Adventureland: The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel

When I first watched the movie ‘Adventureland’ (2009), my mind inadvertently drifted to the lyrics of a Ryan Adams song called ‘Anybody Wanna Take Me Home’:

So, I am in the twilight of my youth
Not that I'm going to remember
And have you seen the moon tonight
Is it full?
Still burning its embers
The people dancing in the corner, they seem happy
But I am sad
I am still dancing in the coma of the drinks I just had
Does anybody want to take me home?
Does anybody want to take me home?
Take me to your house, and I'll leave you alone
Of course I will
Of course I won't
It seems so tragic... but it disappears like magic
Like magic

In enjoying the movie, I was reminded of a couple things. First, that (yep!), I am in the twilight of my youth. I have no idea why the image of the full moon hits me, but it does. These feelings usually hit me at night. A warm, comfortable night are the best conditions. It has just the right kind of comfortableness; it has the same quality that Rob (Cusack) wanted in his store’s background music in High Fidelity (2000): “I just want something I can ignore.”, he pleads to Barry. This lets the mind wonder and imagine.



Second, the movie made me sad - mainly because to lose one’s youth is usually one’s first wistful tragedy. “The Youth”, cries the poet William Wordsworth, “who daily farther from the east/ Must travel, still is Nature's priest, /And by the vision splendid/ Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away,/ And fade into the light of common day.” As a youth, we are still Nature’s priest. Our bodies are strong and our energy is high. But the transition into being a Man is filled with pathos: we see it ‘die away’, and ‘fade into the light of the common day’. The drive to keep youth can drive you to insanity, as it did for Dorian Grey. The secret is accepting it and moving on to the next stage. “On or back we must go; to stay is death.”

These are the feelings I had throughout the movie. The preciousness of youth, how fleeting it is, how memory doesn’t remember it all, and especially the whole notion of making it a ‘period piece’: all these elements really make the movie work for me. A theme here is that “growing up can happen when you least expect it” (Simon Reynolds, movie critic). To set the movie in the 80’s is smart, because the 80’s are becoming nostalgic. The people who were teens in the 80’s are now entering their fourth decade. But this movie just captures the feel of the 80’s perfectly, and so it sets the conditions just right for ‘memories that come in monochrome’, as Angela Carter would put it. This mostly is due to the soundtrack, which is full of great 80’s music - with quick clips from 41 songs. You can see them all here: http://reelsoundtrack.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/adventureland-soundtrack/

The plot is cliched and it’s been recycled so many times that I’ll just barely touch it. James Brennen is a smart kid in 1987 who has the dream of going to the prestigious Columbia University for postgraduate work in journalism and doing a tour of Europe. James says:

“I want to be, like, a travel essayist. But I want to report on the real state of the world. You know, like Charles Dickens, for example, wrote what you might call travel books, but he visited prisons and mental asylums.”

He graduated with a degree (with high honors!) in Comparative Literature. His hopes are dashed when his dad tells him he lost his job, which means he can’t fund his trip to Europe or the cost of his education. What do to?! He lands a job at an amusement park with the help of a friend. This forms the setting for all the teenage stuff that’s about to ensue. James meets Joel, who is socially awkward, but he can hold his own around James intellectually. There’s a point where the dialogue gets pretty charming. For example:

Joel: What's the point of being a writer or an artist anyway? Herman Melville wrote fuckin' Moby Dick, he was so poor and forgotten by the time he died that in his obituary they called him Henry Melville. You know, like why bother? They're just going to forget our fuckin' names anyway. I heard Em went back to New York.
James Brennan: I wish it didn't end like that, I should've - I don't know.
[Beat]
James Brennan: Your Herman Melville story that - that's bullshit.
Joel: It's true, they called him Henry.
James Brennan: No, I mean, he wrote a seven-hundred page allegorical novel about the whaling industry. I think he was a pretty passionate guy, Joel. I hope they call me Henry when I die, too.
Joel: One can only hope

I love that. Or when Joel says: “Oh, but I'm an atheist, maybe more of a pragmatic nihilist I guess or an existential pagan if you will...” There’s a poignancy about it in this coming-of-age setting. But back to the plot. There’s the usual stud (Mike), played with charm and humanity. Mike sleeps with (and might have feelings for?) Emily - you might know her from the Twilight movies. But James throws a wrench in everything when she takes a liking to him. James has an innocent nature, though: this keeps Mike from ever feeling bitter about anything that happens between them. It’s all stuff we’ve heard before. The movie’s focus is that relationship between James and Emily. But it’s also about James’ desire to deal with present, crummy circumstances, and the yearning to break free, live life, and “run away and leave it all behind” (Foo Fighters). The movie is more about characters than plot originality - and since it’s a period piece, it’s more about atmosphere and ‘feel’ and catharsis than anything else.



The movie was written by Greg Mottola, the same guy responsible for Superbad (2008). But there’s more emotion here. The emotion resides with way the script is acted out and the subtle, accompanying cinematography. The feelings are aroused right away, in just the right way. The homesickness just knots in the gut. You can almost smell the air of the summer night. If you relate to having a crummy, summer job, it’ll be even better. Some scenes have no talking at all. They relax in the summer twilight. At one scene, while James and Emily are forming the first stages of their attraction for each other, even the fireworks remind you that this is temporary, that soon they’ll break away from teenage angst, the other person almost embodying a hope that is just barely (it's just right) hinted at, but suggested in just the right degree. The comedy and the drama mix and compliment each other very well. I like what the American writer Carson McCullers says: “As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.” I’ve never been and had never heard about Adventureland before I saw the movie; but the whole setting makes me wistful and many of the scenes from the movie have an elegiac quality in my imagination.