There are few things as exciting as trying to figure out 100 films that someone would deem their “favorites.” At a certain point, the topic jumps from quality and jumps to something personal. A story will connect with you not so much because it’s the best told or most groundbreaking, but because it reminds you of a time and place. For as maligned as “dated” cinema often is, I have come to embrace it as I’ve grown older, to have these aesthetic choices that immediately transport you back to a moment. I love watching a 1930s film and reveling in the wonky distortion between silent and talkies. I love roller rink dramas of the late 70s if just for how sincerely they embody a fad that means nothing now but used to be the biggest deal in the world.
To me, it’s almost boring if your Top 100 is nothing but classics. I want to see your personality shining through in these off-ball, sometimes forgotten choices that are held dear. Who cares if it has a bad score on Rotten Tomatoes? Just embrace what makes you happy, inspires you to create art and live a life authentic to yourself. As I’m slowly approaching my Mid-30s, I have found it to be actually reassuring to do this and it’s why I’ve chosen to revisit a film that five years ago changed my life. It’s not necessarily one that has a fervent fan base akin to Spielberg or Tarantino, but I feel reflects a lot about who I am in a very direct way. That is why without Alex Lehmann’s masterful Blue Jay (2016), I don’t know that I’d be the person that I am today.
As a student of 2010s indie, I have a consistent relationship with Mark Duplass especially as director, writer, actor, and even producer. Among the class of filmmakers who defined a generation of indie, he is someone who remained prolific, whose very presence at least promised me some relief that this could be good. Him and brother Jay Duplass were the perfect levels of deadpan, low/no stakes comedies that still comfort my soul. I turn to them when I need something peaceful and, when casting him opposite Sarah Paulson fresh off of the god tier Carol (2015) it felt like the perfect evening watch. Even if it’s become more of a risk I’m not willing to take, I was introduced to it as an anonymous Netflix release on their app and decided to take a deep breath and just dive in.
I was 28 when I first saw Blue Jay in August 2017, and certain emotions were running deep in me. A lot of what drives me is placing my life into a narrative, and you best believe that the looming threat of turning 30 was on my mind. The media does an amazing job of glamorizing your 20s as a prime era of your life, a vitality that you’ll never get again. You’ll fade into irrelevance and suddenly nothing you do matters. Returning to college after a disastrous run in my early 20s, there was some pride in trying to prove myself but also the sense that life had passed me by. Given that 2018 also marked my 10 year high school reunion, I was so in tune with my mortality and had no real way of expressing it.
The best that can be said is I had an idea. I wanted to write a novel that served as a moratorium on this decade of life, which felt like one that was crucial to hold onto and make some lasting remark. I had written short stories, but never sat down to craft a novel. As a career writer, it felt like something that I needed to do. Given that I wanted to do it by the last day of being 29, my inability to get started seemed confounding but alas, inspiration was not there.
I didn’t watch Blue Jay as that catalyst, and yet certain things clicked almost immediately. Through the black and white cinematography, I saw the story unfold in its own unassuming way. Duplass and Paulson played former high school sweethearts celebrating their 20th anniversary, if just by happenstance. Like the best of stories, the starting point feels almost accidental, finding the duo meeting in a grocery store aisle. For most people, this exchange would amount to a quick “How’s your life been?” before checking out. Instead, this leads to something much more substantial and, over 80 minutes, presents a story that is among the most lived in I’ve ever witnessed.
How do you depict a romance two decades on, when your life has established so much without the other person? The void is invisible and each person has room to compensate for whatever story they want. I’m not entirely sure how Lehmann directed the film, but it does feel like the actors had a lot of say in how they were molded. Each had their own significant events that defined their defeated state of adulthood, where the happenstance meeting felt like something greater than just meeting an old friend. It felt like a chance to connect to a part of yourself that was long forgotten and repressed, to remember the progress you've made throughout your life. There’s a treasure trove of inside jokes that nobody but your friend knows, and to be able to use them after so long feels like reviving something deceased.
The only major difference between me and the characters of Blue Jay is that they’re Gen-X and I am firmly in the Millennial camp. While I lived through a lot of their key nostalgia, I was a child who had no connection to the high school experience of the 90s. Even then, I grew up on the cusp of the shift between something comparatively analog to the digital era where everything moved faster. I grew up in a time where recording songs off the radio onto a tape was still necessary, where the dial-up conundrum meant I knew that connection sound oh so well. I will never claim to know what it meant to grow up as contemporaries of Duplass and Paulson, but in some respect, I recognize so much of their journey.
For me, there’s nothing more sublime than a film that simply allows their characters to exist. I want to see two people sitting in a diner recounting their day for 20 minutes. There’s something to the way that a trail of laughter can become this greater emotion for the audience. It can be found when visiting liquor stores and discovering that the owner is the same man you knew as a teenager. How do those relationships change over time? Without having to overstate a backstory, one can know what it is like to live in someone else’s shoes and escape.
Even then, the most profound moment of this film is the one where Duplass takes Paulson back to his mother’s house. In a lot of respect, it hasn’t changed since their time together 20 years ago. It’s the equivalent of going to a swap meet and finding dozens of stories buried in plain sight. The only difference is that these two characters are capable of giving meaning to everything. On the one hand, it’s a sign of great improvisation made better by the duo’s stellar chemistry. However, it’s also the impressive gift of a story that centers on a bittersweet concept but wraps it in a familiar nostalgia that we all have. As we grow older, there is an unavoidable desire to look back and recontextualize history as something profound. Maybe it’s not, but Blue Jay depicts a friendship that finds beauty even in the mundane moments.
It’s the type of story where specificity makes everything better. I’m aware that some would say pop culture references cheapen a story and take away from a greater emotional impact. This is especially true if you don’t have any connection to that extratextual media. However, I am of the mindset that at times, especially in the consumerist America of the modern age, that it’s inescapable. You can write good stories that are void of any greater cultural connection, but I think there’s something to using it correctly. To me, a reference can work beautifully if the joke isn’t recognizing the media itself, but how it relates to the individual. It can build character and reflect interests that shaped someone’s mentality.
I think of this especially in relation to the “Wuthering Heights” scene. In what may be the film’s finest moment, the two meet around a bookshelf that Duplass’ mother has featuring a variety of novels. The Emily Bronte book comes up as one that Paulson tried to get him to read, and the discussion of its quality compared to other texts, notably bad erotic novels and private diaries, unveils this joyful antagonism between them that finds an awkward part of the past that doesn’t bother either of them. It’s not a literary study, but more an example of how art gave them a sense of connection and the belief that they could persuade anyone to read it. The recurring presence of “Wuthering Heights” reflects these small intellectual ways that they differ, proving their small inabilities to truly be connected.
Given that later scenes find them recounting wanting to be a rapper who opens for Public Enemy and slow dancing to Annie Lennox, there’s a whole world that’s not on screen. There isn’t a single flashback full of goofy, dated wardrobe and yet the audience feels like they have experienced a whole relationship with them. These small hallmarks are necessary to make them feel greater, to reflect on the hours they’ve spent together and built that intimacy. Even if the viewer has never read “Wuthering Heights” or heard Lennox, there’s a familiarity to the emotions they feel for it that are universal. The joy it brings these characters is convincing enough to believe they’re real, desperately clinging to something that without would make them strangers.
I don’t wish to spoil the big reveal that crops up in the closing stretch, but the story within itself embodies feelings that I’ve experienced in the years since seeing Blue Jay. As a writer, I am attracted to these small connections that make us feel desired and welcomed in the world. To me, nothing is more exciting than two characters who “get it” in the intellectual sense, who can walk around Before Midnight (2014) style and make you feel like these strangers are your best friends. A small bump in conversation can lead to a recurring tease or present a personality flaw. Duplass and Paulson do this with such frequency that it’s amazing how effortless it is.
How did this ultimately change my life? I think the parallels are obvious when considering how much I was thinking about growing old and thinking about high school through the lens of a Facebook page where a lot of alumni were sharing stories of their lives over the past 10 years. At the time, I felt inadequate and unsure of what I really could share. Watching Blue Jay, I finally cracked that necessary inspiration for writing a novel around these insecurities and capturing a moment of my life that I knew I would want to look back on.
To me, I wanted to be another book on that “Wuthering Heights” shelf, where we pull it off and laugh about the ways I used to be. It’s the idea that I used to have certain regimented thinking, and saw patterns that have since been deemed ridiculous. To me, it was a piece of nostalgia, a scrapbook of my past. It was connecting me to the past while creating a new memento along the way. Three years removed from “Apples & Chainsaws,” and I remember the effort I put into writing and editing that book, believing that I needed to put everything into it. That was my first novel, and one I’m very proud of. I am as nostalgic now for what’s in the story as I am writing it. I can only imagine what I’ll think in 10 years, or if anyone else picks it up and questions what I was thinking when I wrote certain chapters.
I know that one can argue this hardly qualifies as “life changing” in a substantial sense, but to me Blue Jay embodied enough of what I aspired to as a writer that I wanted to create my own story. Our stories are very dissimilar, but it launched me into writing longer tales and trying to find something personal that was worth exploring. I don’t know that I’ve reached my peak, but what I can say is that without Blue Jay, there’s a good chance that this would’ve looked much different, that I maybe never would’ve written “Apples & Chainsaws,” and my own past would continue to remain a mystery. What do I have to show for anything? At least now, I have something tangible, to connect me to a history that can be my own long after I’ve disappeared. It’s a lot to read into a story that’s essentially looking back at high school maybe a bit too longingly, but sometimes you need to know where you’ve been to know where you’re going. For me, this was the moment that all made the most sense.
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