Identity and The Surprising Things Friday Night Lights, Blink-182, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Richard Linklater’s Adaptation of a Play Have In Common
There are things that make me feel nostalgic for a life I never had, which is not an actual feeling. These things that make me feel things I can’t name are things like Blink-182, the Friday Night Lights TV series, Richard Linklater’s 1996 film Suburbia.
With the exception of Linklater’s film, I never liked these things when I was at the age of first discovering them.
I initially rejected them.
Only now do I like them, and I couldn’t understand why. So I wrote about it to try and figure it out.
This is the result.
Dangers & Benefits of Nostalgia
To try and understand what I’m feeling I wanted to learn more about the closest emotional corallary I know, nostalgia.
Some of the benefits of nostalgia, from Psychology Today (emphasis my own):
Our everyday is humdrum, often even absurd. Nostalgia can lend us much-needed context, perspective, and direction, reminding and reassuring us that our life (and that of others) is not as banal as it may seem, that it is rooted in a narrative, and that there have been—and will once again be—meaningful moments and experiences. In that much, nostalgia serves a similar function to anticipation, which can be defined as enthusiasm and excitement for some expected or hoped-for positive event. The hauntings of times gone by, and the imaginings of times to come, strengthen us in lesser times.
The danger of nostalgia – as the below quote addresses in our personal life, and the Pop Culture Detective video below addresses in our popular culture – is that it can keep us in the past, mourning something that never was while dooming ourselves to repeat the history that actually happened.
On the other hand, it could be argued that nostalgia is a form of self-deception in that it invariably involves distortion and idealization of the past, not least because the bad or boring bits fade from memory more quickly than the peak experiences. The Romans had a tag for the phenomenon that psychologists have come to call ‘rosy retrospection’: memoria praeteritorum bonorum, ‘the past is always well remembered’. If overindulged, nostalgia can give rise to a utopia that never existed and can never exist, but that is pursued at all costs, sapping all life and joy and potential from the present. For many people, paradise is not so much a place to go to as the place they (think they) came from.
BACK TO ME AND MY BULLSHIT
Whether used for good or evil, nostalgia involves reminiscing about a past that was, at one time, actually experienced.
But what if you miss something you never had?
What is that? It’s not regret. I don’t wish I had had some different life or different friends.
It’s not that I wish for something I never had.
Instead, it feels like experiencing something now about my childhood, knowing I never experienced it as a child.
It’s a ghost memory implanted by pop culture I’m consuming now. A phantom limb I never had to begin with. Growing up, looking back, and seeing that other road, not taken, and the moment it broke away from your own.
It’s The Fear and Loathing Of Having Missed Out.
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS
Let’s make a little timeline of how detached I am from Friday Night Lights, in order to then understand why it’s “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose” motto affected me so unexpectedly later in life:
- Friday Night Lights was a book released in 1990
- It documents a Texas high school football team from 1988
- I went to high school in Wisconsin at the turn of the Millenia
- The show Friday Night Lights began in 2006
- I watched it 10 years later on Netflix
So in 2016 I’m watching a show from the 2000s based on a book about 1980s Texas football culture. On top of that, I am not the demographic for either of the shows main plot lines.
- Neither the teenage drama of the show, nor the adult, family oriented arcs were in any way directly relatable to my life.
- Lastly, this is a show I would not have liked in High School because it was too white, too “jock”, too stereotypically “yell at a boy to turn him into a man”
Coach Taylor is at the center of Friday Night Lights and is possibly the most upstanding citizen this TV-side of Andy Griffith. Wholesomeness is oozing out of every pore of this show like sweat from lineman during summer 2-a-days.
Taylor has a moral certitude that can be appealing but much of his coaching method is everything I hated about men growing up: the yelling, the tough love, the blind confidence in ones own viewpoint. My hate for this method probably had a lot to do with why I quit my own high school football team after 3 days my Freshmen year.
(Years later over beers at the bar my friend would respond to this admission of mine with, “they were trying to weed you out”. Sure, maybe that’s how football has to work. Maybe they lost a potentially athletic wide out. My own sting of rejection taints my perspective on high school coaching methods. Anyways…)
In this way, Friday Night Lights is offering a nostalgic vision of masculinity. It can be dangerous, and certainly not for everyone, but I can understand its appeal: we all want a father figure who has it all figured out.
And yet, watching the show, I can’t help but wish I had, at one time, had these characters problems. Problems that involve, believe it or not, people.
To put it lightly, my problem growing up was people: talking to them, responding to things they said to me, worrying what they thought , assuming the worst…
a brief aside for the storytelling success of Friday Night Lights
What I listed above is the technical, on-paper statistics that create the backdrop for Friday Night Lights and on paper the gap between my experience and the experiences depicted in FNL is wide.
But the backdrop of a drama is something all good drama must transcend in order to have any chance of commenting on the human experience.
So, here’s a quick aside as to why FNL works despite its specificity.
- Good writing reveals the universal by focusing on the specific. How else would the story of a Texas High School football team make me tear up with “what could’ve been”? Went to Texas once, was mostly hungover while there, hated playing high school football…love Friday Night Lights. That’s what good writing can do.
- The blues and the oranges. The colors of the show lean heavy on this emotional color combination. Hell, the team’s color are blue and yellow, the texas sky is blue, the lights of the stadium are yellow. The film treatment emphasizes this. Nearly every shot in the below trailer has both colors in it. See Johnny Cash’s video for “Hurt” if you don’t believe that orange and blue aren’t devastatingly effective. And read more on how common an orange and blue color scheme is.
While the writing and the cinempatography go a long way to making Friday Night Lights relatable, they don’t fully explain why this show affected me so much.
To figure that out, I had to understand what Blink-182 knew about me that I didn’t know about myself.
This is a band I actively disliked in High School whose music now makes me long for the simple times of South Californian high schools in the 90s, time periods and places – much like Friday Night Lights – I had nothing to do with.
GRUNGE: A TIME PERIOD AND PLACE I HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH
To understand my befuddlement at this phenomena I should explain.
I grew up a white kid in the middle of Milwaukee in the 1990s. One of the poorest major cities in America during one of the most racially charged times in American history (have there ever been non-racially charged times in American history?).
The schools I went to, from K-4 to Senior year, were majority Black.
My grade school was in the middle of a neighborhood that saw Milwaukee’s response to the Rodney King verdict.
We had D.A.R.E. classes about how – and I remember this very clearly – the KKK wasn’t as much of a threat to black lives as (wait for it) other black kids in gangs. This was meant to remind us all, of course, to be afraid of black kids in gangs, to discourage black kids from joining gangs and also… how the KKK isn’t that bad? It was a very confusing message to a white boy. But I digress.
I couldn’t relate to white people characters in movies and TV shows, at least not entirely.
Many of my friends growing up were black, hmong, hispanic, mixed.
There was no white kid like the white kids I knew, anywhere in the media it seemed.
Cry me a river, I know. A white kid not feeling represented in mainstream culture…but it was something I could palpably feel, a vacuum in my identity: a need to identify with an image other than the one presented to me of “white kids”.
What does a white kid who doesn’t fit in with their “group” do for their cultural markers? What do we grab onto in its absence?
In my experience, people who feel left out of their socially assigned tribe, reject identities we feel have already, or will soon, reject us.
I did this by detesting any and all things “preppy” (read: white, upper-middle class, mainstream America) and without the mainstream white experience to align with my own I patched the rest together, much the way grunge patched together punk guitars, classic American Rock songwriting, and vintage cardigans.
I didn’t think I was black nor did I try to be black.
I just didn’t identify with what I perceived to be “white” and neither did a lot of my white friends.
We grew up watching The Box in all its grainy glory, Saul William’s SLAM was a coming of age movie for us, we had freestyle battles at parties, and went to slam poetry readings…for fun.
With these influences of Black culture, I patched in the aforementioned Grunge to round out my hobbled together identity.
Grunge – from what I could tell – proliferated out of gen-Xes rejection of the same white identity I wrestled with.
This is all to say, nothing about Friday Night Lights or Blink-182 would be appealing to Me the Teenager.
Identity is complicated, but at least with grunge music, I saw white guys who were not happy with all this normal whiteness. Or, maybe more tellingly, that’s what I saw when I saw them.
And still, years later, after the dust of adolescence had settled, I realized that “Dammit” by Blink-182 might just be a masterpiece.
“Dammit” & The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Dammit is the riff-centered punk-pop tale of a high school boy and his ex passing each other at a movie sneak preview. Movie sneak previews. I remember when those were legitimately a thing we got excited about. So already, my older self is hooked on the hook of this song.
The sentiment of Blink-182’s breakthrough single cuts a bit deeper, and is more nuanced, than I initially wanted to admit.
You’ll walk by on the arm of that guy, and I’ll smile and you’ll wave we’ll pretend it’s okay
It’s the chronicle of the first time a young person experiences the backlash of their social life, the first time they get dumped and have to act like an adult about it, at least, in public. It’s like the second half of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. To review:
- Main character is shy to start the movie
- But then! He finds friends, and in the process his own voice
- Main character gets emotionally involved with people – something main character both yearns for and deeply fears
- Things get complicated and now some people don’t like main character
- Some people are angry at main character for things main character said and did, and then…
- It works out after all
“Dammit” and The Perks of Being a Wallflower are about learning that relationships aren’t just the honeymoon phase, the kids you grew up with you will grow apart from, and throwing tantrums because the girl you chased on the playground is now chasing another boy will get you nowhere but a psych ward.
There is nostalgia inherent in “Dammit” (and a lot of Blink-182’s music) and Friday Night Lights unabashedly shovels it by the truckload. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is awash in it, albeit through muted tones, a very relatable sense of social anxiety, and the poignancy of unrequited love.
It’s not just that these movies and songs feel nostalgic, or that the specific nostalgia they are selling is effective to me, it’s even more particular.
The Way Things Were
Friday Night Lights, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Blink-182’s “Dammit”, make me nostalgic for a memory of myself I don’t have.
A memory I want for the kid I was, that I would give to them if I could, but not one I regret not having. If that makes sense.
I didn’t put myself out there enough, therefore I never had the dramatic social backlash in TPoBaW or the seeing of an ex…anywhere.
My particular brand of neuroses left me with the complex of both feeling bad for not succeeding at the social life of high school, while also beating myself up for wanting to succeed at it.
I both longed for acceptance and rejected everything it took to gain it.
So much fun.
In Conclusion: Richard Linklater’s Anti-Suburban Suburbia
Where Dazed and Confused offered the same type of boy-meets-world, world yells at boy until he’s a man, but oh there’s one nice guy who takes you under his wing, overly-nostalgic view of masculinity that Friday Night Lights peddles, Suburbia, Linklater’s follow-up, sticks with those Dazed characters (especially the ones with the paddles) a few years after high school ended and they never left town.
Suburbia the movie is based on the play by the same name, both written by (yes, that) Eric Bogosian and starts out with a protagonist monologuing about the meaningless of life, only to deconstruct and undercut that judgemental viewpoint, and the protagonist, by the end of the film; all the while, painfully conveying that life for anti-social misfits in their 20s is a lot like hanging out all-night in a convenience store parking lot.
Vulture calls it the 3rd worst Richard Linklater film. I think they’re wrong.
Suburbia is a movie about how bitterness eats its keepers and how those keepers might get out of their own way and in the process, their destructive spiral, if there identity wasn’t so invested in it. Everything might be meaningless, but thinking about it all the time isn’t going to make your time here on earth any better.
Roger Ebert gave it 4.5 stars out of 5. I think he’s right.
And while Ebert might agree a little too readily, too giddily, with the premise that “the lives of these young people is on hold” (Ebert himself being someone you could never picture hanging out at a mall or parking lot in the nights of his 20-something years) I agree with him when he says,
There is, I believe, a seductive quality to idleness. To be without ambition or plans is to rebuke those who have them: It is a refusal to enlist in the rat race, and there may even be a sad courage in it. But what Linklater sees is that it is so damned boring. Life without goals reduces itself to waiting.
My outlook in high school was a lot more Giovanni Ribisi-in-Suburbia then it was Kyle Chandler-in-Friday Night Lights. And despite Jeff’s (Ribisi’s) suburban up-bringing I was a lot more like him than I would care to believe. He hates everything that “sells out” and yet, doesn’t dare to try to become anything himself. It’s always safer to shy away from a challenge, and then tell yourself later all the noble reasons you didn’t find the courage when you needed it.
Identity is a very real, very complicated, very delicate thing. It is usually thought of as strong and withstanding, something hammered into place, or something that existed before the hammering. But often identity is as delicate as an origami rose, made of rice paper, folded into a high school year book. it must be delicately and carefully unwrapped years after it has been set in place.
I recommend all of these pop culture pieces of art, but just keep an eye out for the orange and the blue, the agreements about life they make without saying them out loud, and that if she walks by on the arm of that guy, well…this is growing up.