But I don’t feel tardy…
On Friday I went to see Michael Apted’s documentary 49 Up. It’s the seventh film in the Up series, which began by interviewing ten seven-year-old English schoolchildren in 1964, and checking in with them every seven years (at ages 14, 28, 35, 42, and now 49) I’d never heard of the series before reading the Cinemateque listing, and apparently I’m the last person on the planet to know about it.
Fortunately for me, this edition incorporates a great deal of footage from the previous Up films. Despite this, and despite the 135-minute running time, I felt like I was missing a lot of the context that would make these people interesting to me. The film consists of a lot of sit-down type interviews, with Apstead off-camera asking fairly point-blank questions about what they think about their lives. Their satisfaction in their career and family life, interspersed with previous interviews with their younger selves talking about what they want out of life, whether they want kids, and so on. I found it sort of surprising that a majority of them, it seemed, ended up roughly where their 7, 14, and 28-yo selves had predicted. Most of them were happily second-married, with between three and five generally normal-seeming children. They were all basically generous, decent people. Makes you think life isn’t so hard after all, really.
Except for John, the working-class kid from Liverpool, who spent most of his early adulthood living in squats in London and wandering homeless in rural Northern England. At 49 he’s become a Social Democratic politician on income assistance. His life was the most interesting, basically because suffering is inherently dramatic. And also, terrifying as it sounds, I found him by far the most relatable. Like him, and unlike most of the other subjects, I feel a severe discontinuity with my past hopes, desires and fears. Although my life hasn’t gone off the rails quite so catastrophically, where I am now, fast approaching thirty, has very little in common with my expectations ten and twenty years ago.
The point of the documentary isn’t really drama, though, or even character. It felt much more like a nature show, an oddly distant anthropological study of the baby boomers. On a typical reality tv show, the subjects self-select for shamelessness; here, they were chosen as children, nominated by their school boards. The fact that all but one of them has stuck in there for 42 years is a little surprising. One subject deals with the intrusion into her privacy by not allowing her husband or children to take part in the film. Nevertheless, she continues, perhaps out of a sense of obligation to the project. Another uses the project to promote his charitable organization in Bulgaria. “Watching people get old, bald and fat,” he jibes, “… it’s thrilling, I’m sure.”
And it is, in a way. It’s life, and what could really be more interesting. Phillip Roth’s book Everyman is interesting in the same way, dealing with the life trajectory of a mostly ordinary, good-hearted, selfish man who gets a job, gets married, has kids, has affairs, gets divorced, gets old and then dies. Of course, the novel form allows Roth much more license to explore the nuances of inner life and self-justification, which are all the interesting parts of ordinary lives.