Life is not a stroll across a field – Boris Pasternak
Nostalgia. Nostalgia is a sorrowful lament for the memory of forms. A gentle suggestion of moments past; moments that lingered briefly before quietly acceding to the next. One cannot talk about nostalgia without paying heed to the narrative trope of one’s ‘coming of age’ and one cannot talk about coming of age without an encounter with Peter Bogdanovich’s tender 1971 film The Last Picture Show. The film reveals, in a poignant and compassionate tenor, the evolution of youthful expectations as they are molded, corrupted, and realigned by the passage of time.
When youthful ambitions are seen through the prism of adulthood they refract strange new tangents, and reveal troubling insights about the difficulty of holding onto untroubled innocence. The passage of time is an indifferent sculptor, rendering the material of youthful ambitions moot. It casts quiet dreams aside, reawakening dormant fears and stoking the discontents of one’s inner world.
The Last Picture Show treats its subjects with a tender hand, illuminating their heartsick trajectory as they come of age in the sleepy West Texas tumbleweed-town of Anarene. They chart well trod ground but it’s all terra nullius to them: the rules, missteps, and lessons must be learned firsthand, as if for the first time.
We come to know them intimately, even as they make alien choices and bleed the nectar out of their carefree adolescence. We encounter adults who live in a liminal space between quiet aspiration and reluctant stasis. The adults have experienced, and moved beyond, their own coming of age, and the highway view of their youth has taken a detour and come to rest in a darkened cul-de-sac.
Throughout the film friendships reach catalytic crossroads, affection blooms and then withers, and dust rolls across the face of dreams. When Sam the Lion passes away, the emotional landscape of the town lays in a flux state, with tension and antagonism breaching the ramparts of the everyday. The town of Anarene is an ecosystem of ambivalence, host to a dwelling space of tarnish and rust, but also flowers and afternoon solitude.
To experience a coming of age is to witness and come to a head with the inversion of expectations. We begin encountering the world as it is, rather than the world of our imaginations. Where there was once a bright, open future dense with hope, there is now just an eternal present – the cause, effect, and consequences condensed into a harried and relentless lived experience. Wistful daydreams lose their intoxicating and believable luster, and become an empty refuge, the last ditch provenance of the desperate.
We can’t discuss the bittersweet heart of The Last Picture Show without a nod to its melancholic, twangy track listing, which heavily features the soulful sounds of Hank Williams Sr. The sonic flavour of the film readies the palette for the dark nostalgia and good-old-growing-pains that the film so beautifully surveys and bears witness to.
