‘Boyhood’: Or ‘growing up’ millennial

There’s a moment from the opening scenes of Boyhood I can’t seem to get out of my head. It’s not the obvious one that serves as the movie’s poster—Mason staring skyward, completely of the moment, embodying a sense of hopeful wonder only boyhood might contain. That one’s nice, maybe the nicest scene until the movie’s end, but the moment I keep returning to in Boyhood is when Mason and his family leaves to Houston and chasing the car on his bike is Mason’s childhood best friend.

The way director Richard Linklater shoots this moment is unnerving: The camera rattles from Mason’s point of view, catching glimpses of Mason’s friend in between thickets of straw grass, but his figure never fully appears. The car speeds further and further away, but this phantom keeps tearing after Mason. Try as hard as he may, the phantom can’t catch the car—or Mason. There’s a yearning to the moment; everyone involved—Mason, Mason’ friend, Linklater, the audience—wants one visible sightline between Mason and his friend before they’ll likely never see each other again. But it doesn’t happen. Mason isn’t quite clear what he sees and emotionlessly turns and sits down. Then he fights with his sister Samantha.

When Mason stops looking for his friend, it doesn’t mean he’s not there. It feels quite the opposite; it’s like his friend never stops chasing him. Because he’s essentially transformed into a memory now, something Mason once knew, but doesn’t any longer. As hard as he tries, his recollection of this friend will be like that moment—obscure nostalgia.

I keep returning to this moment because Boyhood is a movie about memories and how we develop memories and how those memories impact us years later without us even realizing it. Watching Boyhood feels eerily similar to how our own childhoods are remembered. It’s a collection of moments, nothing continuous, that ground our experiences and character.

In a less skilled director’s hands, this movie would be a disaster. But Linklater aptly recognizes that life’s shaping influences aren’t its obvious moments, but the small, quiet ones. Mason’s (first) alcoholic stepfather Bill beating his mother and throwing a whiskey glass at him mightily impacts him, but what really fucks Mason up is that same alcoholic stepfather forcing him to shave his head without permission. (And what cheers up Mason isn’t his mother reassuring him he looks beautiful anyways and that don’t worry, son, I’ll have a talk with him when we get home; it’s some random girl passing him a note saying she like his haircut after all his classmates just laughed in his face.)

By its nature and timing, Boyhood is the most millennial movie that exists. It captures the lives of children growing up with their parents’ bad choices, as the aftermath of divorces, amidst a faster and faster-changing world. Mason and Samantha are dragged through three divorces, split visitation hours, confusing and conflicting emotions between loving their parents separately yet equally despite each parent slyly talking shit about each other, experiencing transformative life talks in greasy bowling alley bars, and these parents at times making decisions that best suit themselves instead of their children. This is all while navigating the travails of ‘growing up,’ especially ‘growing up’ with the Internet and constantly advancing technology, which presents a whole new set of existential problems to digest. (Hold that thought.)

That Mason’s parents divorce and remarry other people seems wildly appropriate to the millennial childhood. It may come across as cynical, but I’m almost more surprised when somebody tells me their parents are (happily) married instead of divorced. (Full disclosure: My parents are divorced.) I meet that statement with skepticism, wondering if their parents have a) given up or b) should be divorced or c) might in fact be (happily) married. The first two thoughts usually fade away with time*, and I stop doing that 22-year-old thing I do where I’m so sure of everyone else’s lives.

*Okay, they don’t truly ‘fade away.’ What happens is I choose to believe the evidence that supports option c) because that’s a more worthwhile existence than believing options a) or b). Which isn’t to say nobody’s parents are (happily) married anymore—damn that’s a dangerous thought—but circumstantial evidence leads me toward at least thinking about it. I wish I didn’t.

But his parents’ divorces doesn’t instill some misplaced misanthropy in Mason (or me) because that’s not where adolescent boys learn about girls or love nowadays, if ever. Mason gets invited to an abandoned house by his friend where they’re supervised by that friend’s older brother. A couple other kids come, too, including the older brother’s friends. There they drink beer and talk about girls and their sexual exploits with those girls.

I tried to explain this to a girl I love not too long ago, but this is how boys introduce themselves. Boyhood does a much better job of capturing it than I did, especially how it grounds those talks to seem less absurd than they really are. Every time I meet new guy friends or catch up with old ones, the conversation always pops up: ‘Get any pussy lately?’ It makes me wonder if some guys have sex only to brag about it to their friends afterward. And it’s not like everyone involved in these conversations believes half the shit they’re spewing—look at Mason, who not too soon after falls hopelessly for a girl who breaks his heart and displaces him into a serious funk for months. In that ‘guy talk’ moment, however, Mason embraces that boyish conversation and looks delighted and intrigued by it. It’s possible to be both.

Which is what Boyhood mostly concerns itself with: The both-ness and in-between-ness of moments and memories. It’s possible that Mason loses some things with his troubled adolescence and divorced parents, some things that might be deemed ‘normal’ or ‘essential’ to societal inclinations, but he also gains perspective and moments that others might never experience. He might be better off.

It’s not outlandish to believe millennials have experienced the most significant amount of changes during their childhoods compared to previous generations. (Cue every person older than 30 scoffing.) We’ve been through 9/11, had computers creep into every facet of our lives, learned to concern ourselves with our ‘brands,’ bought each version of the iPod, watched as America transformed itself into a largely service economy, had a black man named Barack Hussein Obama elected President of the United States, experience firsthand the dissolution of the typical nuclear family, and feel our world expand from national to global almost overnight.

With all this perpetual change, two attitudes could develop: a) encroaching numbness to the world, an existential dread that nothing matters and everything and one will perish soon enough or b) that with all this change, there’s extreme optimism to where we’re going, that everything matters and everyone has some purpose to live out.

Boyhood presents option b).  The movie ends with Mason, his roommate, his roommate’s girlfriend, and her friend Nicole eating pot brownies and hiking Big Bend National Park.

Nicole and Mason have this exchange:

Nicole: “You know how everyone’s always saying seize the moment? I don’t know, I’m kind of thinking it’s the other way around, you know, like the moment seizes us.”

Mason: “Yeah. Yeah, I know, it’s constant, the moments, it’s just — it’s like it’s always right now, you know?”

If it sounds like two kids having high-sounding thoughts, it’s because it (kind of) is. But it feels right, at least for millennials. It explains the best way to experience an ever-changing world without being swallowed by it. We’re not defined by our Boyhood but the product of it. After it, we’re whoever we want to be.

And looking back on it, boyhood wasn’t that bad; it was quite wondrous really.