I used to do a lot of movie reviews for my school newspaper. Most of the time I would write about movies that had been released years ago and which had escaped my generation’s notice. I would pick out some relevant, timely connection and try to make my peers see something about themselves that only the screen could show them. (No, I did not have many friends.)
I do kind of look down on most movies that are made these days. There have been many times when I just could not understand the mass hysteria over films I estimated were supremely mediocre (like Black Panther) if not somehow dangerously bad (like Parasite). I started to think that there could be no more good movies, that they had all been made, and it was just a matter of getting around to watching them. Already an old geezer at eighteen.
But finally—and I am glad I have been proven wrong—there has been a movie made by and about my generation that is actually good, and good for us.
It’s called My Old Ass. My mom watched it before me and thought I’d love it. I resisted for a while; I didn’t believe it could be good. It’s got an annoying beginning, a dubious premise, and, apart from the brilliant Aubrey Plaza, a crew of actors unknown to me. But it turns out to be one of the most tremendously moving portraits of young adulthood I have ever seen. And, weirdly, it seems to have rolled all the insights of a stoic meditation practice and Hegelian definitions of love and family into a watchable rom-com-dram. So, per usual, my mom was right.
After making contact with her thirty-nine-year-old self on a mushroom trip, eighteen-year-old Elliott starts living a little differently on the advice of her “old ass.” She starts to spend time with brothers she thinks she has nothing in common with. She forces herself to play golf with her younger brother, and helps her other brother put up a thousand photographs of Saoirse Ronan in his room (which is oddly reminiscent of my own little sister’s wall of Tom Cruise portraits). She savors the work on her family’s cranberry bog instead of going through the motions. She starts talking openly to her mom again.
“Do you remember the last time you went out as a kid with friends and just played pretend the whole day?” Elliott’s love interest asks her. She doesn’t remember. “Isn’t that sad?” he says. So she starts doing everything as if for the last time.
William B. Irvine, a living stoic philosopher, says in his popular meditation called “The Last Time,” that “for everything you do, there will be a last time that you do it…there will be a last time you tie your shoes, pay your taxes, and eat chocolate.” We tend to act on the assumption that we will do that thing again in the future, perhaps hundreds more times. But continually recognizing that you have “finitely many days left to you increases the chance that you will extract the full value of those days.” So when you do something, pleasant or unpleasant, consider that it might be the very last time you ever do it. “One of the great psychological insights of the Stoics,” Irvine says, “was their realization that by allowing ourselves to have sad thoughts in a controlled manner, we can become more appreciative of the life we find ourselves living.” We can appreciate and even embrace things that we previously took for granted.
My Old Ass’s stoicism is essential for anyone moving to college or leaving their family. I’m lucky to have a family I love more than anything, and I’m glad I realized well before I left how much I would miss them. I was scared by that statistic that ninety-five percent of the time families spend together happens before the kid turns eighteen. I wasn’t going to let that be true for me.
Apart from this gentle stoic reminder, the film has a surprisingly sophisticated way of looking at love (which I won’t entirely give away because the love story is the best part). At one point Elliott’s older self says that “healthy love is safety and freedom all at once.” She admits her definition doesn’t sound very romantic, but that she would come to see that it is. I think this is a pretty good distillation of what Hegel says about the love bond, putting him in millennial terms—a sentiment delivered by Aubrey Plaza in her signature vocal fry, but with a distinctly Hegelian ring.
In love, Hegel writes, “we are not one-sidedly within ourselves, but willingly limit ourselves with reference to another, even while knowing ourselves in this limitation as ourselves. In this determinacy, the human being should not feel determined; on the contrary, he attains his self-awareness only by regarding the other as other.” The safety which comes from being tied to someone is not a limitation but a precondition of freedom. Sounds pretty romantic to me.
If you need any more reason to watch My Old Ass, there’s one hilarious joke at the expense of academics. Elliott wants to know what to look forward to. “Just tell me something good!” she whines. Her older self takes a while to respond. “Why are you struggling to find something good?” she probes. “Ooh, this is good,” the old ass finally says. “You’re gonna be fuckin’ psyched to know that you are a—Ph.D student. Fuck yeah.” Oh no! Elliott and I both exclaimed at the same moment.
A few months ago I would have vehemently rejected the idea that I would ever go to grad school. I’ve seen the dark, slimy underbelly of the academy! I know too much! As as kid, when my teacher parents would go “on the job market,” I always imagined those rickety round tables set up in New York parks with a pair of chunky-glassed professors stationed at each one as sweaty, CV-carrying hopefuls cycled through and tried to sell their wares. Later I learned that my vision was not so far-off: it just took place at a hotel and was called “the MLA.” Now I’ve somewhat reconciled myself to that doctoral fate. So I guess I was the perfect target audience for that joke. Yikes.
Clearly, this movie was weirdly on the nose for me. (I may or may not have uncontrollably cried at the end.) I think it probably is frighteningly accurate for most people my age. But we don’t need to have a paranormal psychic experience to import into our own lives the lessons Elliott learns. She just gets a lucky intervention that we can and should simulate for ourselves.