Things Are Only Corny If You Can't Relate To Them
What does it mean when the melodrama is working?
And I’m becoming so concerned with why I spend every night alone.
— “All of Our Lives,” Watercolor Paintings
Lately, I’ve been feeling old. And not like in a rickety, unhealthy, weary, out of touch way — though I do feel all of those things sometimes — but more in like I’m starting to relate to things that I never thought I would relate to because they always just seemed so… corny. You know what I mean?
Just, here’s a recent example that caught me by surprise:
I shouldn’t like anything about that clip from Miami Vice. I hate the 1980’s. I know it’s a weird thing to say that you hate a decade that you never existed in. What I mean is I disdain 80’s pop culture. The ugly fashion sense, the corny movies, the overproduced music, the yuppies, the total negation of the radicalism of the 1960’s, the rise of neoliberalism, the finicky cassette tapes, it’s all rubbed me the wrong way ever since I first saw one of those commercials on TV for a 10-CD Pack of All the Greatest Hits of the 1980’s! For only $29.99! (But I do have a soft spot for WarGames and The Golden Girls, specifically Ally Sheedy and Bea Arthur, respectively.)
This whole 80’s nostalgia revival we’ve been experiencing in the aesthetics of our current pop culture has totally gone over my head. Stranger Things, bright pastel colors, 8-bit videogames, remakes and revivals of every conceivable IP from Willow to The Dark Crystal to Top Gun, hating Russia, lionizing vulture capitalists, cocaine, and all the fricken 80’s-inflected synth in all the pop songs nowadays. It’s too much. I don’t like synth. I like real instruments, man. The Who (well before the 80s) were the only ones to ever use a synth in an interesting way. I digress.
All of that is tangential to what I’m really trying to say about that Miami Vice clip. It wasn’t the somber use of Phil Collin’s synth-heavy and drum-machine laden “I Can Feel It In The Air Tonight.” What got me is when the chiseled, hardened cop with a great head of hair and with a lot on his mind right now stopped at a payphone just before a daring suicide mission to call his girl who he’s been on the outs with recently to ask her, in seriously subdued action hero tones, maybe for the last time:
“The way we used to be together…it was real, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, it was,” she says. “You bet it was.”
A pregnant pause.
“Sonny, what’s wrong?” she asks him.
”Nothing, Caroline.”
He hangs up the phone.
I shed a goddamn tear.
That’s some corny-ass bullshit. But I’m finding that I can’t help it anymore.
When you’re a child, the emotions of adults can be understood intellectually but not viscerally (at least not in the same way that they feel them) because you simply have not experienced the inevitable things in life which make the causes for those emotions relatable (I would suggest that those much-discussed opening minutes of Pixar’s Up, a movie ostensibly made for kids, are only affecting for the grown ups in the audience — you know, the only viewers who have any sense of what it’s like to fall in love with someone, build a life with them, and then lose them forever.) As a child, I didn’t cry when Tom Hanks’ Castaway character lost Wilson the volleyball at sea. I didn’t cry when he came back to the world like a revenant after years alone on an island fighting to survive to see his love again, reunited with his now betrothed ex-partner, the wife that would have been his, looked at the happy pictures of her and her new partner magneted to the fridge, inevitably has to leave her again, and tells her, standing outside soaking wet in the rain: “I love you, Kelly. More than you’ll ever know.” But as an adult — call me maudlin and melodramatic if you want — I find it one of the most affecting things put to film.
But I’m not arguing that it’s an adults vs. kids thing. It’s just, you either get it or you don’t. You can either recognize yourself in the characters, or you can’t. Now, that being said, there are of course far, far, far too many examples of storytellers attempting emotional feats that fail because they come off as cheap, unearned, manipulative, cloying, inappropriate, or cliché. I’ve noticed that these kind of moments seem to be getting worse and more prevalent in popular media these days. Episode VIII of Star Wars comes to mind, where soaring music, indulgent slow motion, and big explosions underscore the sacrificial death of a character who was introduced on screen just three minutes prior. What’s with all the bombast there? Note to storytellers: just because you kill a character or break their heart doesn’t mean I’m obligated to feel any particular way about that. It’s all in the way that you do it. Scripting, editing, mood, performance, tone consistency, balance — laying the groundwork, as it were — all of these things contribute to achieving an emotional goal. As Tony Zhou put it, humans need time to feel things. You need to do the work in order to be affecting.
All that being said, it seems to be getting easier and easier for me to feel a gut punch. I have always been a mark for a certain genre of story, often termed “coming-of-age,” though I dislike that moniker for some reason, perhaps because it seems too broad. But you know the type. It includes Perks of Being a Wallflower (the movie and the novel), Lady Bird, Juno, Lost In Translation, As Told By Ginger, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and Garden State amongst its entries. Various bands that could fall under the genre of “Twee” strike a similar vibe. Artists like Free Cake For Every Creature, Your Heart Breaks, Los Campesinos!, Dear Nora, The Softies, and Frankie Cosmos are exemplifying. The videogame Gone Home fits here, as well as the episodic game (and later comic series) Life Is Strange. That game, one of my favorites, has so many cringeworthy moments in its dialogue and character decisions (“We’re hella best friends!”), the comic is even worse sometimes, but dammit I always overlook its faults because I’m such a sucker for romantic, heartbreaking, will they-won’t they, magical surrealist storytelling (and, come on, what teenager never says anything cringeworthy anyway?). This is my constant weakness, my soft spot. But fricken Miami Vice? Really? That’s what I’ve stooped to these days? Kill me.
But I suppose this is to be expected. Maybe some people get harder with age. Certainly they can get more cynical. But what about growing into empathy? The more you go through life, the more likely you are to understand any other given human being or character arc in a piece of media. I’m not necessarily saying this is a good thing or a bad thing. The older you get, you can grow to understand some pretty nasty pieces of work. Youth has a way of protecting you from being the villain. But age can really bring out the beauty in things.
Guys, what are we doing? Can’t live this way forever.
— “Heaven Go Easy On Me,” The Head And The Heart
You can be young and have no money and a broken down car and no health insurance and the people you date and hang out with can all be broke and directionless and it’s not a problem in the slightest. If anything, it’s funny, and not even in an ironic, defiant way. There’s nothing better than the warm, familial company of people all hacking it together, sharing meals, staying up late, getting faded at home, stopping by to say hello and cracking up at how fucked up each other’s situations are. It’s fun. All the inevitable troubles, the everyday emergencies of being broke really don’t seem like troubles at all when you’re twenty years old and living in a First World empire. But, it gets shittier the more you go along. Youth softens things. In so many ways. At some point, pushing your girlfriend’s stick shift car out of traffic and into the nearest parking lot with people yelling at you to get out of the road after the clutch has burned out again isn’t fun or cute anymore. It’s just deathly. The little problems that were once nice adventures, happy breaks from the boredom, interesting challenges, bonding experiences, something to laugh about, something to learn, have now become the kinds of things that undo people entirely. The annoying coworker, once endearing perhaps, is now the straw that breaks your back. The little unlovable things in others you once looked past to love, and expected others to look past in you, are now the things most central to convincing yourself that you can give up on that love completely, and the things which you know someone will leave you for. And it’s not so much that your problems have categorically changed — a broken car is a broken car, a broken heart is a broken heart — it’s that you have changed. The teflon layer of youth has given way to a skin rubbed raw by infinite, unceasing works and days and humiliations and wrongs and inadequacies and failures and hurt — hurt which was done both to you and done by you, the harm we do to each other separating us further from the unharmed ones — that, well, it all just makes the emergencies of poverty and life take more out of you than they did before. It’s like one of the most haunting lines from The National’s Boxer: “I think everything counts a little more than we think.”
It’s fun until it’s not. We’re not getting stronger here, we’re just getting more beat up. Some of us are getting killed. The latent chronic diseases locked inside our genetic codes from birth begin showing themselves. We know the young father with Parkinson’s. The good friend with Crohn’s Disease. The pretty twin sisters who died early from undiagnosed Addison’s Disease. Others of us begin to lose our minds. Some friends from middle school are walking the streets now, sleeping under overpasses or out of their cars, nursing their new nervous tics, going mad, watering the earth, the light having dimmed from their eyes.
What happened to the fun in all this?
But, I guess, as the years advance, I can at least cry in all the parts of media that I’m supposed to cry at now, corny or not. Sometimes it’s Casablanca, sometimes it’s The Rugrats Movie. I’m not saying it’s a good thing. It’s just the way it is.