Sometimes nostalgia makes you revisit things that, in all honesty, you should just leave alone in memory. The revisiting inevitably ruins things, and you wish you could've just left well enough alone. Here's a select three items from my life like that.
1) Goonies. I'm pretty sure that any kid who was grade, middle, or high school-aged during the 1980s has some psychological attachment to this film. I myself saw it with my cousins at my hometown's single-screen theater. We rode to town in my uncle's pickup, us kids in the back, with my uncle driving and my mom up front with him. In one of those rare, sharp moments of memory, I recall us lying in the covered pickup bed, pretending to sleep and making raucous, fake snoring sounds. (Also, we were lying down to avoid a cop seeing us, because riding in a pickup bed, covered or not, was not legal even in rural, mid-1980s Illinois.)
So, Goonies. What I remember from the movie was : kids, pirate ship, gold, funny-looking guy, and underground chase scene. 100% awesome! Right!?!
Well, upon a re-watch at my local theater's classic movie series several years ago, I discovered that Goonies is overly long, nonsensical, and definitely less than 100% pure awesome. Not only does a lot of it barely hang together, some of the lead-up to the underground kid pirate ship gold pirate booty chase scene is downright BORING. As an adult, one of the only interesting features of this film is young Josh Brolin (mmmmm, Brolin), whose older brother jock character only gets involved because he can drive, and because a hot girl ends up in the kid pack being chased by the robbers.
So, yeah. I would disrecommend re-watching Goonies.
2) The Invisible Circus, by Jennifer Egan. This one stings in a very particular way. This book arguably changed the course of my life. My mom had brought it home for the library in the summer, and for reasons I can't remember, I picked it up and started reading it. I was a sophomore in high school, and the story of a young woman from San Francisco following her deceased, hippie older sister's trail to Europe in the mid-1970s was vividly realistic to me. I had been studying German, and Egan's descriptions of her protagonist reconnecting with the sister's ex-boyfriend in Munich launched Germany from some dusty, black-and-white photo location in my history books, the place where multiple world wars and a massive genocide had started, to a real, modern, sun-drenched country (a veritable Instagram, come to life!) full of hot ex-boyfriends who were ready for some sexual healing to get over their dead girlfriends who died under mysterious circumstances. It is not an overstatement to say this book was the reason I decided to major in German in college.
So why, after several years following graduation, did I insist on re-reading this book that was such a touchstone for me as a teenager? Well... We all make mistakes.
The book begins in San Francisco, and as someone who has now lived here 7 years (longer than any other single location aside from where I grew up), I'm pretty convinced the author had not actually visited here. I realize lots of authors haven't lived in or visited locales they write about, but Egan's SF descriptions seem especially flat, like something gleaned from a Fodor's travel guide and a few pictures on huge nascent Internet. Even more egregious, the descriptions of my beloved Deutschland felt like so much hot air as well. Beyond that, the motivations of the characters seemed frankly unbelievable. What had seemed so adult to me as a teenager felt, well, childish to me even in my early 20's.
I've read several of Egan's other books (The Emerald City, Look at Me), and while there's been none I liked better, I think Invisible Circus belongs to her juvenile writings and is quite different from the rest of her works.
3) Gilmore Girls. Ahhhh, Gilmore Girls. What's not to love? Witty mother-daughter repartee, bitchy controlling grandmother, precocious daughter falling in love with nice boy from town, the BFF who has a girly clubhouse in her walk-in closet where she hides her contraband music and magazines from her religious immigrant mother... This show practically defines the term, whimsiquirkilicious. It's like a melange of everything I loved as a child growing up in a small town, with series like Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley High, and Saddle Club, and Judy Blume's many novels guiding my understanding of how slightly older, cooler, richer, more urban girls acted. Lauren Graham is superb as the mother, Alexis Bledel was heart-breaking as young Rory, and Melissa McCarthy shows the early promise of the comedic genius that we all grew to love in Bridesmaids and beyond.
I have only re-watched a few episodes of early GG, because I just. couldn't. after that. Everything I recalled loving about the show (see preceding paragraph) just felt... Off? Too slow, too contrived, too drawn-out, too many subplots, just... TOO. I knew from previous experience not to force it, so I stopped while I was ahead and moved on to something else (Wildfire, Make It or Break It, Bunheads) on Netflix to fulfill my need for fast-talking, unrealistic, female-centered dramas.
So, there it is. Not everything is ruined by revisiting, however. I could still watch My So-Called Life once per year, I still love U2's Achtung Baby as much now as when my mom first bought it for me on cassette tape ca. 1992, Tori Amos's early records are practically part of my DNA from so many repeat listenings, and Are You There, God? It's me, Margaret, is still amazing in its optimistic frankness about coming of age.
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