The Big Chill: Snow Days, Frozen Yogurt, and the National Film Registry

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 throwback to 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 54^th 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.

 

Peggy Sue Goes Back to the Future

Last weekend I attended a major reunion of my high school class. I will not divulge how long it’s been since we all graduated from Hamilton High School in West Los Angeles, but there’ve been some serious changes among us: marriages, divorces, births, deaths, expanding waistlines, hair that changed colors or disappeared altogether. Not that my reunion was nearly as eventful as the one portrayed in Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married. I don’t think anyone there was time-traveling, and our shindig wasn’t graced by the presence of a one-time dweeb who has now blossomed into a computer zillionaire.

Nonetheless, a good time was had by all. I’ve been to enough reunions to realize that the urge to impress one’s former classmates has long since faded. Instead, we’re all simply grateful that we’re still here, standing on our own two feet (most of us), and happily spinning stories of what we’ve survived and what lessons we’ve learned along the way. Admittedly, my reunion wouldn’t have made for a terribly good movie. The juicy stuff – the diva out to flabbergast, the drunken confessions at the bar, the reuniting of lost lovers who promptly decide to dump their longtime spouses – either didn’t happen or escaped my attention because I was too busy comparing notes about dead parents and favorite teachers. I must say, I didn’t mind at all that the drama of the evening was so muted.

On screen, though, reunions can be potent things. The classic reunion movie, one that remains a touchstone for my generation, is Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, released in 1983. It’s not about a formal reunion, but rather chronicles a gathering of some Baby Boomers who’d been college chums in the Sixties, and have now gathered fifteen years later to mourn the loss of one of their own. In reviewing The Big Chill for Time Magazine, Richard Corliss wrote, “These Americans are in their 30s today, but back then they were the Now Generation. Right Now: give me peace, give me justice, gimme good lovin'. For them, in the voluptuous bloom of youth, the '60s was a banner you could carry aloft or wrap yourself inside. A verdant anarchy of politics, sex, drugs and style carpeted the landscape. And each impulse was scored to the rollick of the new music: folk, rock, pop, R&B.”  Corliss’s description fits my classmates and me as well. We vividly remember the politics of our high school and college days, the loss of JFK, the fear of being drafted, the music by which we lived our lives. One of Saturday night’s highlights for me was the moment the deejay put on the old tunes and some of us bravely bopped to everything from “The Stroll” to “Unchained Melody” to “Honky-Tonk Woman,” in defiance of the passing years.

The Big Chill always puts me in mind of John Sayles’ 1980 indie, The Return of the Secaucus Seven.. Because Sayles broke into movies via the Roger Corman Graduate School of Film, I spoke to him at length while researching my inside bio, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers. With $40,000 in the bank, the use of someone’s house, and a gaggle of non-SAG actors all turning thirty, Sayles chose to craft a story about former college friends gathering to commemorate the day, ten years earlier, when they all got arrested en route to a D.C. protest march. The film, Sayles’ directorial debut, beautifully fulfills an important Corman maxim: take advantage of what you’ve got.

I’d like to think that my Hami High classmates have done the same.