The parts that bugged me: at first, I thought that the story wasn't well integrated with the period and place - like it could've happened anywhere (but I've kind of changed my mind about this). Why a crappy amusement park, why the 80s? Superficially, it seems to be a wink at the audience, like "look at how stupid this is, do you remember jelly bracelets and Mr. Belvedere?" But I accept that there's some purpose behind it. One, creating movies in the present is easier, but it dates them. They usually feel phony and distant quite quickly (see "Encino Man" - an example of a movie I think was made to be hyper-current). Two, I think that the emotional themes of the film - awkwardness, distance, longing, trust, betrayal, etc - are much more difficult to capture in a very modern film. Technology defeats too many of these things.
Consider: it is difficult to convey the awkwardness over the internet. Awkwardness tends to happen between 2 people, or a small group. It is a signal that this moment that is happening right now matters. Can you really have this kind of important moment over email or text message? Probably not as much. Over the phone? Yes, probably. But it is more in person, things happen. Or don't happen. But that is significant, too.
And I think about exactly why these kind of moments are difficult on Facebook or through text messages or something. Is it because we've basically censored out all of awkwardness from our lives? We've built up walls to shape what we do and what we see so it is too expected and too familiar? With the new forms of technology, it seems there are more and more ways to disengage with the difficult, awkward, less expected things. When something stupid happens, we can just delete it or push it away, right? And think about the ways we've stopped these things from happening to us. I think that the biggest leap for this pre-emptive strike on awkwardness was caller ID on phones.
The point is this: technology makes things move faster, but it has also slowed things down. Nowadays (hate that word), among the young and affluent, everything is supposed to be good and nothing is supposed to be bad. This is the de-facto state of affairs. The awkward, the crappy, etc - all of that gets minimized and pushed away. So everything is still a party. There's no bittersweet - just sweet, sweet, sweet.
In truth, I'm not sure we have become good at separating the 'public relations' piece of all of this - making others aware of how awesome everything in our lives is - from the 'actual communication' piece - getting across what these things mean to us or ought to mean to us. Can we communicate why this is important? Do we even know why this is important to us? And I think I have some idea about the inevitable conclusion to it all. When something is too awesome or you can't find the next something awesome enough to do, the dull grey clouds start gathering. Live your life like a person, not an arcade game, continually trying to set high scores.
This is a derail: the antithesis to all of this - this being heavy, rough, awkward, difficult, emotionally engaged - is "Entourage" (or what I remember of it, since I haven't seen it in a few years). The show is Everything is Awesome All the Time No Worries It Is Gonna Be Awesome. No actual problems, no conflict. It is too modern, or post-post-modern, or something. It is a television show that is either so terrifyingly out of step with the current cultural moment that it should be abandoned immediately (my choice), or so terrifyingly escapist and ought to succeed. In this way, Adventureland has a degree of cultural relevance - the heat-death of the 80s consumption bubble looks an awful lot like this one.
Anyway. The movie. This isn't related to anything I was just thinking about, but in a book I was reading a while ago it weighed the importance of the notion of unrequited love. Because the idea is that the unrequitedness made us want to become better people (not necessarily actually become better, but at least the desire was there). Isn't that the problem with some of these people? That their affections are always so requited, so frequently that they are just completely awful people.
