No, seriously. Tonight a bunch of girlfriends got together and we watched The Big Chill. Have you watched this film lately?
I can’t remember the first time I saw this film, but it must have been in college. The film came out in 1983, when I was 15, and I definitely didn’t see it in the theaters, at least not first run. What I remember about the film, is that it it was about a bunch of old people, and while I thought it was an interesting film, I definitely couldn’t relate to it because everyone was so, well, old and staid, and that was not going to happen to me.
And, now, watching the film, the characters are all a good six or seven years younger than I am now. How did that happen? They watched those crazy black-and-white monster films on the Late Late Show. What happened to the Late Late Show? No one shows those movies anymore. And what did happen to quaaludes? I remember hearing about them constantly in the 1980s; they were all the rage. Remember “Puppy Uppers” and “Doggie Downers”?
And those shoes! I got my first pair of Nikes in 8th grade, when I joined the track team. They were $40, but my father said that was okay, because if you were running, then it was important to have shoes that were good for feet, so I didn’t need to worry about how expensive they were. They were brown. With an orange swoosh.
1983 seems both so remote and just a few days ago. Looking at the VHS tapes, the bulky video camera, that padded shoulders, the short shorts, the big curly hair brings me right back to my room in our house on Miami Beach. At the end, Mary Kay Place (who is practically unrecognizable from her latests role as Roman Grant’s wife in Big Love) passes around a pen and address book and promises to write back to letters. Girl, just text each other your 411 and drop an e-mail once in a while. Or just friend each other on Facebook!
Not that long ago, I was talking to someone about the cliche of the character discovering pertinent information on an answering machine when someone doesn’t answer the phone. This is completely obsolete today. The new cliche is the dead cell phone battery. So many vital parts of movie making are falling by the wayside. The Big Chill couldn’t happen today. “Well, he checked in a couple of days ago on Foursquare at the hardware store.” “Yeah, and just last night he sent a tweet from that party.” “Dude, I totally saw about your marriage falling apart on TMZ.”
Odd to think that someday my kids will watch movies like High Fidelity and Oceans 11 and Mean Girls and say the exact same thing… except they won’t. Those films will be ancient to them, like Easy Rider was to me. The films they’ll be saying these things about haven’t even been shot yet. The boy’s Big Chill won’t even be made for another seven years.
Next time, we’ll be watching the Gen X version of the Boomer’s The Big Chill, which is, of course, St. Elmo’s Fire.
One thing I’ll say about The Big Chill. I was humming “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” for a week the first time I saw it; I’m pretty sure I’ll be humming it for the next week now. Some things never change.
