biography in The Atlantic. Most likely to invent a fad diet. Most likely to cheat on their kid’s application to private kindergarten. Et cetera.

When you’re a kid, it’s really hard to comprehend what it would be like to be an adult. And that when you’re in college and supposedly more mature, demonstrating that maturity sometimes requires ironic detachment from very real concerns. And once you’re a parent, you should probably rethink that family screening of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”

Sarah J. Howland '11 is a Social Studies concentrator in Mather House. She likes John Cusack and Hegel equally.