You still my boy, Blue: “Old School” turns 10
What are the responses when you’re pushing 30 and you toss out a message to your social network of choice to remind everyone that the great, anthemic, forever-quotable movie of your college years is about to turn 10 years old? Here’s a smattering.
“wow. i refuse to process this information.”
“that just blew my mind.”
“That’s not possible!”
But, indeed it is. “Old School,” the Luke Wilson/Vince Vaughn/Will Ferrell vehicle that hit theaters in February 2003 — the spring of my freshman year of college — is now a decade old. This means that it was also a decade ago, that same spring, when a couple of older guys in the town where I went to college (they were ancient, you know, 25 or 26) were so inspired by the movie’s pivotal “Mitchapalooza” party scene that they threw a “Markapalooza” backyard rager for a friend who, like Wilson’s character Mitch, had just gone through a breakup and needed to be, shall we say, re-introduced to society. I went with my friend Tess because we knew one of the guys from a local sports connection and he’d invited us. We were terrified. It was our first “grown-up party” (ha). A neighbor called the cops with a noise complaint and we scrambled up a fire escape to hide in the attic.
This means it was nearly a decade ago that my sophomore year hallmates kept the “Old School” DVD on repeat in a dusty common room where Collegiate Gothic windows were adorned with Christmas lights and beer stains and the handsome hardwood floors were mostly covered up with the stadium-seating complex they’d built the week before classes started to make sure their movie-watching and “Halo”-playing was optimized for prime viewing. (Priorities!)
And, yep, it was just about ten years ago when my friends cracked one “Old School” joke after another because, right around my 19th birthday, I started dating a 26-year-old law school graduate — which at the time seemed like a comically massive age gap, something that was only accentuated by just how quickly the relationship flopped. (If you never got around to seeing “Old School,” Mitch finds himself in a similar but significantly more inappropriate situation.) Re-watching the movie ten years later, almost every minute there’s something else that sets off some kind of throwback buzzer for me: That time when I had to escort a drunk friend home after a party and he chose to shout “We’re going streaking! Through the quad, to the gymnasium!” in the middle of a quiet courtyard. The way the energy in a crowded basement party would escalate when Andrew W.K.’s “Fun Night” came up on the mix CD. This was the movie that was the right movie at the right time for me, and probably for hordes of other young Americans born in the early ‘80s. These were the days when we were dumb as rocks. And, oh, the things we think we’ve learned since.
(As a side note, oddly enough, there are the things that I realize I didn’t understand when the movie first came out, the lines about that foreign concept called “adulthood.” The bits of dialogue in the opening scene, where Mitch escapes a drab business conference and his colleagues ask him if they can have his nametag because it means “two free drinks at the meet-and-greet,” suddenly make sense.)
It’s perfect, maybe, because it’s the nostalgia movie that’s particularly liberal with the kind of nostalgia it can instill. Unlike “Animal House” or “Porky’s,” it’s not a period piece. Nor does it call upon the viewer to reminisce for a specific era in the past, like “Hot Tub Time Machine” and its eponymous fantasy contraption that provides a direct route to the ‘80s. While “Old School”’s Frank, Mitch, and Beanie are ostensibly attempting to quench their thirst for a wild bygone youth, they only make reference to those days a scant number of times, usually involving Frank’s resurgent “Frank the Tank” alter ego. There are a few recollections in the dialogue that refer directly to the circa-1989 years in which the main characters would have been in high school, but all of them concern the band Whitesnake and its song “Here I Go Again.” There are no awkward prom photos or flashback scenes to drive this point home, and by 2003 Whitesnake was a fixture at college parties across America once again, thanks to laptop music libraries and a proliferation of post-Napster file-sharing services that meant no great party song ever had to go out of style.
And like any great party song, “Old School” has held up remarkably well. Sure, the fraternity guys are slouching around in the somewhat dated look of striped Izods and T-shirts layered over long sleeves — since then, jeans have gotten skinnier and plaid is no longer designated slob wear.But you have to really nit-pick to find the stuff that hasn’t lasted. The fact that the movie predates the smartphone revolution by a few years is only noticeable in a few scenes, like when Frank (Ferrell) has a cell phone conversation on an unwieldy flip phone with an antenna, or when Beanie (Vaughn), a local discount electronics store kingpin, hypes up his stores’ deals on beepers and DVD players. Never mind that Speaker City likely would have gone belly-up around 2009 when it could no longer compete with the likes of Amazon.
But, on that note, the timelessness of “Old School” is ironically what gives it away as being a 10-year-old film — basically because it probably just wouldn’t get made today, or at least not made very well.To greatly simplify a decade’s worth of American taste in R-rated comedy, the string of “Frat Pack” comedies starring the likes of Will Ferrell, Luke Wilson (and, more prolifically, brother Owen Wilson), and Vince Vaughn eventually ran out of steam, giving way to a largely Judd Apatow-guided path in the direction of nerd triumph tales and tableaux of recession-induced neurosis (even “Hot Tub Time Machine,” arguably the closest film thematically to “Old School” that’s been released in the past five years, falls into both of these camps).Compared to the past few years, “Old School” and its relative avoidance of pop-culture insideriness and a skewering of current events (be they a nationwide recession or the fear of a zombie apocalypse) seems quaint in comparison.
And as protagonists go, Frank and Beanie and Mitch probably wouldn’t cut it. The trio of “Old School” protagonists turn to reliving their college party days because, for the most part, they’ve screwed up their own lives because they’d plunged into adulthood when they still had a few years of boneheaded antics ahead of them. In 2013, their lives would’ve been pre-screwed-up for them. The stars wouldn’t be the 30-year-olds cobbling together a fraternity, but rather the mixed bag of misfits who chose to pledge — and there would probably be more than a few lines, however comical and profanity-ridden, about student loans or the dismal chances for a job after graduation.
It’s telling that a forthcoming Frat Pack revival, this summer’s “The Internship,” will feature Vaughn and Owen Wilson as 40-year-olds who find themselves unemployed and attempt to make their way up the ladder in Silicon Valley — the kingdom of the young, nerdy masters of 21st century pop culture (thanks to the likes of Reddit, YouTube, and the Kardashians’ Twitter accounts). A recession-meets-Silicon-Valley-boomtown flick is about as early-2010s as you can get. And maybe it’ll be great (or not). But it’ll be zeitgeisty, the exact adjective that “Old School” wasn’t. When a movie’s that tied to its place and time, it’ll drum up nostalgia a decade later. But it won’t be the sort of nostalgia that can be totally different for anyone who’s ever viewed it, as is the case with “Old School,” a story about any set of guys in any college town in some given year that doesn’t really matter.
Somewhere in a dimension that humans will probably never be able to access, in some sort of alternate-universe DVD commentary of this 90-minute comedy, there is a canon of “Old School” stories and lore, the anecdotes and tidbits and gossip sent into the ether with every repeat view by everyone who ever thought that this was their movie. It makes us talk. It makes us share stories. This was me. I was there. This was that party. There are, packed onto this impossible DVD, a million different stories about a million different late-night bashes starring a million different Frank the Tanks.
Ours gave me a piggy-back ride to a party once. He dropped me.
