And I want life in every word to the extent that it's absurd
On when your teenage years become a period piece
Last Tuesday, I sang “Come on!” along with 12,000 other millennials, Gen Xers, and a few stray Gen Zs to Death Cab for Cutie’s “Transatlanticism.” The flannel-clad crowd was celebrating the 20th anniversary of the album and the one and only Postal Service record, Give Up. This was the second leg of the national tour, and it was finally stopping in Atlanta, or its very northern burbs. I actually got so car sick in rush hour traffic that I joked to the friend who drove that I should ask the audience for Tums, and based on age every third seat would have some. We were all willing to drive to the ass-end of Fulton County at peak traffic for a chance to hear the melodramatic scores of our teenage years. And while I’ve seen Death Cab five times and Jenny Lewis six, I’d never heard coming-of-age staples like “We Will Become Silhouettes” live, and there was something healing about bopping along to a charming electronica song about death.
Give Up was an album that felt so deep to me at 14, when I’d only ever had crushes on boys but I still wouldn’t kiss one for five more years and not even realize I was gay for 14 more. It was a time of my life when no one super important to me had died except pets and my biggest stress was the PSATS. Basically, I didn’t know shit, but that didn’t stop me from setting many AIM away statuses to the lyrics of “Clark Gable” (also the title of this post). And in hindsight, I don’t think Ben Gibbard knew shit either. The man who wrote those albums had been in one bad affair, but he hadn’t ended multiple marriages or traded in drinking for ultramarathon running. The Gibbard singing these songs now sounds and looks better than he ever did, but at a certain angle you can see how he will look as an old man. He already kind of is one.
Yes, I’ve reached that important part of adulthood when you realize you’re getting old(er). I talk about mortgage interest rates at parties now. Friend dinners are planned around their kids’ bedtime routines. But that all crept up at a natural pace kind of like slowly graying hairline. What was surprising was finding my high school years as parts of period pieces. First it was the Abercrombie and Harry Potter of Saltburn. What shocked me more about that movie than the infamous bathtub scene was how my teenage years could now be seen as art apparently.
Then this weekend I saw Challengers or the slutty Zendaya tennis movie as I like to call it. Challengers goes back and forth in time more than a tennis ball over a net. We meet the love triangle in 2019 but volley back to when they first met in 2006. The movie has a lot of time stamps so I eventually did the math to realize when it started, but I should’ve known from the Nelly soundtrack and Zendaya’s Juicy velour hoodie. I could practically smell the Axe body spray and that Victoria’s Secret mist that reeked of rotting mandarins. By the time Zendaya wore a cami, I could almost start to feel the arthritis creeping into my fingers. Of course, I know all of these trends are back for the current youths, but you won’t catch me in a boho skirt any sooner than sucking a vape. The thing is the mid-aughts, or the naughties as the Brits call it, was not a classy time period. We wore tacky slogan T-shirts with sexual innuendos. We had ipods with music ripped off Limewire. Wife beaters were more layered than our opinions on gender (as evidenced by the name of this tank top). And now it’s a throwback in a movie with a lead actor mostly too young to remember it.
Part of why Challengers is so hot to watch is because of the nostalgia. From the poster, only Zendaya looks like the hot one, but on screen Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist are sexy because of how much they remind me of the guys I went to high school with. They embody a time when a good hang was beer in someone’s parents’ basement, when a polo shirt worn with a certain insouciance was swagger. When desire was something I mostly heard in songs rather than experienced in practice. If anything, I find the queerness of the film the most unrealistic part because the mid-2000s was a time when the f-word meant a slur. It’s a movie for millennials but with a bit of Gen Z lens.
As I watch movies like this blow up my social media feeds for nostalgia-horny millennials, I wonder if I should set my own novel back when I went to college. But maybe I am falling into a trap of thinking just because something recalls my youth means it’s interesting. Do we really need to memorialize indie sleaze as its now called in a novel? I’m not sure yet.
Tess Recommends:
-Challengers is very sexy, very fun, gorgeously filmed, suspenseful AF, and will make you want to take up tennis until you remember a snake probably has better hand-eye coordination than you. I already knew Zendaya and Mike Faist were stars, but welcome, Josh O’Connor.
I remember the first book that gave me that 'oh shit, my high school experience is going to be a period piece one day' feeling - Marlena by Julie Buntin!
I am seeing Challengers tomorrow! I can't wait.
Why am I stunned this movie is so big? I don't know why I thought it would fizzle--I had no reason for this. I am not drawn to Zendaya but I'll take a look at these two boyz. Gotta see this, I guess!