Posted on 02/25/2024 7:12:34 AM PST by Rummyfan
I know I've seen this film once, probably as a teenager shortly after it hit the video rental market. I don't remember much about it other than my parents and their Boomer friends absolutely loved it. And of course the soundtrack was a massive hit.
This line from the film near the end of the article stuck with me: "A long time ago we knew each other for a short period..."
How true this is. Looking back on high school, or college, I only knew those people for four years. It seemed like an eternity but it was only four years. And I don't know anything about them today, nor they me (other than the occasional Facebook post).
This was around the time that the term "yuppie" was coined (young urban professional) and this smarmy, self-important little group personified exactly what yuppies were.
Spending the weekend in a huge mansion together, driving around in Porsches, and fretting about the "changes" in their lives, it was at times insufferable. Even the movie soundtrack sounded like a curated playlist of the most overwrought and overplayed 1960s era tunes.
However, the movie did help define a turning point of our culture back then. By the mid 1980s, the young generation of the 1960s had fully transformed from the anti-establishment hippies we once thought they were to the more materialistic and wealth-accumulating generation we saw during the "go-go 80s".
It was also a time when the Democrat party began abandoning their base of lunchpail blue-collar working men and started becoming the party of the educated "professional" class, who look down on everybody else. Yuppies.
Decades later, the transition is complete. The "liberals" of the 1960s are now the establishment. With total control of academia, entertainment, and the media, they will happily put their jackboots on the necks of those who question authority or dare espouse any kind of traditional values.
Same here. I’m a boomer and don’t know what the word inheritance means. I had to pay out of my pocket to bury my dad. My wife’s parents died owing us $50,000 from making their mortgage payment for 12 years. But we have two friends the same age as us, one inherited a million dollars and the other $700,000. Yet we still split the restaurant tab.
Another Hollywood fever dream about Boomers. Not one Boomer I know has a life even remotely connected to anything in this movie. But great soundtrack.
The movie “The Big Chill” served as an indirect inspiration for my college housemates and me. It motivated us to embark on a class project aimed at writing a 501(c)(3) business plan. Our goal was to purchase our rented house, secure a low-interest loan, and establish a student housing organization.
Three and a half decades later, we have grown apart, some relationships even at the point of disdain, but the organization we started still exists, and has added a half dozen houses.
This epic line from an iconic 1980s hit was a lamentation of sorts about exactly that transition:
Out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. — “The Boys Of Summer” by Don Henley
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