Maybe it’s not fair for me to begin the review of a festival film with a lengthy digression on nostalgia and the death of Michael Jackson, but somehow all of these things seem to point in the same direction (and geographically speaking, despite the connection to Westwood). So please, bear with me:
The Associated Press published an editorial this morning by Ted Anthony, titled “2 lost icons: For Generation X, a really bad day.” In it, he assesses the impact of the near-simultaneous deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson on the segment of the population who were at their most demographically desirably in the late 80s-early 90s. He attributes the following portentous quote to a 38-year-old HBO employee:
“This,” he said, “is the moment when Generation X realizes they’re grown up.”
Thanks to this article and others, “Generation X” has been bopping around Google’s Top 100 search terms all day. Which is funny, because I can’t remember the last time I even thought about the concept of Generation X … before earlier this week, when I watched Passenger Side, Matt Bissonnette’s third feature and an entry in the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Narrative Competition. Starring the director’s brother Joel Bissonnette and Adam Scott as two brothers (one a struggling novelist with an aversion to modern technology, the other a personable recovering junkie) who spend a day driving around Southern California looking for the ex-girlfriend who one of them wants to marry, Passenger Side also seems to have that age group’s reconciliation of age and nostalgia for a simpler time on its mind.
With its wall-to-wall soundtrack of early 90s college radio hits (Silver Jews, Superchunk, Guided by Voices) and plot that only makes sense thanks to a complete absence of cell phones and internet, Passenger Side plays like a lost classic of the post-Slacker era. Not announced as a period piece, barring the appearance of an aged Greg Dulli Passenger Side nonetheless feels like the product of another time. Whether this works for you or not may depend in no small part on your attachment to that time, but from the style of conversational banter between the brothers (in the spaces around the not-always-successful roadtrip comic setpieces, the screenplay works as a study of how, if a conversation lasts long enough, deadpan sarcasm eventually gives way to introspection and confession) to the odd but gorgeously warm-toned rear projection effect on the driving scenes, the film’s aesthetics are extremely appealing.
Nostalgia, and the cynicism that tends to sandwich it, is cyclical. It took the death of American popular culture’s biggest and most problematic icon to get MTV to revert to playing music videos; surely, I’m not the only one who found herself up way past her bedtime last night, not wanting to turn the channel off for fear that the transformation would be over by morning. It wasn’t — the channel announced plans to keep the marathon going until at least 8pm EST, thus creating a 24 hour respite from the game shows and slick unscripted dramas that have become their programming staples — but by afternoon, after the aesthetic highs of “Beat It” and “Scream” had given way to schmaltz and self-deification of the later Jackson videos, exemplified by the Free Willy tie-in “Will You Be There” and the Garden of Eden allusions of “You Are Not Alone.” It could be that sincere nostalgia is only possible as a knee jerk reaction; if we push it hard enough and/or long enough, chances are our warm, halcyonic memories will spoil and sour.
And this is something like the experience of watching Passenger Side: the nostalgia it evokes — for music, for the experience of having to physically look for something rather than virtually search for it, for the concept of conversation unmitigated by technological distraction — is palpable and powerful. But there’s nowhere to go from this high other than down, and in one of its last scenes, Passenger Side sinks its slice-of-life-looseness in a “gotcha!” plot twist. Like the nostalgia tour pop culture seems to have taken over the past 24 hours, I wish Passenger Side had ended while still ahead, but I appreciate having taken the ride.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth