My Old Ass

I went to this movie knowing almost nothing about it, so I was not at all prepared for the feels it gave me. In retrospect, it was sort of obvious that a movie about a woman meeting her older self was gonna delve into questions about the kind of life a person wants to live, and the relationship between you at 18 and you at 39 (here, literalized), and involve a lot of nostalgia. But I was not ready! I went in unknowing, soft belly exposed, so wow did this movie get me. Even as I recognized that some of it was sort of predictable or obvious, I was crying anyhow, and I wasn’t even mad about it.

Part of the cleverness of the film is that it’s almost entirely from the perspective of the 18yo Elliott, but it clearly feels like a movie for the 39+ crowd. That is, the film invites you to see yourself and your own life as the mysterious stranger, one whose day to day experiences are utterly foreign to a teenager. Defamiliarization is a powerful tool!

Of course, there’s the obvious yet interesting question: if you could go back in time to talk to your 18yo self, what would you say? It turns out that there’s really only one thing to say, if you can make yourself listen, and in fact, it’s the same thing you should be saying to yourself even now, no matter how old you are: cultivate gratitude and appreciation for your life and for the people in it. It’s a straightforward message, maybe a simplistic one, but I think it’s also true, and I think the movie persuasively shows you how nice it might be to do that.

But meanwhile — and this was the really brilliant part — in this version of the interaction, the 39yo is also twenty years ahead of us, in the future. And so we also want to know what her life is like! Sort of. She’s pretty cagey about sharing information (ostensibly because she doesn’t know what the ripple effects could be), but the brief hints we get about the future are fairly terrifying (“salmon, oh man do I miss eating salmon — enjoy it, they’re all gone now.”) But she’s also clearly alive, and not in some kind of intense biohazard gear or bionic body, so, you know, that’s something? Right? A lot of credit here goes to Aubrey Plaza and her performance. It’s her trademark opacity and ominousness, the combination of vulnerability, anger, and sadness, but in this context it’s richly suggestive in a very potent way. Is she somewhat sad? Is it because she regrets some of the choices she would go on to make as a young person… or because humanity is half extinct and she feels melancholy about how blithely unaware her younger self was? That her teenage self comes to realize that the family home she’d assumed would always be there might not be after all feels like a clear metaphor for the future of humanity. Maybe that’s just my climate anxiety speaking. But I thought that this was what really took the movie to a different level, beyond a perhaps somewhat treacly message about mindfulness: it’s also a message, of sorts, from our future selves, and it’s exactly the right balance of foreboding and still open possibility to really make you think about your life.