Notes on Relating: My Old Ass and Seeing Oneself in Film
There was one monologue during My Old Ass that sold me–and by that I mean my couchmate and I promptly devolved into involuntary sobs. 18-year-old, brink of college-bound Elliot recruits older, wiser, and positively off-limits Chad to help sell her boat on a fine, rural Canadian afternoon. Just a few scenes before, (potentially) imaginary 39-year-old Elliot heeds an enigmatic warning: stay away from Chad. Elliot and Chad sit in the boat on the way to the marina, basking in the kind of tension you only feel on the precipice of a relationship: Elliot, processing her childhood lasts, and Chad, balancing her distance with a healthy dose of puppy-like affection. Elliot turns to him and asks about lasts: the last time she’s driving her boat, the last time she’s living at home before moving to college. He replies existentially: there was a last time you rode your bike outside with friends, playing pretend and truly being a child. This scene is what My Old Ass is trying to reconcile with. When do we become adults, and when do we stop being children?
It’s late August in Los Angeles, and I don’t want to walk home from work. Chad says he can drive me, even though it’s only five blocks. I am 17, 18 in a month, and I say I’ll show him the place where you can see all the way to Catalina Island. I point which way he should turn (I struggle still with right and left) and we end up at the abandoned house foundation at the top of the hill. We stand on the graffiti and rubble, and I ask him what he felt when he was about to go to college. “I didn’t really think much,” he says. “But I got nostalgic.”
Elliot grabs Chad to shield him from a bridge coming over the boat. It’s almost Hallmark, almost Love Actually, almost perfect. They’re nose to nose, eyes flitting, and they kiss. It feels forbidden. She is young, and, up to this point, a lesbian. She’s been warned against him by an irrefutable power: her future self. The boat emerges, and immediately, Elliot jumps off of him and runs away.
Chad hands me a fleece sweater the day after my birthday. My mom thinks I’m at Ro’s house. We’re sitting in the trunk of my car listening to Joni Mitchell, and I’ve forgotten what we’re talking about. He kisses me, and asks me what we should do. I go home, and he texts me: in my defense, that was legal.
Elliot and Ro are at breakfast, and Elliot breaks the news. She likes a guy, for once. Ro extends her empathy and validates Elliot’s queerness: just because you like him, doesn’t mean you don’t like girls anymore. Ro dissolves my panic.
Elliot and Chad go on to have a relationship, despite older Elliot’s warning. We learn that Chad will die (Chad will break my trust), and Elliot will be heartbroken (we will break up). But Elliot, in that moment, chooses to love him anyway. My Old Ass arrives at its point: to be young is to experience, and to be dumb is to live. Maybe, in the end, if our older selves could guide us as now, we’d never become who we are.
Would I stop myself that first night, at the lookout with my Chad? Would I go back? I’m fairly sure My Old Ass told me not to, and I believe it. In this way, it forgave me for loving so hard and hurting so badly. In its gentle didactic storytelling, it extended a hand through the screen and rendered me Elliot.
Maybe you didn’t have a Chad. Maybe you resented your 18th year. Maybe you never went to college. But somewhere in My Old Ass, you can find a channel to relate. Take what sticks and leave what doesn’t. Maybe you changed your label for your sexuality after someone entered your life. Maybe an older lover broke your heart. Maybe you have simply been 18, or done drugs, or contended with feelings of adulthood and a deep attachment to your mother. Elliot climbs into the adirondack chair where her mother sits, three days before leaving her hometown, and says: I don’t know why I still need you so much. Another seizure of my stomach, more tears swell.
We often joke: we’re all living the same life. It’s why I study History. In the story of Jane Austen’s 1813 Pride and Prejudice, we can substitute Mr. Darcy for a brooding, soulful love interest. He’s the eyeliner-clad drummer from the band you saw on Friday, or the person you wish you asked out in your 12th grade calculus class. And you are Elizabeth Bennet, pining, beautiful, confused. 200 years after its release, we still coo. The same emotions Elizabeth and Darcy felt for one another are felt across people today. It’s no surprise the media is a multibillion dollar industry.
Art imitates life. Life imitates art. Please don’t kill me for being cliché. Everything we experience is fuel for creation. And if a film can pull me in, can feel like it's drawn from my own life, then someone must be doing something right.