This is my contribution to Chad’s baby, Filmosophy, which is, as some might say, a blog worth blogging about.
I’M REMINISCING THIS RIGHT NOW
by Meaghan O’Connell
Kicking and Screaming is the kind of movie you tell your friends they have to see, and when they oblige, sit staring at the tv thinking, “Maybe this was a mistake.” 20 minutes in you start to look around nervously, waiting for them to laugh at the good parts. Where are all the fucking good parts? Are they just ruining it for you? Soon you take out your computer and look up the Memorable Quotes on imdb.com to affirm yourself. You shift in your place in the corner of the couch, and maybe, if you are like me, you apologize, grab the wine from the kitchen, say something like, “It’s, it’s sort of slow, I guess. You just have to be in the right mood, ya know?”, and hate yourself for giving up so easily.
Kicking and Screaming is a movie that makes you scream, “NOT THE WILL FERRELL ONE!!!” before panicking when you remember that your friend loves Will Ferrell and you have just cemented your role as The One Not To Invite To Movies And Who Is Becoming a Real Bitch. Because who doesn’t love Will Ferrell? Everyone but you, you asshole. When watching, remember: you are the asshole here. You found this Baumbach DVD in the music section of Barnes and Noble, You picked it up just because it was part of the Criterion Collection and had a fucking crossword in the liner notes, you hurried home with it tucked into your Strand tote bag, thinking 25 dollars?! Oh well, that’s just two brunches although when have we ever said, “No sorry, can’t do brunch today, I bought a Criterion Collection dvd last week and I’m waiting for things to balance out…,”?, and finally, it was you, you, who, staring out the bus window, peeling at the ruinous Open This Way stickers absentmindedly, bit your lip and pigeon-toed your feet, remembered you forgot to brush your teeth today and knew, you just knew, that this movie would Make You Feel Less Alone.
And worst of all, it does!
Kicking and Screaming is the kind of movie that, immediately after, makes you want to email The One That Got Away (and, if you’re anything like me, you do):
Guy I Almost Lost My Virginity To But Didn’t Because You Didn’t Know What To Do,
It’s just, it’s so dead on. Just trust me, you have to see it. Just let me know when you see it.
xoxox,
Meaghan
Should you have xo-ed? Was that too much? Like the character’s in Baumbach’s entree into filmmaking, written when he was your age, when he was experiencing this very same moment, (except he was writing a script for a major motion picture and you…were weeping through reruns of The Tyra Banks Show), these are the most important decisions you make.
In the movie, the leading lady, Jane, as she’s called, abandons our archetype to move to Prague and take writing classes on scholarship rather than play house with him to Park Slope (“Not just Brooklyn. Park Slope, Brooklyn. Division II Manhattan.” “Prague is Division I Bratislava.”). In my own personal drama, he ran away to New Zealand to sleep in hammocks and fuck Scottish girls. I moved to Division I Manhattan to be a nanny.
“It’s not as dramatic as all that,” Jane would argue, “We have time. It’s a long life. So what if we really did have a love affair. Would it even last?” Jane is the romanticized version of the guy who works on Wall St. his first year out of school, except you love her and she’s doing what you want to do, just better. In short, she’s proving all of your complicated theories wrong.
So, instead of moving to Brooklyn, Grover stays. And all of his friends stay with him. Cue witty repartee and miserable doing of nothing. Crossword puzzles are completed, graduate programs are foregone, underage women are taken advantage of, passed around, and mocked ruthlessly. We see a few boobs! College kids have sex in the same room! Max chimes in with my favorite: “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I’m reminiscing this right now. I can’t go to the bar because I’ve already looked back on it in my memory… and I didn’t have a good time,” and, in a near-unbelievable pushing of the sophisticated child dichotomy, Jane spends the majority of her screen time (all in flashbacks) fiddling nervously with her retainer.
I’d walk you through it, and really, I’d love to, but you can catch most of it in the aforementioned Memorable Quotes section.
Kicking and Screaming is in large part a parade of fragile masculinity, all corduroy blazers and paper grocery bags filled with 6-packs of Coors Light. “You’re like a child sometimes,” Jane tells Grover.
“Yeah, but if I was a child, you’d find that endearing.”
And there we have the central lament of the film- this being caught between two moments, charm failing to save you from the confines of expectation. Where minor rebellions manifest with the hope that we - I’m going to go ahead and say “we” here - that we will still be liked when we are Nothing. When we “do nothing,” as Max puts it.
He looks in the mirror and repeats himself. “My name is Max. I do nothing.” And how is that not at least superficially thrilling? I remember the way I used to smirk at men in bars when they asked me what I did, how rebellious I thought myself to be. Maybe I figured that choosing failure was preferable to happening upon it. Maybe we choose “nothing” just to see how saying it feels, just to resist our potential; push it away and dare people to still be interested.
“All that thought and energy put into Saturday morning cartoons,” Jane says to Grover in a fiction workshop; “I think it’s depressing.”
And maybe it is. But God knows I’m watching.
Meaghan O’Connell is a writer living in Brooklyn. She blogs here.
