To Encounter for the Millionth Time
Coming of age with Mottola, Jia, and Joyce
I’ve seen a resurgence of interest in Greg Mottola’s film Adventureland. The streaming service Mubi is featuring it in one of its rolling 30-day windows, with an accompanying video essay on the film’s remarkable soundtrack, and the site Indiewire canonized it as a New Classic in its thoughtful appreciation. It’s a film that I instantly loved in 2009, and upon a rewatch my affection has not faded. As those two pieces express, Adventureland captures the ephemera of young adulthood that, despite their seeming insignificance, end up being strongly felt memories—wisps of the past to reach for, charged with momentous banality, held with wonder at a romantic distance.
In many films, money is often treated with extremes: either the protagonists inhabit a world free of its ever-present shackles, or their creators mine pathos out of indulging in miserable poverty. Adventureland at least shows some monetary tradeoffs. James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) is not guaranteed his European vacation after college graduation; his father’s layoff thwarts his plans, and he is not above, as his co-worker Joel (Martin Starr) later states, “doing the work of lazy, pathetic morons” at an amusement park. At the end of the film, repairs after James’s drunken car accident threaten his graduate school plans, too—another thing dependent on money, and another thing not guaranteed to the middle class—but he strikes out on his own anyway to New York City, without permanent housing but with a defiant autonomy forged by necessity.
In between these financial bookends to James’s summer is a longing to write. His grad program is at Columbia’s well-known journalism school, and he cites Charles Dickens’s travel writing as a model for his aspirations to “report on the real state of the world.” He reads Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy in his spare time, likely imagining, as I did while reading Tropic of Cancer, what it would feel like being penniless and having crabs, but writing in Paris. The familiar sentiment of the eager idealist resounds: there is an artificiality to dispel, a cold truth that my work can draw out. Where others have failed to hold up the mirror to society, I can compose an image of clarity with the force of my thought.
That a budding man of letters chooses New York as the home to foster his creativity is also a well-worn conceit, and indeed it’s the same one I ingenuously dreamed of as a kid. As in James’s industrial Pittsburgh, I had summers of numbing indolence, filling free time with the dead spaces and empty calories of south Texas, embarrassingly dependent on parents’ cars just to move about; it’s unheard of to commute by public transit, by bike, or by foot there. When James needs a car at night and enlists his friend Frigo to get his mom’s sedan out of the driveway, silently in neutral, the memories of skulking around come flooding back.
The driving culture of this side of Texas is especially inimical to serendipitous connection: the journey from origin to destination is fully contained in a vehicular interior; you even get back into the car just to move intra-strip-mall. When I went to college, sundered from the automobile, I had to ask my freshman adviser for a tutorial on how to use a subway. The idea was so alien to me that it defied basic reading skills; I could complete vocabulary analogies but could not decipher a map with colored lines and open circles. (This confusion had a post-baccalaureate incarnation in Chicago when I had to decrypt tiered fares to ride a commuter rail for the first time.)
As I traveled within Boston, it surprised me to see unaccompanied teenagers taking the T to school. Later on in life, I realized this was one simple way that an urban environment could have better prepared me for the future. I know much of my feeling is just childish insecurity about being the parochial misfit among the cosmopolitan, but I also lament what I still see as an antiseptic childhood sorely lacking in discovery and awe. I wasn’t exposed to crime and danger and risk taking, to independent decisions and spontaneity, to everyday frustrations with strangers, to the physicality of staunchly using your legs everywhere to locomote. I wasn’t privy to an international consciousness, to radical art and opinion, to the constantly growing comprehension that world is vastly bigger than in any of your previously held conceptions. I was chaperoned on a flight gliding over what Michael Chabon termed the wilderness of childhood, the “great original adventure” where you wander, get lost, get hurt, maybe seriously, but then duly fall back onto your own resilience and creativity.
This wilderness is not unique to the urban city, and I am loath to cast the issue tritely as the provincial town versus the bustling metropolis—it gets more complicated than that. But I do believe the latter setting helps tremendously. In the metropolis you are more likely in your exploration to encounter kindred spirits, to experience those fortuitous meetings that divert your life’s developing course. They surge and shape the alluvial plains with the unyielding hand of nature; they veer and pivot sharply and form oxbows that definitively etch the past. The people I met in Boston, then Chicago, and then New York directed my life in wholly unexpected ways, shifting and guiding the path at incidental bends. Especially for a person conditioned to naïvely dole out life into prefabricated compartments, it is humbling to reflect back on these unplanned connections as their consequences inexorably ramify into the present.
In his book Triumph of the City, the economist Edward Glaeser illustrates the particularly “urban ability to create collaborative brilliance”:
For centuries, innovations have spread from person to person across crowded city streets. An explosion of artistic genius during the Florentine Renaissance began when Brunelleschi figured out the geometry of linear perspective. He passed his knowledge to his friend Donatello, who imported linear perspective in low-relief sculpture. Their friend Masaccio then brought the innovation into painting. The artistic innovations of Florence were glorious side effects of urban concentration … The spread of knowledge from engineer to engineer, from designer to designer, from trader to trader is the same as the flight of ideas from painter to painter, and urban density has long been at the heart of that process.
Is this what beckons James to New York, that song of the Sirens echoing to the suburban would-bes and dreamers? (“They’re calling at me, ‘Come and find your kind.’”) The idealization of New York as the escape from lands bereft of opportunity suffused my self-justification, and as I wrestled with my relationship with my hometown, I attributed so much of my sadness and resentment to what I’d thought was a shameful handicap. I wasn’t a citizen of the world, and I didn’t know how to be. It is a mutation of that privileged millennial angst, a belated FOMO—the fear that I already missed out, and missed out for decades, and can’t ever catch up.
As Frances Ha mordantly puts it, “I’m not a student. There is no more ‘abroad.’”
Yet it’s here that I ultimately come back to, perhaps deliberately summon, Adventureland’s sentimental retrospect—because my stomping grounds evoke a very difficult mix of emotions. In all the time I have wasted pettily regretting that didn’t get to grow up in some Renaissance Florence, I nevertheless look back very fondly at some prosaic recollections that are a part of me: after-school trips to Taco Bell and Subway, walks to the grocery store to buy my girlfriend holiday Oreos, a highway traffic jam after a football game with an errant streaker, innumerable AOL Instant Messenger conversations. I developed my first true friendships with my classmates together with their online avatars. If our transportation was limited to cars, our substantive socializing was often across dial-up connections, when incoming callers got the busy signal for hours, and when picking up the landline in another room quickly prompted the robotic GOODBYE sign-off. Some of the most important conversations of my adolescence happened online—which, I suppose, might be de rigueur now anyway. But in spite of all this dull terrain, the chain restaurants and the highly processed food and the electronic contact, I filled in the contours of my nascent personality; I honed my jokes and writing to impress my girlfriend, presenting myself through text, the best way I knew how.
I only recently realized why I cherish these remembrances so much, inseparable from a time of stifled development, but also ensconced in the magnanimous nook of nostalgia. It was that incipient taste of personal freedom, a world of my own making. It’s the feeling I get when Greg Mottola shows us James staring out on a languorous Fourth of July beneath fireworks, young and in love; blissfully rounding the corners in a pot-cookie-fueled bumper car session; passing below the imposing steel beams of a bridge enveloped in darkness, intimately sharing his bummer jams; musing on Herman Melville’s disrepute, empty beer cans strewn about a grassy slope as the summer winds down against an overcast magic hour—and, naturally, arriving in New York in the dead of night, peering through a rain-stippled bus window (He understood public transit) at the flickering city lights, vivid and pulsing and out of focus.
Jia Zhangke’s 2015 film Mountains May Depart opens with a jubilant dance to the Pet Shop Boys’ record of “Go West” on the eve of the new millennium and ends with the same dance 25 years later, into our own future. In the opening section, two suitors court Tao (Zhao Tao), who eventually chooses the brasher of the two men, Jinsheng (Zhang Yi). In the second section we see they are already divorced, with Jinsheng having won custody of their child, whom he crassly but characteristically has named Dollar. The final section follows Dollar, now a young man, long estranged from his mother and losing the ability to communicate with his father, both emotionally and even linguistically.
It is a melodramatic saga that I have critical issues with, and yet my mind, in its probing reveries of the past, repeatedly returns to the film’s final image: to see a drained Tao, absent for most of Act 3, muster up the spirit for the hopeful dance of a vanished era is to deeply feel the ache of a quarter century, when youthful optimism was wounded and scarred, and when relationships dissolved over familial bitterness, cultural fractionalization, and a frightening economic divergence. On Dollar’s side, inheriting this milieu is a given of his life—it can never be rewritten, only reconciled with—but as he stumbles, emotionally adrift and confused, he must cast off a dubious legacy. In an interview for Film Comment, director Jia said of Dollar, “As a writer I have a lot of love for this character, because we all find ourselves at this juncture between our predetermined past and an unknown future—it is [the] point that opens up a possibility for freedom and revolution.”
Here, once again, is that beautiful gift of personal freedom. It demarcates the threshold of adulthood.
I learned a new word recently: Künstlerroman. Describing a subset of the more familiar bildungsroman, a Künstlerroman is a novel about the coming of age of an artist. Perhaps the best-known example is Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Stephen Dedalus abandons his misguided plans for the priesthood and instead pursues the creative life.
His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar.
At the close of the novel, Stephen famously proclaims, in the loftiest of words, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
Adventureland is very much in the mold of the Künstlerroman, and in my extreme navel-gazing, maybe that’s the ultimate reason why I react to it so strongly. It is a common experience to slough off the hurtful legacies of preceding generations, and it’s the artist who, through the alchemy of his or her medium, is driven to transform the common into the universal. The calling requires millions of forays into an often hostile world, painstakingly trying to make some sense of life—but the artist lives in it, assays that experience, attempting to sublimate the terror into beauty and truth. Lofty, just like Stephen Dedalus.
Does James reignite the social realism of Dickens? Is Stephen weary from his forging in Ulysses? Could we ever dance to the Pet Shop Boys with the same overflowing vitality and optimism of yesteryear? I will always love the bildungsroman because I will forever be coming of age.
