My Old Ass and Finding Beauty in Fatalism

Spoiler alert: This article contains mild spoilers for the film My old ass.

Writer and director Megan Park My old ass It is an uncomplicated meditation on time and temporality. But the word “uncomplicated” in this sense works quite to its advantage. She is passionate but not interested in manipulation. self-absorbed for the purpose of dismantling selfishness; Clear in a way that places emotional beauty in the regrets of mundane life; Nostalgia for sad youth without literally begging the viewer to return to it. Most important of all, the film – for me at least – demonstrated the appeal that can be found in a joyously accepted fatalism.

The story follows 18-year-old Elliot (Maisie Stella) in the weeks before she leaves for college. She was born and raised on a quiet cranberry farm in Ontario, Canada, and has since had many feelings associated with teenage angst and wants to start an adult life.

To celebrate her birthday, Elliot and her friends embark on an all-night camping trip in the woods filled with high school hallucinations. Late that night, after her friends have gone to bed, Elliot meets her 39-year-old self (played by Aubrey Plaza, so I’ll refer to her as “Aubrey”) for the first time. Assuming it’s just a hallucination, the teenager and the “young adult” — as Aubrey insists — exchange casual banter. But it’s surprisingly endearing: Aubrey tries to convince Elliot to cherish the remaining time she has at home before she leaves for college because nothing will ever be the same again. It’s a laundry list that only a mind mature enough to savor moments stuck in the past can do: go golfing with your brother even though he’s stressed, watch Saoirse Ronan movies with your other brother even though he’s a dweeb, be nice to your mum and dad, remember Enjoy your remaining time on the farm, and most importantly, Stay away from Chad.

The next day, she meets Chad. It’s the impossibly healthy cranberry farm hand that she immediately tries to suppress her feelings for. Realizing that Aubrey wasn’t just a hallucination, she called the number Aubrey had left in her phone (“My Old Ass”). These calls are how the main exposition takes place within the film: sporadic phone conversations in which the older self guides the younger self toward enjoying the right things and rejecting the wrong things.

But Aubrey can’t keep Elliot away from Chad. Despite her best attempts, she falls in love with him amidst cranberry picking and boating across Canadian summer lakes (which any reasonable viewer must admit has such a gorgeous area that no Catching emotions would be a much more unlikely scenario.)

There’s no way to tell the rest of the story without spoiling major details; So, if you’re at all concerned about that, It’s time to abandon ship.

Aubrey visits Elliot one last time to ask her to stop seeing Chad. They get into an argument. Assuming Chad’s problem is a secret character flaw, Elliot asks, “Well, can you tell me what’s so bad about Chad?”

“there nothing What’s wrong with Chad? This is the problem. Chad is amazing. But Chad died, okay? He died. “And there’s nothing you can do to prevent this from happening, so just forget about it.”¹

This stops the conversation. But after a breath and a beat, Elliot answers, “I don’t care, okay? I’ll love Chad as much as I can. I don’t care that he hurts me. I don’t want to be like you and be afraid of everything. I’d rather love than never feel anything.”

Knowing how the story ends sparks opposite reactions in the two. One sees it in terms of its ability to evoke beauty, and the other sees it as a wide hole that can only hurt. Which brings us to the film’s central thesis: that fatalism is only made acceptable through plausible hope, but made intolerable through cynicism.

Fatalism is the idea that what will happen in the future is inevitable, and therefore we must resign ourselves to it. It often breeds pessimism, paranoia, despair, and cynicism, and is a resounding lament for the utter futility of all our actions.

Both Elliot and Aubrey are fatalists. However, their differing interpretations of how to deal with a fixed future are the crux of the film. Aubrey sees fate as a cold, meaningless mistress to hide from; Elliott sees it as a window into savoring the highs and lows, feeling everything deeply and profoundly as it comes to her.

The dichotomy between cynicism and skepticism is wonderfully displayed between the two. Aubrey the cynic, Elliot the skeptic. While cynicism and skepticism appear functionally identical, they deviate in a crucial way: skepticism has hope while cynicism has none. Sociologist Jamil Zaki Notes This is because while sarcasm is not trustworthy the peopleDoubt is a lack of confidence in us Assumptions. Aubrey would rather protect herself from the possibility of others hurting her, but Elliot is skeptical of the assumption that all love causes harm. Cynicism’s lack of trust stifles all the potential for love, while doubt analyzes the cost of love before deciding whether or not the possibility of harm should dictate the possibility of love.

This illustrates a truism that can help us navigate life in general, and Christian life in particular.

As researcher Andrew McGowan said NotesAll Christians face persistent and difficult questions about how to inhabit time. However, there are very few written models that describe the correct ways to deal with it. We know how the story ends, but it’s not always clear how our current choices contribute to the narrative — especially given how small they are in the span of eternity.

How Christians, and God himself, deal with time has been the subject of heated debate. Some depict God as completely outside of time, restless and distant, as if He had set the ball of the universe spinning and then stopped interfering. In this sense, our choices seem futile or redundant: if everything were to happen the way it was meant to happen, what difference might we be able to make?

But the philosopher Boethius, V The consolation of philosophy, He argued that God was not only Disturbed time. Rather, it exists forever in presentexperiencing everything that goes along with his creativity. This does not mean rejecting God’s foreknowledge or his complex interventions (indeed, Boethius proposes this as an alternative to foreknowledge because foreknowledge is too simplistic); It indicates that He is on our side in our present awareness, not just hanging by a thread hoping we don’t fall into a hole.

So does the philosopher David Lewis He provides An optimistic view of fatalism. Although some events in the future are fixed, this should not prevent us from believing that we have the power to act. Seriously, we have no choice but to act As if Our choices make a difference.

Most importantly, we are capable of it Enjoy time. Savoring the present is not a matter of pleasure. Rather, it can be a way to bring us closer to God, and the ability to affirm the inherent joy in things without allowing those things to control us. C.S. Lewis, in his attempt to balance our relationship with pleasure, Sum it up “Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant hotels, but he will not encourage us to mistake it for our home.”

Boethius and Lewis’s rationalism deconstruct the irony of Aubrey’s fatalism. Whether everything will go as planned or not is irrelevant. There is no joy, no rational wisdom, in our desperate acceptance of certain final points; Perhaps it is their extremely assertive nature that inspires us to act in ways that inevitably change what was previously thought to be fixed.

From the point of view of Dey message (God’s mission to reconcile humanity with himself), his human portrayals have a necessity to silence doubts about nihilism. Our belief that we can participate in this mission through the help of the Spirit is one of the main thresholds that prevent us from drifting aimlessly through life.

As James K. Smith reminds us in his book How to inhabit time, We are both “trapped in the chapters of history and the actors shaping the future.”

It’s important that we come to terms with this—in order to build hope that can dismantle our cynicism—because our thoughts about it will color all of our experiences.

As Boethius wrote: “Whatever is perceived is perceived not according to its own power, but according to the power of those who perceive it.” In other words, we understand things according to our unique minds, personalities, and beliefs about the world. Everything we experience is colored by our emotional state. That’s why Elliot and Aubrey’s outlook on the situation is completely normal. Their interpretation of the situation is symbolic of the stage they are in their life.

studies We’ve long noticed that our tendency to take risks begins to decline in our twenties. As we age, risks seem less attractive until they finally seem foolish, careless, and reckless. This is why Aubrey’s interpretation of the situation can only see pain, while for Elliott, taking risks in order to experience love cannot be no logical.

But this is part of the complex design of how life is organized. If we didn’t have neurological tendencies telling us to take risks, we wouldn’t do it. This would ensure more emotional security, but think of all the great art, beautiful relationships, and world-changing business ventures we could have missed out on if our risk aversion had peaked earlier.

Like Cormac McCarthy books“It is good that God has kept the facts of life from the little ones when they are just starting out, otherwise they would not have had the heart to start at all.” Or, as Eliot himself put it, “If you’re not young and stupid, you’re never brave enough to do anything.”

Finally, Aubrey’s position is, in my opinion, completely unrealistic. People tend to forgive themselves for the choices they made in the past. Studies have found that the majority of regrets we feel at the end of our lives surround the things we regret Didn’t do that Doing the opposite of the things we do He owns finished. This is usually because when we decide not to do something, we may make ourselves feel better in that moment, but the slow deployment of “what ifs” leads to longer-term thinking. disappointment That outweighs the initial comfort of taking the safe road.

Thus, perhaps the most obvious lesson in the film is a Shakespearean one: it is literally better to love than not to love at all. This coming-of-age film is the perfect reminder that we shouldn’t allow suffering — even direct and understandable possible Of suffering – to prevent us from having the experiences that make life worth living.

1. I’m 95% sure this is the dialogue, but I have no way to verify it because it has now left my local theater. However, it still captures the essence of the dialogue. ↩︎