At one point in adult Stan’s narration about the time and setting of his childhood in '60s America, he sums up the era saying, “The world was changing, and so was how we saw ourselves in it.”
In so many ways, Stan’s words encapsulate the perspective of coming-of-age cinema in Hollywood, where time and age are as important as the characters being affected by the vagaries and milestones of said time and age. Who better than Richard Linklater — the behemoth behind rite-of-passage storytelling — to recreate nostalgia through the powerful memory of pop culture, current affairs, and their collective impact on us personally?
Linklater’s latest release Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood dropped so silently on Netflix in early April that one would have easily missed it over the marketing noise that lesser deserving films have continued to generate. The animated film that is devoid of the usual trappings of dramatic storytelling — a villain, some conflict or even adolescent romance — relies on its simplicity of idea and realistic portrayal of characters set at a time when the world was indeed racing in space and in society. Through this all, Stan becomes a man on a mission (quite literally), and his hindsight narration is what talks us through his coming of age.
When you watch Apollo 10 1/2, you are reminded of what made you admire the man behind Dazed and Confused, Slacker, Boyhood, the Before trilogy, and School of Rock.
The inspiration and the subsequent passion with which Linklater can show personal transition through the prism of time, the detailing to paint as realistic a picture of the era, and the ability to trace mental growth through the sum total of experiences, resonates in so many of his works.
Like Cynthia says in Dazed and Confused, “I’d like to stop thinking of the present as some minor, insignificant preamble to something else.” Because the present is not a preamble in Linklater’s works; it is often the culmination of years of brewing and gestating. If Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and Before Sunrise were all set in a day in the lives of their characters, movies like the highly experimental Boyhood and even Apollo 10 ½ provide us with the benefit of distance of time.
In Apollo 10 ½, the first hour easily is a flashback narration of all the events that have contributed to the moment that Stan throws up in a lunar module simulator. It is as if Linklater painstakingly pieced together a 1960s visual version of Billy Joel’s 'We Didn’t Start the Fire' but in a more small-town middle-class Texan way.
These moments are signposts in the unending road trip that nostalgia can be. Quite unlike the unimaginative way big sci-fi franchises evoke nostalgia through punch-line gimmicks and character reappearances, Linklater takes much effort to remind you of your past by punctuating the narrative with more universal events and topics. So as the character comes of age on screen, you too subconsciously undergo a transformation by pivoting yourself within the narrative.
It is the same reason why a film like 83 worked for several generations preceding the millennials. It made us all pause for a second and think: Where were we when India won the World Cup? Did you watch the final match? How did you feel when the David versus Goliath nature of this struggle played out?
Similarly, there are so many such questions that remind us of how real-life events hasten up our growth. How old were you when seatbelts became mandatory? Where were you when blasts ripped through Bombay? What were you doing when America put a man on the moon?
Good or bad, these public events contribute substantially to who we become. Linklater, while capitalising on the life-altering nature of current affairs, constantly makes it an experience that is as external as it is internal. Like Stan says, as the world changed, we too were changing how we saw ourselves in it.
Set in the noughts, School of Rock was as much about the students of Horace Green Prep School finding their voices and identities through music, as it was about their substitute teacher (and frequent Linklater collaborator Jack Black) Dewey Finn growing up into a more responsible, less slacking adult. Like in Apollo 10 ½, School of Rock hinges its transformation on the shoulders of fourth graders who are not just at the threshold of middle school but are months away from the beginning of unprecedented hormone rushes.
Even Dazed and Confused straddles overgrown boys who refuse to man up and kids in the freshman year with spurts of edgy experimentation that reminds them that the '70s are just as cool as the '60s. Linklater frequently employs the concept of a rose-tinted past coming in the way of a present that is actually in the midst of being historic.
So much of our own emotional and mental evolution has got to do with accepting the present without judgment as a state of transition, where we are writing the very history we will look back upon with smiles on our faces. Linklater’s mastery of the coming-of-age genre has everything to do how we identify with his characters’ personal and public nostalgia. It fuels our own acceptance of the contemporary; that the present is definitely not a preamble, but the main text itself.
Apollo 10 ½ is streaming on Netflix.
Senior journalist Lakshmi Govindrajan Javeri has spent a good part of two decades chronicling the arts, culture and lifestyles.
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