The Big Chill Revisited
Last night when I should have been finishing a manuscript, I saw that The Big Chill was on TV. I wanted to see if it held up after 35 years.
It kind of does, although the music is one of its saving graces, and seeing Kevin Kline as a young man (I like him). In 1983 it was the kind of movie even some fundamentalist young people in their late twenties could relate to because of the nostalgia inherent in meeting up with college friends.
Of course, the activities of these friends is pretty hedonistic. One wants a male friend to make her pregnant, but her first choices of the four don't pan out so a female friend offers her husband. (I realized last night that this was not "altruistic," but to justify her own infidelity with the character who has committed suicide and brought them together for the funeral.) One wants to cheat with another. One just wants to "get laid," and another just wants to do drugs.
The hedonism doesn't hold up, but the nostalgia does. Nostalgia can be dangerous, as a recent article in Christianity Today argued. My nostalgia is over the music and the fact that we enjoyed the movie back then.
It kind of does, although the music is one of its saving graces, and seeing Kevin Kline as a young man (I like him). In 1983 it was the kind of movie even some fundamentalist young people in their late twenties could relate to because of the nostalgia inherent in meeting up with college friends.
Of course, the activities of these friends is pretty hedonistic. One wants a male friend to make her pregnant, but her first choices of the four don't pan out so a female friend offers her husband. (I realized last night that this was not "altruistic," but to justify her own infidelity with the character who has committed suicide and brought them together for the funeral.) One wants to cheat with another. One just wants to "get laid," and another just wants to do drugs.
The hedonism doesn't hold up, but the nostalgia does. Nostalgia can be dangerous, as a recent article in Christianity Today argued. My nostalgia is over the music and the fact that we enjoyed the movie back then.
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