While much of the U.S. has been shivering through
snowstorms, I’m almost embarrassed to say that we in SoCal are enjoying
glorious weather: the kind that encourages you to be outdoors taking a walk,
not inside watching a movie. Frozen yogurt sounds great to me right about now,
and there’s a popular little shop nearby called “The Big Chill.” Which just
happens to be named after a 1983 film that recently made it onto the National
Film Registry administered through the Library of Congress.
In 1983, The Big Chill was a hugely popular film
peopled by some of Hollywood’s brightest new talents, including such
stars-in-the-making as William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, and Glenn
Close. They play former college pals gathering in a comfy home in South
Carolina to memorialize one of their number who has died, a suicide. It’s a
film whose central subject is nostalgia: they’re all remembering back to the
Sixties, to their college days at the University of Michigan, when they were
young, optimistic, and full of ideas about how the world should be run.
Looking over the whole list of new inductees to the
National Film Registry, I’ve concluded
that nostalgia is a central concept in many of them. Sometimes the movies
themselves are thematically looking back on an earlier (and maybe better) era;
sometimes it’s the modern viewer who’s transported by a classic film to a time when
life seemed to hold much more promise than what we know today.
What do I mean? Well,
let’s start with two musicals from the 1950s that both made this year’s list.
They were released by different studios (Paramount and MGM), but both,
curiously have the same top-billed star, Bing Crosby. Both are set in what was
then the present-day, but the reality they portray is definitely candy-coated. White
Christmas (1954) unfolds largely in and around an old country inn where two
WWII army buddies who now have a nightclub act woo two talented singing sisters,
while also trying to help the inn’s owner, their former commanding officer. Of
course the plot climaxes with the singing of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,”
a song originally written for a 1942 Hollywood film with a very similar
premise, Holiday Inn. Listen to its hyper-nostalgic lyric: “I’m
dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.” And 1956’s High
Society is a musical version of 1940’s The Philadelphia Story,
portraying a ritzy but placid social environment that all of us would just love
to experience.
There are some serious dramas on the list too. Glory (1989)
is a powerful historical drama portraying the 54th Massachusetts
Infantry Regiment, an African American unit that fought (under white commander
Colonel Robert Gould Shaw) for the Union during the Civil War. I suspect most
of us are hardly nostalgic for the racism and blood of the War Between the
States, but we can look back with admiration on the raw courage of Shaw and his
men. Similarly, 1993’s Philadelphia graphically portrays the depths of
the AIDS crisis. It’s not a time to which we’d want to return, but the story
unfolds in a way that makes heroes out of its central characters. And Tom
Hanks’ Oscar-winning portrayal of a dying gay man includes a heartbreakingly
nostalgic scene in which he relives an operatic performance by Maria Callas.
We can feel a much happier kind of nostalgia in recalling how
we (or our children) loved The
Incredibles (2004) or how Wes Anderson helped us look cheerfully back to a
time that never quite was in 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.
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