Nostalgia redux

I have always defined nostalgia as a longing for an emotion that I never had, and after seeing the film Adventureland, I am more certain that this definition serves me well. Described as a coming-of-age film, Adventureland concerns the ‘adventures’ of a group of recent college graduates and those still enrolled during a summer employment at Adventureland, an amusement park replete with games and rides. By coming of age is usually meant an introduction to sex, the experience of disappointment (applied not to sex but to relations in which sex occurs), to life’s harshness and to an awareness of life’s beauty--usually seen from the perspective of a heterosexual relationship which ends the film. There is always the requisite difficulty with parents, a titillating flirtation by a character or two with class politics (usually through heterosexual relations), and concern with money and employment. This film was no different.

I would have loved to have had the lives lived that summer by the main characters, Em and Benning. I wanted their life. Their life was the perfect coming of age I should have had.

But my life didn’t happen that way, and I am nostalgic for that life. My angst was much less lovely, and organized and focused. My shirts got dirty, and either my parents were not so oblivious, or I was more terrified of them than I like to recall. My summer job often occurred in rain and in dirty factories, and we ate our meals in silence in our homes. There was not some glorious close-knit community of college students smoking dope, drinking and having sex.

And though Ronald Reagan appears in the film explaining away Iran-Contra, I think, there is no politics in the film. This was a perfect summer of peace, albeit with a series of relationship issues that all work out in the end, thank you very much.

So I experienced a perverse enjoyment; someone up there on the screen was living the life I wanted, and I was having a vicarious pleasure watching their life and wishing it had been mine.