This Is Running for Your Life

by Michelle Orange

  Check it out: Leaving aside the big-ticket items that weren’t half-bad, like The Sixth Sense, American Beauty (okay, half-bad), The Insider, and, say, horror kitsch like Sleepy Hollow and The Blair Witch Project, something was up with the year’s output of smaller, largely independent, madly inventive films. An era was either peaking or having an intense, pre-expiration paroxysm. It was a culminating moment, in any case, when there was still something like legitimate independent film, and the people with money weren’t as frightened about taking risks; perhaps the co-opt had begun, but some fight was still left in the independent system. Even the old pros were stepping up their game, trying something new: Spike Lee brought Summer of Sam, David Lynch had The Straight Story, Kubrick unleashed the love-it-or-laugh-at-it Eyes Wide Shut, Woody Allen offered the underrated Sweet and Lowdown, and Pedro Almodóvar broke through with All About My Mother.

  The reign of 1999 began with the wide release of Rushmore, in February. Forebear of all things fresh and wonderful, it set the tone and the bar for the year. Then came The Matrix and Office Space in March. I snuck out of my own stultifying office job to see Mike Judge’s second film over a distended lunch. A multiplex was underneath my office building, and another close by; my coworkers and I all cut out for movies now and then, each pretending we were the only one. Then there was Go, Hideous Kinky (oh, Kate!), Open Your Eyes, and eXistenZ, which I zoned out of on a kind of principle.

  And then: Election. Glorious Election. After that came Last Night, a scene of which was shot in my apartment building; Buena Vista Social Club; then—yes—the first Austin Powers sequel; Run Lola Run; and the goddamn South Park movie. What a great time—a great summer—to be dating, now that I think of it. With South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, I could tell in the first fifteen minutes—as I was cramping up from the laughter gushing from some awesome, astonished wellspring inside me, never before tapped in a movie theater—that Mr. Easter Island beside me would hardly do.

  Dick! Romance. And then the fall season, where things get ridiculous: Three Kings and the one-two crunch of Boys Don’t Cry and Fight Club, both of which spat me into the streets feeling like someone who’d just been kidnapped, injected with adrenaline and heartbreak, and jack-heeled out of a moving car. American Movie; Dogma; 42 Up; Sunshine; Girl, Interrupted; Holy Smoke (ohhh, Kate); and Mansfield Park are comparatively minor but still pretty fucking good. Then came Being John Malkovich, a true-blue circuit-buster, and The End of the Affair, which I am prepared to fight about, and finally Magnolia and one of my favorite films of all and ever: The Talented Mr. Ripley.

  * * *

  So, about that. About 1999. Then I had just spent four years studying the film and the literature of the past, as though that is indeed where all good and worthwhile things can be found. Then I was recently out of school and unconcerned with continuity, or the connection of inner scheming with the form a life might take in its fullest expression. Then I answered a relative’s holiday dinner-table question about what was next for me with the only option that seemed both honest and objectively accurate: Oblivion?

  There’s a chronic history of that kind of thing, but let’s not get into it. Let’s just say that even when I wasn’t playing the in-house Visigoth at family gatherings, “the future” was a concept that tucked my mind into twilight mode, like a pleasant whiff of ether or the wave of a prestidigitator’s hand. In the fog of youth, all of my ambitions were internal and subject to daily renewal, so that each morning I thrashed my way back into the world, having just found my footing when the sun began to set. All of my longings had in some sense to do with time—for time, against time—and the trip wire that kept me from experiencing the world with any kind of reliable, butt-wagging rhythm. At the end of a century defined by its compressions of distance, space seemed more like a cute theory, a dead question. The quest for a modern self is defined not by a map but a schedule; to lack a clear timeline is to be lost. Often I went to the movies to mess with time, to get it off my back or keep it from staring glumly at me from across the room. Just as often I went to get right with it, to tether myself to the present in a way I couldn’t otherwise manage.

  It worked to that weirdo’s advantage, I think, that in 1999, at the movies anyway, so little nostalgia perfumed the air. Through the nineties we dressed like filthy hippies one year and peg-legged mods the next, wearing Goodwill weeds to mourn a time when we didn’t exist. For a while, nostalgia was only acceptable in the very young, as though working forward from our parents’ generation might show us where we fit into the picture. Back then I figured that the mixed-up, inter-era quality of much of what was going on would make it impossible to reheat on the nostalgia-market stove. But then the eighties returned with the millennium, and the aughts had hardly hobbled out before the nineties came pogoing back, and I saw clothes I still had in my closet arranged in store windows for maximum retro cachet. Is it that time already?

  Being a practicing nostalgic is no longer a stain on your record; odds are your records will come back into fashion before you begin to miss them. Its prevalence makes it tough to differentiate between meaningful recovery of the past and the perpetuation of a craze. A lot of crap gets unearthed not because it’s good but because ours are kitschy times. Often that’s the same difference: evoke a moment however you like, as long as it’s both past and specific. The yearning behind that impulse has less to do with sensibility than the drive toward a more stable sense of time.

  That nostalgia has become an integral part of American culture is odd not least because it was initially considered the exact opposite. In The Future of Nostalgia, Russian-American scholar Svetlana Boym connects the beginning of closely measured, delimited time to the birth of what an eighteenth-century doctor called “the hypochondria of the heart.” Basically, absent the option of sweating the apocalypse, a pile of closely bordered countries were left in a kind of spiritual pickle. According to Boym, it’s no coincidence that, in medieval Europe, the end of the End Times was also the beginning of nostalgia, which is to say of individuals and collectives looking back to sustain a sense of identity; of pooling memory funds from which to draw meaning; and of shrinking time’s unwieldy continuum to reflect a specific situation, specific values, and specific ideals. The more objective our measurements for space and time, the stronger our impulse to transcend them with a sense of personalized order. The longing for a sense of confinement—of home—is both personal and communal, its basis purely human, its paradox even more so.

  A Swiss doctor put a name to this longing in 1688, while writing a medical dissertation on a pathology he had observed in Europeans displaced from their homelands—students, servants, and soldiers, mostly. Johannes Hofer described the condition in terms of extreme homesickness, using Greek for street cred: nostos, meaning “to return home,” and algia, “longing, or sickness.” Over the centuries, treatments for nostalgia included leeches and potions and other earthy voodoos, but the first prescription was the most basic: get back where you belong.

  Nostalgists were said to see ghosts, hear voices of loved ones, dream themselves home, mistake the imagined for the real, and confuse their tenses. If they had been able to find vintage candy stores or Ramones 45s on eBay, perhaps they would have, and we’d all roll our eyes and think, Let it go, man; live in the now. But in its origins as a mental illness, nostalgia is a fairly pristine metaphor for ambivalence toward modern displacements, the foreboding of the present moment and an untellably gnarly future. Which goes a long way to explaining why the first Americans considered nostalgia to be a weakness of the Old World. They were too far away from all of that, too new and forward-looking for crybaby callbacks to the good old days. Motility was progress, and a national sense of place and pride what they would make it—the future, not the past, was where American dreams were set.

  The nostalgia diagnosis had disappeared by the twentieth century (but was revived in Israel, according to Boym), if not before the emergence of suitable heirs like neurasthenia, the diagnosis mi
nted by the American physician George Miller Beard in 1869. Henry James’s brother William nicknamed the complaint, which was described as a kind of exhaustion with the new, “Americanitis,” and pharmacies began stocking elixirs to restore youth and ward off the anxiety and fatigue Beard blamed on the new world’s unwieldy speed and excessive freedoms. Neurasthenic men (including Teddy Roosevelt) were directed to recalibrate themselves against nature’s rhythms, while women (including Charlotte Perkins Gilman) were put to bed with orders to quiet their minds. Lengthening life spans only seemed to intensify a focus on the primacy of youth, with F. Scott Fitzgerald bewailing a generation’s first wrinkle even while the party staggered on.

  I think you know the rest: We now live on a global clock, every standardized minute counted off on the screens we stare at all day. Our world has never been so closely observed and recorded and mediated, yet our lives have never seemed more self-contained. Western societies are increasingly a matter of discrete single, couple, or family plots, private spaces designed to sustain themselves apart from any conception of a whole. That tendency toward a discretionary existence accounts for the familiarity of the floating, customized Xanadu of the Internet, as well as the hunger for community it seemed to satisfy. The clock was restarted, and the challenge to scale one’s finite sense of time against an ultimate infinity was compounded by a sense of hair-straightening acceleration—the sudden potential to experience all things, all at once. It became possible—it became progress—to live at a speed and spacelessness that held the present in an exploratory suspension. We could prospect this new world like towheads in Narnia, with the sense that life on the outside was paused where we left it, and that “together” we might invent an end to loneliness.

  What nobody told us is that nature may abhor a vacuum, but in its natural state longing is one big sucking sound. Over the last decade, the tightening cycle of nostalgia choking Western culture has proliferated into a kind of fractal loop, and for this we blame each other. But our backward fixations are less a product of the desire to stop the clock or retreat to a more fruitful era than the failure to adjust to a blown-out sense of time. In fact, what we call nostalgia today is too much remembrance of too little. We remember with the totemic shallowness, the emotional stinginess of sentiment. And we experience the present with the same superficial effort. Like overworked busboys gesturally wiping down tables between lunch-rush patrons, we launder the events of the day with the estrangements of irony, the culture’s favored detergent—or dead-earnest ideology, its competing brand—just to get on to the next one.

  On the one hand, perhaps all of the world’s longing has led to this moment. Maybe this is what the poets warned about—Werther and Wordsworth and Whitman, all the wigged-out piners down the ages—maybe it wasn’t precisely petunias and print media and high-speed rail they were worried about but this exact moment. This, of course, has been said before. It’s impossible to know how different our concerns are from those of Hofer’s Swiss soldier sulking on the coast of Sweden, or the Dutch student dreaming of her mother’s toast with hagelslag at Oxford. It’s impossible to know how deeply programmed we are to long for different times, places, tastes—the tinted comforts of memory. It’s impossible to know, in a time that is no time and only time and all times, all the time, how that programming might shake out. But one suspects Broadway revivals might be involved.

  On the other hand are the human things unchanged by time and technology. Things, perhaps, like the cosmic, wall-eating longing that takes light-years to get to you only to confer—burning past your self and any emotion you have known or might know to your very molecules—the unbearable nothingness from which it came. That stuff’s still kicking around. But again, the vessels we fashion to contain and commodify fathomless emotions now often look a lot like Jersey Boys, or jelly shoes, or the memes that streak across the Internet, fostering what little cultural intimacy is tenable when we are so many and moving so goddamn fast.

  If anything could, recalibrating and redistributing the weight of our shared past might begin to restore a sense of pace to the culture, relieve it from the sleeperhold of easy nostalgias, and reroute the collective longing behind those impulses in some more useful direction. Svetlana Boym says nostalgia outbreaks often follow a revolution, and to the Velvet and the French I suppose we must add the Facebook. Though it seems unfair for a fogyish revival to court its constituents as they move through their thirties, which is to say just as the fog is finally clearing.

  * * *

  I was buying gum and uranium-enriched sunscreen not too long ago when the drugstore clerk was swept into a Proustian vortex by the sight of my gold Motorola RAZR on the counter. “Ohhhh,” she sighed, dumping my purchases into a tiny plastic bag. “I know that phone. I wanted one of those so bad.” She beamed at the memory. “That was the phone.” It was a rare moment of gadget relevance for me, so much so that I didn’t notice her use of the past tense and said something shy about how you don’t see many of the gold ones around. My clerk frowned. “Tsssk—not anymore,” she said. “I’m talkin’ like two years ago. When I was in high school.” I punched in my PIN. “I have a BlackBerry now.” I covered the phone with my palm and slid it off the counter. “You need to upgrade.”

  And I did, believe me. Let’s call it the theory of receptivity 2.0.

  The problem, if you will permit it to be thought a problem, is that I can already feel myself reaching the point my grandmother hit in her eighties. For her it was the airplane, the car, the telephone, the radio, the movies, um, the atom bomb, television, microwaves, space travel, CD, DVD, ADHD—fine. But the cell phone was a gadget too far; my grandma simply topped out. There’s a limit to the assimilating one person can do in a lifetime, and she reached it with fifteen years to go. I was the teenager who complained about being made to whip cream by hand in her kitchen, the congenitally late but ultimately enthusiastic adopter of everything wireless, compressed, ephemeral, convenient, and generally knuckle-sparing about the digital revolution. And yet every other week now, when I hear of something like Google glasses—which I guess are goggles that annotate the visible world with information about what can be bought, eaten, or sexually enjoyed therein—my first thought is a grandmotherly Aaaaand I’m out.

  My knees are still good, my friends! I have perfect eyesight, and you know why? Because I let someone cut into my eyeballs with a laser. I don’t hold biweekly Fight Club vigils in my living room, frost commemorative Tracy Flick cupcakes for friends, or wrap myself around a life-size Ralph Fiennes pillow each night. But the older I get, the more protective I feel of something like 1999, a time that felt interesting even then because it was so firmly allied with the present. The longings I associate with it are longings outside of time, larger than me and the movies both. To experience such a radical burst of cinema in my own time stopped me in my tracks, but hardly permanently. If anything, it kept me seeking that feeling, of being a part of something remarkable, and staying awake enough to know it. If anything, I fear not having it in me to care in that same way about the latest tablet, or to develop strong feelings for what amounts to a delivery system, or to imprint sense memories on a soon-to-be-obsolete aluminum slab. Which is to say I worry less about being left behind than not wanting to board the party bus in the first place.

  In a 1968 conversation with Marshall McLuhan, Norman Mailer used the example of plane travel—the latter word, as McLuhan points out, taken from the French verb to work—to illustrate his fear of a poorly inhabited present. “I don’t want to come on and be everybody’s Aunt Sophronia and complain about the good old days, which I never knew either,” Mailer said, by way of qualifying his feeling that flying a thousand miles in an hour means moving through “whole areas of existence which we have not necessarily gained. It may be confounding, it may finally be destructive of what is best in the human spirit.”

  McLuhan replied with one of his casually immortal predictions: “If you push that all the way, what it means is that we will increasi
ngly tend to inhabit all of these areas in depth, simultaneously.” Mailer took this like a shiv to the spleen. “But we will not inhabit them well!” he cried. “We will inhabit them with a desperately bad fit!”

  I’m not sure I ever knew the good old days either. It’s too soon to tell. And believe me, young people, I know the case against me better than you ever could: I rarely go to shows anymore; I don’t troll the sites I can’t even name for hot new sounds; I never got into Mumblecore; too often I read new books because I’m being paid to; and it’s probably a matter of months before I look in the mirror and see Ethan Hawke staring back. I’m right there with you. But tell me, have you seen 1999? I was young then, but it didn’t mean that much to me. It seems like a while ago, I know, but it won’t be long before you’re standing where I am now, trying to sort your personal history from the stuff that stands alone. Time used to do that work for us, but time’s a little tired these days. Time needs a minute. For those of us born into pieces—you and me both, pal—the challenge is not salvaging a meaningful sense of time but determining how to build one within our current parameters, and then inhabit it well. I guess I can only say you’d be amazed how much the 1999s and the Ethan Hawkes of the world can help you with that, if you let them.

  * * *

  About two years after moving to New York and not long after the release of Before Sunset, I found myself sharing a room with Ethan Hawke. Should you move to New York and stick around long enough, eventually you will too. A group of us were huddled in a penthouse at the Tribeca Ritz for an informal brunch. Whether genuinely felt or a function of decorum, the hostess showed a helpless ambivalence about the space, which she informed me was bought for a song—and here we bow our heads to consider whatever her version of that tune might be—when the building went condo in late 2001. She and I had paused our tour of the apartment to consider the spare bedroom’s northern exposure when I felt Ethan Hawke draw up to my side.