The Big Chill represents all the failures &entitled attitudes of the Boomer gen

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How the quintessential Boomer movie developed into an unintended parable about how the Flower Power generation missed what actually went wrong

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The Big Chill was a major cinematic event in 1983, earning $56 million at the box office (about $150 million today) and getting Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, plus Best Supporting Actress (Glenn Close). Boomer audiences absolutely adored it and made the soundtrack a huge hit as well. It’s amusing to note that this movie about how yippies turned yuppies (Kevin Kline’s Harold, the host of the gathering, has gotten rich by opening a chain of “Running Dog” sneaker stores) was itself an element in a synergistic corporate-branding strategy.

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The Motown-released soundtrack was key to reviving the label’s value as a nostalgia brand after key artists, such as Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Marvin Gaye, had left. On the backs of The Big Chill soundtrack, which surpassed the Saturday Night Fever album to become the longest-charting movie soundtrack album, Motown’s strategy evolved to a nostalgia play. It began strip-mining its catalogue for licensing deals, throwback television specials, and other exploitation of Boomer memories (Gaye’s recording of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” became the anthem of a raisin commercial). Scarcely eleven years after the Flower Power dream died with the defeat of George McGovern, the Boomer-nostalgia industry was bursting into full bloom. Consider how little 2010 nostalgia you see around you today, and you’ll quickly grasp how unusual Boomers were in choosing to handcuff themselves to a single moment while everyone else adapted.

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When it appeared, The Big Chill seemed to be about many things: love, sex, friendship, drugs, nostalgia, and leftover Sixties ideals. Today, though, it’s centrally and conspicuously about one thing: the sound of entitled Boomers whining. 

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To recap the action: A handsome n’er-do-well staying in his friends’ gigantic Southern plantation-style summer house with his hot younger girlfriend kills himself by slitting his wrists. So his old college friends from the University of Michigan (class of approximately 1971) gather at the same house to mourn him for the weekend. They are a physician (Close) and her husband (Kline), the sneaker-store tycoon; a TV star (Tom Berenger); a People-magazine writer (Jeff Goldblum); a rich attorney (Mary Kay Place); a drug dealer (William Hurt); and a housewife (JoBeth Williams) whose husband is a well-off ad executive. When everyone announces they intend to stay at the house for the weekend, Close’s Sarah Cooper whines, “Where are we gonna put everybody?” (It’s a real house: five bedrooms, five baths, 7,300 square feet, not counting the guest house.)

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The characters analyze themselves ceaselessly (to the point of videotaping interviews of themselves and one another) yet miss the most obvious things: Drug abuse, infidelity, and unrealistic expectations about life are poisoning them. These Boomers’ parents could have straightened them out in about five minutes, but Boomers are famously the generation that thought it could learn nothing from previous ones.

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William Hurt’s Nick, for instance, a character who seems to have strolled in from The Sun Also Rises (a Vietnam War wound left him impotent), had a perfectly good gig as a talk-radio shrink but left that in a crisis of meaning. He needs to quit dealing drugs and stop burying his problems with quaaludes, cocaine, and pot. If there were a sequel to this movie set in the Nineties, Nick would probably be dead because none of his friends bothered to push him into rehab. Instead, Harold offers him a flagrantly illegal insider-trading tip, which Harold hopes will lead to Nick’s getting a new job but could just as easily lead to Nick’s spending even more money on drugs.

More glaring than the drug problem in the movie, though, is the adultery problem. Sarah cheated on Harold with Alex because, she says, “I was just sick of being such a good girl.” People journo Michael has a girlfriend in New York City but has nevertheless brought a stack of condoms on this trip and starts hitting on Chloe during the funeral service. Sam the actor apparently cheated on his ex-wife, whom he left muttering the classic Boomer complaint of “boredom.” Karen is willing to cheat on her perfectly fine husband Richard with Sam if he’s up for it. Sam initially turns her down for her own good, but later the pair go at it anyway.

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I’m not even counting the famously magnanimous adulterous bonk, the unforgettable scene in which Sarah loans her husband Harold out to stud with Meg in order to impregnate the unhappy lawyer, whose most profound wish it is to have a child, though she previously had an abortion. By the way, neither Sarah nor Harold considers him to have any paternal responsibility whatsoever for any child that might result, just as Sam doesn’t like visiting his daughter because she is an uncomfortable reminder of his flaws. Let’s hear it for Boomer parenting.

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Richard understands how Sixties idealism wound up being a kind of lingering afterburn that made everybody itchy and unhappy. He has more of a Greatest Generation understanding that life is about tradeoffs: “But the thing is, nobody said it was gonna be fun. At least nobody said it to me.” The former student revolutionaries around him sit in stunned silence: Of course life is supposed to be fun! And romantic and irresponsible and hedonistic and free of commitment. Except the movie we are watching is a 100-minute lesson in why none of that works.

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