When I die I don’t want someone else’s life flashing before my eyes…
Within the first ten minutes of Together I was squirming in my Cineworld seat. It wasn’t the body horror (which would come much later in the film), I wasn’t annoyed by someone using their phone and I hadn’t accidentally worn the wrong underwear. No, this was something much worse: I was relating to the film. Not in that beautiful way that lifts you up, when it resonates from the screen and reverberates through your soul, where you feel your load is just a little bit lighter leaving the cinema because of what you’ve just seen. No. Not like that. In Together we meet a couple on the precipice. We meet them at their leaving party, Dave Franco as Tim and Alison Brie as Millie, where they are being seen off by their closest friends. It’s clear from the outset that Millie (who’s new job is the catalyst for the relocation) is much more comfortable with the move than Tim is, who seems to view leaving the city as a move away from his personal independence and interests, his life as he knows it which seems to revolve around playing music, drinking beers and smoking crafty cigarettes, I imagine out the back of small indie gig venues. We learn through Millie’s hushed conversations with her friends that Tim seems to have commitment issues and later discover through a dream sequence that this may be due to traumatic experiences with his own parents. In the closing moments of the this first portion of the film, Millie proposes to Tim, in front of their gathered friends and it’s clearly too much for him, finding himself hesitating with his response. It ends in embarrassment for both of them and the questions around where their relationship is heeded becomes more prescient than ever. Beyond that, it’s cringe inducing for the audience and for me, a little bit beyond. Where was my proxy going? Where was I? This wasn’t what it was supposed to feel like to relate to a film. Maybe instead of looking to the future, it would instead to be better to look into the past, to more comfortable cinema experiences…
When I first saw The Mummy and in particular Brendan Fraser’s ‘Rick O’Connell’ I saw the action hero I was sure I was destined to be. The problem was I very much lived in a small town in the North east of Scotland rather than anywhere near a cursed city hidden in the desert and I was not a war weary middle aged man, I was an eleven year old boy. That didn’t mean I couldn’t dress the part though and that is why I entered my final year of primary school sporting a very firmly gelled curtains haircut and on the weekends began dressing in brown trousers, boots and a tan shirt. I think I even had a bandana with a desert style camouflage pattern on it. I remember heading into my local library and asking for any books on ancient Egypt and was disappointed when I was led to the children’s section and the next day made my mum return (not be confused with The Mummy Returns) with me and had her take out a series of thick volumes that I ultimately would never look at. Despite watching The Mummy, its sequel and the ill advised The Scorpion King endlessly and adorning a quite ridiculous outfit, there just weren’t too many parallels to be found between me and Rick. For starters, he was a fairly reluctant adventurer, only being convinced to take on the journey to save himself from being hung, whereas I myself could not have been keener to undertake a dangerous and thrilling quest. So after a while, the books were returned unread to the library, the bandana went in a drawer and well, I did keep relentlessly watching The Mummy. What Rick did teach me was how powerful a grip that sense of escapism could have on me and quite ironically, I’ve never quite been able to get away from that.
A few years later, I entered my prime moody teenager era and one evening a borrowed DVD watched on a desktop computer provided me the perfect protagonist to reflect all my chaotic, convoluted and definitely not cliche emotions. It was of course Richard Kelly’s (although at the time I was sure it has been plucked directly from my own subconscious) Donnie Darko. Donnie provided the troubled outsider I was both sure I was but somehow still yearned to be. Maybe it was just because he was a lot cooler than I was or maybe it was because I was not engaged in a mind-bending mission to understand messages from a six foot bunny rabbit and prevent the end of the world but something between us never did quite equate. I’m not even sure I understood the film all that well (the first time and only time I’ll admit this) but every night I tried and tried again and somehow felt a deep connection to Donnie’s turbulent tale. It was most likely the unknowable quality of the film that held such a power over me as I struggled to understand myself and the unquantifiable whirl of emotions that were coursing through my teenage mind. It’s probably no coincidence that during this time I was also a Nirvana obsessive, Kurt Cobain’s lyrics also being a collage of loose and semi-literal metaphors that somehow painted a picture of everything I was feeling. There’s also a self-importance to Donnie, he is very much the centre of the universe which encompasses that teenage feeling of everything in your own life somehow being bigger than what exists in the wider world, that every problem and pain you experience equates to much more than the sum of its parts. When Gretchen tells Donnie that his name sounds like that of a super hero and he responds with ‘what makes you think I’m not?’ it equates perfectly to that feeling of pushing back against a wiser world that has simply run out of time for your bullshit, like a much more sentimental version of ‘it’s not a phase, mum’. My life never did quite take on the apocalyptic importance of Donnie’s no matter how much I saw myself in him but I can’t say I ever did quite shake off that emotional narcissism, that impending sense of my ‘not ok’ being all encompassing on an almost universal level, however I have just about developed the pragmatism to realise it definitely, definitely isn’t.
As I moved onwards in my teenage years I again found a film that would go on to define my next phase of life and it feels stereotypically Scottish that it came in the form of Danny Boyle’s adaption of Trainspotting. I had very much entered a period in my life where alcohol and other things (not heroin) had gained some traction in how I spent my time and the nihilistic hedonism of central character Mark Renton definitely felt highly relatable. Whilst my actual life may have looked very different to the one’s portrayed in Trainspotting, the setting was certainly much closer to home but it was the world view, or maybe lack of one that echoed most strongly with me. The iconic ‘Choose Life’ speech from the beginning of the film was the rejection of the mundanity of a seemingly normal and set out life that I wanted to encompass and Ewan McGregor as Renton was my proxy and I took parts of him out of the film and with me as much I saw aspects of myself reflected on screen. My experience may not have been lashing out against the status quo by struggling with a heroin addiction but I did carve out my own heady period of turbulence, with endless gigs, party’s and pubs and when I returned home and needed inspiration to go again, it was often Trainspotting I turned to.
As Renton tears up his life and in the narration gives us the line ‘the truth is I’m a bad person’ it felt like I’d found the perfect mantra for the guilt and shame that was beginning to impinge on me through this time. Eventually the bubble was burst by Dundee based The View with their song ‘Face for the Radio’ and the lyric ‘he watches Trainspotting fifteen times a week, thinking it makes him oh so unique’ which was in a way my own version of stealing a bag of cash and fleeing to Amsterdam. I chose not to choose life, I chose to just endlessly watch Trainspotting.
The next film on the list was a gut punch. It didn’t reflect a version of who I was when I saw it but took me way back when to a time that, it would become apparent, was uncomfortable for me to think about. Jonah Hill’s mid90’s took me by complete surprise as I saw so much of my own pre-teen experience in this depiction of 1990’s Los Angeles. There were insurmountable parallels starting from the opening scene that see’s the young protagonist being told to stay out of his older brothers room before immediately running in and poring over his possessions, his video games (SNES anyone?) and CD collection. Whilst I have no older brothers, seeing this on the cinema screen gave me almost painful levels of nostalgia thinking back to visiting my aunt and uncle’s house, invading my cousin’s rooms and examining everything, the VHS tapes on the shelfs, posters of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls and their very 90’s Street Fighter II and Alien action figures. Like the central character Stevie, I lived predominantly with my mum and recognised her too in the film, as we see her speak to her young songs about adult issues, seemingly with lack of a more appropriate audience for these concerns. The plot of the film see’s Stevie fall in with a gang of skateboarders a few years his senior and I too at a similar age tried to attach myself to a group of older boys in an attempt to feel more mature and adequate in the world. I recognised myself in the most painful aspects of Stevie too, from the heartbreaking scenes of self harm to his attempts to go to any lengths to impress his new friends, trying anything and everything to fit in to who he thinks they want him to be. Whilst the films I mentioned previously had presented me with a rough, romanticised version of how I may have wanted to see myself, this showed me a much more realistic aspect of who I once was, from the baggy jeans to the broken sense of self. It was both cathartic and crushing to witness. mid90’s jerked and jostled me around my own adolescence like a haunted house fairground ride and when the soundtrack jumped from 90’s hip-hop to the Nirvana cover of ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ it only cemented the heartbreak.
Now we come to Tim. I knew I was in trouble from the moment I saw him. His stupid mullet was similar to mine and his outfit could have been plucked from my own wardrobe. As the movie progressed, I began counting our similarities. Tim doesn’t drive (check), seems obsessed with his own music (I’m still too traumatised to touch a guitar but from ages thirteen to thirty – check), seems a little too fond of drinking (check and an extra check for drinking red wine alone at home) and his heart and mind are definitely preoccupied with music, movies and well, being perceived as cool. Check. I’m aware of the irony and meta nature of me saying all this whilst I write unprompted about some of my favourite films. Tim clearly loves Millie but fears that in committing himself entirely to her will mean losing a part of himself and is pushing back against this, chiefly by agreeing to go on tour as a guitar player for Millie’s brothers band but his push for independence only highlights his reliance on Millie, as he needs her to drive him to and from the train station to get into the city for rehearsals. Whilst my relation to Tim isn’t like for like here, I can definitely feel his growing frustration of reaching a stage in your life where you feel like you haven’t ended up where you thought you might and an unwillingness to let go of your long held ambitions.  It’s never easy to admit defeat and settling into a life out in the sticks and away from the stage seems to signal that for Tim and his stubbornness and naivety seemed to sting me too. Was it time for me to give up on my obsessions with film, football and Joni Mitchell? Maybe I would never be the millennial Bukowski. The film progresses and with a little help from the supernatural and The Spice Girls, Tim accepts his fate and embraces his new life. And for me? I think I’m bound to a fate of living vicariously through the characters I see on screen and maybe I’ll just have to try and learn the same lessons they do to make it worthwhile.Â
