As a Boomer, I can say in hindsight that we were spoiled and privileged and arrogant. Worse of all, many of us kept on with our arrogance, espousing naive and outright ridiculous policy and opinion to this day and probably until the day we die of old age. I say this not just to be humble, but because it is true. I also say it so that I can criticize the Millennial youth group shared by my son, as filtered and presented to us by the comedy/coming of age movie, “Brittany Runs a Marathon.” Granted, it takes place in New York, which never exactly shared Heartland values, but still, such hot spots often serve as cultural bellwethers, as California and California Dreaming did in my ill-spent youth.
Poor Brittany: she is a fat, age 25 -plus girl in the city of fashion, where the young and hip still wear suits and skirts and dresses. She is the girl her hot and chic “best friend” goes to when she needs an ego boost, because she knows she can never be as low as Fat Girl. Just wanting to be loved, Fat Girl plays along, making everything into a joke including herself, not only to be loved, but to protect her dirt-poor ego from direct criticism. We get to know her life from the beginning: sharing her apartment with Chic Friend, she works at a crummy job selling movie tickets, and parties almost every night with drugs and booze and some kind of smoking that might be vaping. Her love life consists of giving BJ’s in the men’s room or wherever but she is way too proud to accept advice. She is the classic case of the crying clown. Then one day she goes to the doctor to get prescription drugs for partying. The doctor is wise to her, but performs a check-up anyway, where he finds that she is 5’6’’, 197 lbs., has a BMI of 33 and has high blood pressure. She is strongly advised to diet, cut out the booze, and work out.
We know the story. Little by little she overcomes her false pride and self-doubt and starts to run. Little by little, she slows down the partying and loses weight and gains self-esteem. She develops real friendships with her running partners who also have problems and idiosyncrasies. She begins dating, and then is drawn in the classic movie fashion to a guy who is a pest at first, then a bothersome friend, then a lover wounded like herself. She has a crises, finally runs the …oops! I may have said too much. I will leave it there in case you are like me and need something passingly decent to see because you are watching waaay too much TV due to our bizarre national emergency which, well, don’t get me started. Let’s get back to the Millennials.
Where to begin? First, there is no one in the crowd who is normal from a pre-millennial perspective. All have major parent issues, generally of the lack -of –parenting variety, which would be the fault of the early Boomer generation that so poorly raised or failed to raise their children due to divorce and ego issues; all have a (to me) odd habit of never dating anyone from the same racial or ethnic background, a flag of honor for most nowadays but still fraught as always with special issues once the hormones and virtue signaling end; and all treat sex so casually that Brittany puts on the knee pads immediately once she gets back to the dating scene. With sex, we find that no boundaries exist nor should exist. One of her bestest buddies on the running club is not only a gay married man, but also the proud “father” of two boys who are shown bouncing on the morning bed of the same-sex couple just like we used to with mom and pop.
Yes, I found much to my distaste as an old man would, with the little boys jumping in the bed of the male gay couple being particularly disturbing. I know, I know that times change and I can scarcely claim to be holier than anyone. All told, I am aware that much of my distaste is simply old man claptrap. But there is something far more disturbing that I found floating in the ether behind the celluloid. The writers are telling us something, are gifting us with a five-minute crash course on wisdom. For one, we are told that everyone is majorly messed up one way or another. We are told that this is due primarily to parental malfunctions which have led to serious self-esteem issues. Contrarily, we are also told that this brave new world, just a variation of the one that ruined these poor young ones, is just fine. Listen you old ones, we are told, we young’uns are now FREE of your BS and can live our lives any way we want (just as you did)! Which we find – surprise - has led all the characters to even darker places of self-hatred and misery, something that they will almost certainly pass on to their kids, if having kids just so happens to be part of their ego parade. Finally, we are given the antidote: this darkness can be dissolved by caring for others, finding fulfillment in career, and having a passion such as running that demands absolute dedication, toughness, and sacrifice.
I cannot agree with much of the haughty lecturing of this new brand of do-your-own-thing youth, which is loaded with the same ignorant and self -absorbed solipsism that my own generation once and sometimes still does carry. But how can I disagree with being caring and dedicated? How can I not agree that the triumvirate of career, partner, and passion will not firmly hold one up ‘till the parting of death? Let me give it a try.
I had a certain uncle, now deceased, who on his deathbed demanded that no monument or service or public notice of his passing would be enacted. As far as I know, he did not believe in anything “beyond the great blue sky,” as Genghis Khan is reported to have said. In his life he had his career, teaching math in high school, a tremendous passion for participating in sports, and a marriage that gave him three kids. Yet I do not believe he was fulfilled in his life, although that is only from my perspective. I am not aware of how much he loved his work, although the tough boys who caused trouble loved him because he was so fearlessly tough himself. He did get through to that difficult demographic, which must have given him some meaning, but he also retired as soon as his pension fund hit its maximum. As for his marriage, when his youngest was still in high school, his wife left him for another woman. That is not a misprint. He married again, but that, too, ended in divorce, and with that, he remained an elderly ‘swinging bachelor’ for the rest of his life. As for sports, he ran marathons into his early 70’s until he began to pee blood and his knees were permanently ruined. After that, he continued with whatever sports he could, but without knees those remained limited. Then, as per request, he ended as a shadow passing through this land.
The latter shows an element of humility, but also elements of depression, and he did have reasons to be depressed. His primary relationships did not hold out, his ability to play sports necessarily left him in older age, and his work disappeared with fairly early retirement. What pillars did he have left towards the last ten or even twenty years of life? This is not an indictment of my uncle’s life. He lived a life far fuller than I could even dream, but in the end he still had nothing besides himself and the great blue sky.
It is blindness to the fallibility of those three pillars that bothered me most about the movie. Yes, it is only a movie and movies always claim to give us the path to happy endings that don’t really exist, but I think it was the self-righteousness displayed that created the annoyance. Just as with us Boomers, the Millennials are making the same mistake, believing that the past holds no wisdom. They are then left to find it themselves, and they find it in the very type of things that all young people have always believed will bring fulfillment: gratification of bodily, emotional, and ego needs. It will not be until old age when they discover that none of these needs are ever gratified for long, and for those moments when they are, gratification becomes so routine that it no longer serves to gratify even temporarily. Such it is and such has it ever been known by the wise.
Brittany the Fat Girl did get the initial impulse right, though. She gave up on instant sex for a deeper relationship, disciplined herself to not eat and drink and party to excess, and settled into the hard work of a true career by accepting a lowly apprenticeship in her field that would work in time with dedication and suppression of queen ego. These are the beginnings to what the great religions teach, but she must someday understand that this new-found maturity is only a corrective for her former path. It still is not the great path itself, which rests on the eternally enduring pillars that are harder to achieve than the completion of a marathon. The movie brings us to a proper turn, but promises absolutely nothing more. But then again, Brittany and her real-life contemporaries would never see the next upcoming sign with such newfound happiness. As with the rest of us who thought we were beyond and above the ancient wisdom, they won’t be able to see the way to truth until what they thought would work no longer does.
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