17 Again

About three weeks ago, I remembered that my old college roommate from my freshman year lived in the Boston area. At least he did live here the last time I talked to him, which was over ten years ago. Having decided to try to find him, I identified a person on LinkedIn that I was sure was him. I wound up joining LinkedIn just to find him.

Alas, the email bounced, but one thing led to another, and before I knew it, some old high school friends of mine ganged up on me and got me to break down and finally join Facebook, a step I was sure I would never take.

It turns out I was pretty much the last person I knew to join Facebook. Every one of my old friends, save a few here and there (including my freshman roommate), had accounts already. For the first couple days, I pivoted from delight to shock and horror. It felt like I'd gone to a high school reunion and now would be locked inside forever.

More strange was the mixture of being in simultaneous contact with persons from various epochs of my life. It was dreamlike, to say the least.

One result of all this madness is that for nearly a week or more, the Google Movies page had ceased to become the first web page I visited, after email, in the morning.

But the equilibrium re-established itself shortly. New releases were filling up the multiplexes, and having decided to go overseas, as I mentioned, I wanted to keep abreast of American movies until the last possible moment.

I had mixed feelings about 17 Again when I walked into the Tyngsboro AMC early on Saturday morning for the four buck pre-noon showing. Certainly a romantic comedy was what I was in the mood for, but the premise---the old "age switch" gag, in this case with Matthew Perry being granted a wish to knock twenty years off his age, and thus becoming Zach Efron---is the kind of story that, in my mind, starts with one strike against it.

Why is this so? It starts with a negative in my book simply because, well, duh, this kind of thing never really happens to any living human being. Is that too obvious? I suppose it makes me a spoil sport of some sort, but I like stories that actually attempt to address the human condition, and not the "paranormal" condition, of which I really have no direct experience (and neither does anyone else).

Another way of saying this is that such premises are cheats. It doesn't mean you can't use them, in my book, but that if you do, you have to go the extra mile to make the story reflect some truths about human relationships that do not explicitly depend on the fantasy premise. If the characters' motivations and struggles are really all driven by the fantasy, then the story is just junk. Good storytellers (writers and directors) find ways of overcoming this.

Classical cinema was very light in its use of these kinds of premises, for a variety of reasons, which I am still working out. One is tempted, for example, to compare 17 Again to It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Michael O'Donnell (Matthew Perry) is granted his wish by a "spirit guide" (the lovable Brian Doyle-Murray), who is presumably the New Age version of George Bailey's guardian angel, Clarence. The comparison is explicitly elevated to an homage when the spirit guide jumps off a bridge into a river.

But there is a crucial difference in the stories, one that is enlightening in regard to the trends of Postmodern cinema.

Specifically, in Capra's classic, the "alternate reality" in which George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) finds himself (i.e., Pottersville) is one that is completely orthogonal to the "real" Bedford Falls, in that there is no connection between the two worlds. Because of this, everything that happens in the Pottersville fantasy has no effect on the Bedford Falls world.

Because of this, the fantasy premise of It's a Wonderful Life has what I call "naturalistic cover," which is a hallmark of Classical cinema. Briefly stated, it means that everything about the fantasy story can be explained through naturalistic terms, in this case by the assertion that George Bailey hallucinated the entire Pottersville experience.

That the movie doesn't suggest this explicitly is beside the point. Such an explanation is nevertheless compatible with the Bedford Falls timeline of "real" reality.

On the other hand, 17 Again, like many Postmodern films, discards the entire notion of naturalistic cover. The fantasy timeline is not orthogonal to the normal timeline, but is part of it, integrated into it. What happens within the fantasy story has direct and concrete cause-and-effect bearing upon the real timeline.

Postmodern audiences simply no longer expect naturalistic cover in the way Classical audiences did. It is arguably part of deeper cultural transformation over the last three decades. Even as late as Star Wars (1977), movie makers were reluctant to assert true fantasy without naturalistic cover. In Lucas' movie, the "magical" events are explained as technological advances, and when Luke hears Obi Wan's voice telling him to turn off his flight computer, the naturalistic cover is that Luke is simply hearing what Obi Wan might have said to him, as if remembering his wisdom.

But times have changed. The transformation is one that I find fascinating and have made a private study of.

As for 17 Again, I found that within the constraints of its fantasy premise, it worked fairly well. One major reason is that the story asserted the fantasy without trying to explain it very much, almost winking directly at the audience, as if to say, "we know this is ridiculous, but give us break and go with it for ninety minutes." So I did, and I was happy that I did.

As for the story itself, it was told well. Michael O'Donnell feels his missed out on his life because of a crucial decision he made during a basketball game when he was seventeen years old. We know what must happen, when he gets the chance to be a teenager again (in the present day---this is not a time travel movie). Of course he will find himself in almost exactly the same situation, and, having made a character transformation because of the events in the fantasy story, he must decide to do exactly the same thing as he did before, and be at peace with his entire life.

By the way, the writer of this movie, Jason Filardi, also co-wrote the screenplay for next year's Topper, which I presume is a remake of the 1937 movie starring Constance Bennett and Cary Grant as a pair of ghosts who communicate with living people. It's one of the Classical movies that came as close as you can get to the Postmodern paradigm of discarding naturalistic cover.

Should be interesting to see how they handle it.

O.K., I gotta go check my Facebook page again. Thank God I'm heading off an extended trip, or else I might get addicted.