My birthday is this week. It’s causing me to have some thoughts. Not like, bad, brooding thoughts, mind you. Just .. thinkin.
First, I keep thinking about the movie Tár. I know, yes, it’s a little weird. It’s not exactly a “birthday” movie or even an “oh geez we all keep getting older — life, man!” movie. But I read this essay by Zadie Smith about it and it really got me thinking.1 Zadie Smith sees Tár as a quintessentially Gen X movie. On a first pass, yes, it’s a movie about “cancel culture” and Me Too and all that, but only insofar as those are very current, of-the-moment topics in 2023, and a modern movie might naturally touch on those ideas in order to show how it’s a product of its time. Cancel culture is a thing now, so it’s one of the vehicles we have for telling stories — in the same way that radical religiously-motivated terrorism was a thing in the 2000s and back then we had a million dramas about some zealot who wanted to blow up the world, facing off against a government agent zealot who thought nothing of torturing people to get the information he wanted. Personally, I’ll take a dozen cancel culture movies before I sit through a Jack Bauer/24 reboot, but you know. Tastes vary, I guess.
In any event, for Smith, Tár is really about Gen X getting older. It is a movie that stands for the proposition, “Yes, you, too — people who are new to their 50s — you will get old, become increasingly irrelevant, and be eclipsed by the generation that’s set to follow you.” Lydia Tár is a monstrous human being, and of course (without giving away any spoilers) the movie is about her professional and psychological unraveling. But once you step back and see the movie as a whole, you realize it’s all the younger people in her life who turn out to be the source of that unraveling. Tár comes undone because she’s not ready to acknowledge that — you know, younger people exist, and they have wants and desires, too, and the time is coming when they’ll be running the show and poor Tár will have to just fade into the background with the rest of the olds.
There’s a lot more to say on this topic, but I’ll stop there. I don’t want to just repeat everything Zadie Smith says about the movie. I think her insights make a lot of sense, and if you liked the movie, you should definitely read what she has to say (but wait until after you’ve seen it to read the essay).
More to the point about, ahem, my birthday — Zadie Smith is only five years older than I am. She published her first novel, White Teeth, when she was only 25. I remember reading it when I was in my early 20s and thinking.. “It’s incredible that someone so young, so close in age to myself was able to produce something like this.” And now here she is, watching a movie in which Cate Blanchett plays a character who turns 50, and she’s reflecting on how we’re all going to grow old and no longer be the center of the cultural universe. I’m not saying that Zadie and I both “fear” growing old exactly, or that I in particular feel that I’m “culturally irrelevant” (that seems more like a concern for celebrities). It’s just that — to see Zadie Smith acknowledging she and her generation are now on the back side of the slope toward their senior years — that’s a bit of a gut punch. When did that happen, exactly? How did it happen so fast?
So that’s one kinda birthday-related thought, I guess. Then, too, I’ve been thinking about the birthday celebration trip Sam and I took with a group of friends this past weekend to the roller rink. Coming up with unique, fun things to do for your adult birthday party in the dead of January has always been something of a challenge, and this year I kinda just decided to go for it. So we took a trip 40 minutes out into the suburbs and went to a classic, straight-out-of-1975 roller rink. It was a cool trip and a good adventure to have, but it wasn’t without its downside. I don’t think any of us had been roller skating in at least 15 years, and probably longer. Perhaps then not surprisingly, we had two broken wrists (and a possible third sprained wrist) in the group before the night was over. Proud to say that one of the dainty injured wrists was mine, naturally.
So yes, injuring yourself as you get older is something of a rite of passage. But more generally.. we all got into the theme of the night and wanted to dress up in gay roller skater 70s/80s vibes, and that was a lot of fun. But on the group chat discussing the plan beforehand, you could also sense the element of being ever-so-slightly self conscious about it. Like.. we’re going to the suburbs. We’re gonna be around non-gay people. Can we flaunt our fabulous ridiculous selves with crop tops and eye glitter and all that nonsense? And the answer turned out to be.. well, of course you can. Yes, we were marooned in normie, middle-of-the-road suburbia. There wasn’t a gay bar around for miles. We were clearly the only gays over 30 in attendance at the rink. But also — plenty of the high school age kids were obviously gay/queer/nonbinary/whatever — and none of it mattered. These were fabulously queer kids doing their thing at the roller rink on a Saturday night in Summit, Illinois — and I would never have dreamed of doing something like that when I was that age. Gay stuff and gay people are very much accepted in normie spaces now, but part of what it means to be accepted is just .. it’s really kinda boring. So you wore a crop top. No one cares! That’s certainly a positive development, I think — but for me, I guess, it’s one that marks the passage of time.
Generational self-consciousness aside, though, skating was a lot of fun. We went out in Boystown afterward and .. again, to no one’s surprise, I stayed out too late and was consequently useless come Sunday. Gone are the days I could bounce back from a night out like it’s no thing. Maybe those bygone days weren’t even as I’m remembering them to begin with, but.. point is, it’s just a given anymore that I’m going to spend most of the next day on the couch after a big night out like that. Which is fine. Spending a Sunday on the couch is a luxury and a privilege that I should appreciate. But in the moment, as I was was emotionally and physically hung over from the whole experience and perhaps feeling a little sorry for myself, I landed on one of my indie comfort movies to watch — Frances Ha.
And Frances Ha.. man, I dunno. I used to really like this movie. It was sweet and quirky and kinda painful in the good way. And it still is those things. I do still like it. But also .. boy this time I found it kinda depressing. Frances is just so young and unstable and most of all — so self absorbed. And yes, that’s obviously the point. Like, she’s 27, she’s living in New York and has a really unstable job that doesn’t pay her enough. She lives in an apartment with a roommate she deeply cares for, but that situation is unstable, too. The whole movie is basically a series of apartments she moves between, people she stays with while she tries to figure things out, and half-hearted attempts to find work that might pay her enough so she can keep her head above water. How could she focus on anything other than herself and her own circumstance amidst all that chaos? No, Frances doesn’t have anything to say about politics or the world generally or anything like that. Her life is entirely contained within her friend circle and her own precarious situation. But .. her life is objectively hard because of all this insecurity, even if she also seems incredibly privileged in the manic pixie dreamgirl sorta way.
So yeah. On this watching, I wanted more for Frances, and I found her youth and insecurity to be kinda depressing. But again — that’s because I’m me, being older now. Greta Gerwig is amazing in this movie, and she (like Zadie Smith!) isn’t that far in age from myself. She made the movie when she was 29. And absolutely, when I was 29 I had no idea what city I really wanted to live in, what I wanted to actually do with my life, how I was going to pay off the mountain of school debt I had accumulated. I couldn’t possibly know from one year to the next what apartment I was going to live in. But.. that has all really changed, hasn’t it? I don’t want to pity Frances in this movie for being so young. But.. I kinda can’t help it. I’m glad to have moved on from that part in my life.
This post is all pretty disjointed, I realize, and I’m writing it quickly so it doesn’t just sit around and I end up hitting publish a week after my actual birthday. But these are some of my birthday thoughts. I don’t mean any of these ruminations to be melancholy, necessarily. They’re just .. here’s what it means to get older. Zadie Smith is looking ahead as Gen X turns 50, and it’s utterly incomprehensible to think that’s gonna be me before too long. Going out roller skating with friends is fun, but I’m struck by how we all still carry our baggage with us somewhat, and we bear the markers of older millennials who will always still be the slightest bit self-conscious about being gay. Frances Ha is a nice reminder that like.. as I look around my life now, it wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I did have all the anxieties and insecurities of youth. Those have all been replaced by different anxieties and insecurities, but it’s weird to see how that 20-something vibe just doesn’t quite fit anymore.
I’m not sure how the year ahead is going to unfold. I’ve been taking up meditation and kinda getting into it, so I want to see where that goes and maybe I’ll write about it more later. It has a lot to do with deconstructing the conception of one’s self, and that tends to lead to some new and strange places when you start to do a lot of thinking. I think about running a lot, and I increasingly lean into running as something that really grounds me. I’ve also found myself contemplating getting a tattoo for the first time ever? That’s not something I expected for myself. Maybe it doesn’t matter. A tattoo might be interesting and worth doing because it doesn’t matter. Again.. these are all thoughts I keep having. Birthdays, man.
Mostly, 43 is a good time to appreciate that I’m firmly set in middle age, whatever it is we mean by that. No longer *young* by any objective measure, but also not old, either. Old enough to have experience, and to feel the pull that I should “moderate” myself somewhat. Less going out. A little more attachment to conventionalism and things that are more steady and more permanent. But also.. it’s a time to sit with the growing realization that this is all going to end. Like Lydia Tár’s fantastic career in which she’s truly on top of the world until she isn’t — all this, everything around us is temporary. It will end, or at the very least morph in some truly unpredictable way. Family members, friends, social environments, priorities, even the notion of self and identity — none of it is fixed. It can’t be taken for granted. There’s a tendancy to take this realization and immedately fall into a deep nostalgia about everything that came before. I want to resist that to an extent, because nostalgia isn’t really the point. It’s more just that .. something different is coming. That’s ok. But .. what am I doing with myself in the meantime??
It’s definitely more of an essay than it is a movie review. I linked to a copied pdf of the essay because it’s sorta-kinda behind a paywall at the New York Review of Books. As in — you can read it for free, but you’re supposed to sign up for a NYRB account first. That seems like more trouble than it’s fair to ask you, dear reader, to go through — so I’m linking to a pdf of the piece that I downloaded myself. Please don’t accuse me of IP malpractice.