Proving Nothing to the Past
Sparing a Thought for Reunions
Although I’m not coming up on a high school reunion year, I’ve lingered for the past few days in that vague state of unease that often results from unexpected confrontation with your past, thanks to a grainy pre-digital age video my sister sent me of our school’s marching band.
At first, I wasn’t able to identify quite what was needling me; after all, by the time of the performance featured in the video, I’d ditched the group and was drifting about in full-blown senioritis, immersed in fantasies of getting to newishly democratic Prague before investors ruined it. Every aspect of my being save the physical body it was housed in, then, had already fled elsewhere; I was trying to leave behind the person I’d become, and move into something I wasn’t quite sure about—only that it wasn’t this. An experience no different, in other words, from what I imagine most teens still deal with as they enter that liminal stage where you’re neither child nor adult.
And so it was strangely coincidental—and helpful—that I’d been reading Simon Reynolds’s Retromania when that video link showed up in my inbox.1 The book explores how pop culture, especially music, tends more and more to cannibalize its own history and past trends, its development slowing down into what Reynolds calls hyper-stasis, “rapid movement within a network of knowledge” that keeps currently produced music (or music as of 2011) from staking out any new territory of its own or pointing the way to something we’ve not seen or heard before. Instead, it just falls back on reference, citation, and sampling, an almost scholarly exercise in collage of bygone materials that’s too emotionally distanced even to qualify as nostalgia.
It wasn’t the examination, though, of how US and British pop has developed from the mid-twentieth century on that really made the connection to the dis-ease I was feeling—but rather, an observation Reynolds makes about reenactments: “I’ve never really seen the point of historical re-enactments: all that meticulous attention to getting the uniforms right, the cannon smoke. It seems obvious that the simulation of ‘being there’ fails on every level: you know there’s no real danger of death; you know what the outcome is going to be. It’s an exercise in pageantry.”2
It’s not that high school reunions are reenactments, exactly—but exercises in pageantry, certainly, failed recreations of past good times that you know will only end in a return to your current life. And those periodic get-togethers, too, are filled with the same sentiments Reynolds describes in reunion-tour audiences, not there to hear what their onetime heroes have been working on since they faded from the scene, but rather to be regaled with past hits they know by heart, old songs that place the spectators securely in a past they don’t want to recall with any changed outlook or opinion.3 There’s something in this scene, I’ll venture, that’s the real impetus behind a school reunion: not to catch up on the past few decades of a classmate’s life, to change your impressions of who that person was or correct any misconceptions you might have developed about said person over the years (if you think about them at all). The point seems instead to fall back into the useless escapism described in Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” an attempted denial of the world you may have settled for, in favor of living again in a place where the future was open and where if you were lucky, you had no real responsibilities or hurry to be anywhere or proof that it was too late to achieve a dream. And if a reunion is an attempt to be anything more than a trip down memory lane where the characters remain unchanged (and hence, can make no comment on how you’ve turned out), the pageantry probably involves hopes of wreaking vengeance on painful memories, getting back at bullies or mean girls or puppy-love exes with indisputable proof of how fabulous you always were and how much they’ve lost by not having recognized your greatness in the first place.
I wonder, though, whether reunions could be less of a sham prospect for people who stuck around their hometown instead of getting the hell out of Dodge: for those who stayed, their knowledge of each other doesn’t get stuck at some premature cutoff point. You see each other at the store, at the gym, maybe even end up working together or chatting while dropping your kids off at school: little unplanned, uncrafted drop-ins that, even if not extended or profound, might just provide you with a more nuanced, ever-changing understanding of who that other person really is.4 Maybe that sort of life—as opposed to, say, the at-best surface-level connection experienced on social media—could even allow you to overcome your old, early impressions of another person, or to transform yourself into someone different and new, a more “authentic” you who would in turn be recognized over and against others’ long-held assumptions and histories about your own past.5 Given such a charmed scenario, a reunion would just be like a good party, a chance to get together and relax.
But if you leave your hometown behind, it’s probably difficult, as it is for me, to imagine classmates having changed, even if you know on an intellectual level that it would be extremely disturbing (and unlikely) for a person to have held onto their teen beliefs, attitudes, or MO for the past thirty years. That lack of imagination is probably why I’ve never even been to a high school reunion—not because I didn’t like my classmates—but because I didn’t like who I was when we were all stuck together in the same place.6 Yeah, yeah; the horror of it all was probably overblown even at the time, and has probably only lingered in my own head. But still, what other impression would people have had of me other than the insufferable dork I was? I’ve no need to relive or be reminded of the countless times I made an ass out of myself, even if I also recognize it happened to everyone, and that all those fumbles are part of the way you sort out who you are or at least want to become. Among the same scene again, who knows what sort of painful behavior I might revert to, the same inadvisable defenses I might adopt?
You could argue, then, that it’s all the more important to buck up and go show everyone that it’s all water under the bridge; enjoy the fact that you were all dumb teens and now you’re not. That’s the thing, though, the false promise of reunions: nothing will really be changed by two hours’ worth of boozy awkwardness and self-promotion in the high school gym or a nondescript rented ballroom, among people all trying to put their best foot forward and update their own images in former classmates’ eyes. There will be no realization of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion fantasies, one-time nerds striding gloriously out the doors after having upended the lingering hierarchies and hypocrisies of high school life. Instead, everyone will probably go back home thankful to have it over with, maybe taking sick comfort in having come out on the favorable end of comparisons about who’s gotten fat or who’s stuck in the worst job.
It's not just the pageantry of past or present that contributed to this week’s slight existential dizziness. Reynolds chipped away at another aspect of what was most likely going on when he observed that “On the Internet, the past and the present commingle in a way that makes time itself mushy and spongiform.”7 The claim is still part of his discussion on the ways in which musical styles and the time-specific attitudes that originally shaped and came along with them are so easily jumbled together thanks to online and other computer technologies. But with my own video, I was forced into a sudden glimpse of a past I thought had remained safely in the historical dustbin—a past that was uncomfortable because I’d been so uncomfortable in it, uncertain of pretty much everything and afraid that nothing would ever get resolved, or at least not in any good way I could think of.
But then along with that mental throwback, I also remembered one of my English teachers assigning Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. She’d probably done enough careful observation of near-adults to know all of us were jumbled up in the sort of fear and anticipation and frustration I was feeling—and at the same time, trusted us enough to get what we needed out of what seemed like an unconventional choice for a high school curriculum. And that selection turns out to have commingled a particular experience of reading with any number of later points in my life: maybe something better said simply to have staying power than the mushiness Reynolds mentioned. Because Frankl’s assertion, that the old have no reason to envy the fact that the world is still wide open to the young, hit me with just the sort of punch I needed when I first read it, and it’s stayed with me ever since.
The potential beauty of youth left behind, Frankl said, was the ability to take something like satisfaction in “the realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. Those sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.”8 Man’s Search was the first time I remember recognizing without fear that life would eventually start to gel—not that it would be ultimately and satisfactorily settled, because nothing ever is—but that we could actually get to a place where we would be more convinced of who we were and weren’t, and more committed to trusting our convictions.
What that video did was put me back in that spongiform adolescent place—but then return me indirectly to that good memory of a big authority’s non-condescending assertions that things might just be alright, even if you could never get too complacent or convinced about having reached a place of final good feeling or unshakeable self-confidence.
The last few days’ strange discomfort will eventually fade away; in the meantime, I’m trying to view that video as a good reminder of how far I’ve come in being more comfortable in my own skin, more or less liking the skin I’m in, and recognizing how high school and all the rest of the unpleasantries along the way have shaped the me that’s turned out OK.
Still: you won’t catch me hanging out at my next reunion.
Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011). Quotations and references to self-cannibalizing collage practices in this paragraph are from pp. 428 and 425, respectively.
Reynolds, 51.
See especially 31-43. Reynolds includes not just concerts, but albums in fans’ demand for past hits only: “When fans buy new albums by reformed favourites of their youth, at heart they’re not really interested in what the band might have to say now, or where the band members’ separate musical journeys have taken them in subsequent decades; they want the band to create ‘new’ songs in their vintage style.” Reynolds, 40.
I feel like I’m describing the social scene of one of Jane Jacobs’s walkable neighborhoods in The Death and Life of Great American Cities—but taking it one step further. Her neighborhood grocers and corner-store businessmen never knew their customers, or vice versa, on a level that led to more than acquaintance at best, and neither party would have wanted to deepen that relationship even if the chance had presented itself. I’m also well aware of the ever-present danger of being suffocated and stuck forever in an assigned role a small community has assigned you, as I discussed in my last post.
It seems any potential social media may once have touted themselves as having to serve as this sort of intimate commons has ended up as its own sort of pageantry, with photos and cheery announcements substituting for actual knowledge of who a person is in real life.
I realize I’ve probably just invalidated all my declarations about reunions, given my never-attendance. They can’t be all that different, though, from the mini-reunions of younger grades’ graduation ceremonies, or alumni receptions at conferences, family reunions, etc., etc.
Reynolds, 63.
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, 3d ed., transl. Ilse Lasch (New York: Touchstone, 1984), 125.