Nights to Remember 6 comments

By A.G. Harmon

Last weekend, I went to see The Hangover, hoping for a really funny movie; I’d read some good notices. In the first fifteen minutes, four men at a bachelor party in Las Vegas steal up to a hotel rooftop; with some Jägermeister, they click their glasses and toast the coming night. Then the shot fades.

The next morning, they wake to find their suite filled with an unexplained baby, a tiger, and a smoldering chair, among other things. One of their number, the soon-to-be-groom, is missing.

The jokes after that are pretty much what you’d expect—funny enough, as far as it goes. I have to say though, with Ed Helms in it (from The Office), I thought the whole thing would be more surprising. I hold much higher hopes for Bruno, the trailer of which was funnier than the last dozen comedies I’ve seen.

It’s giving nothing away to wonder not so much about the appeal of buddy movies—I’m as prone to them as the next guy—but about nights like the one portrayed here. Having been in a goodly number of weddings (27 Tuxes is an exaggeration, but not enough of one), I went to a goodly number of bachelor parties. They routinely followed a script, and everybody knew his part. There was always a great deal of music, shouting, and windows being let down and hung out of (this must ring a bell?); nothing very novel about any of it; the self-consciously uninhibited are all alike.

And upon reflection, it seems the whole thing was more than a bit desperate. Not because this was some guy’s last hootenanny before he took up the old ball-and-chain (I remember one friend actually being chained to a ball the whole night—a bowling ball soldered to a manacle; who in the world paid for that?) but because there was this intense need to have a story—a great story—one to tell forever about that night. Once, a group of us got lost from the others, and went on a furious, manic hunt to regain the party—mad that we’d fallen out of the ever-lovin’ story.

But what story? Why was it so important? What did everybody hope to gain from this tired kabuki? Yes, yes, yes—the prerogatives of youth and all that—but it was more than that too. Such frenzied exuberance was also meant to reassure us that we hadn’t missed out—we’d gotten to the dance—we’d caught the train.

And now I know that such motivations never truly leave us either, no matter what the age or occasion. It’s being afraid that if we haven’t driven something very fast, climbed something very high, or explored something very dark and deep—all the while skirting the law and flirting with disaster—we’ll have been cheated.

There’s a similar frenzy in needing the most number of travel stickers on your steamer trunk—more exotic places, more local cuisine, more native dances, more crafts of the artisanal stripe, haggling to get them in a pidgin or bartering to buy them with your blue jeans. Rise early, or never go to sleep—drink absinthe and smoke cigars while you listen to Fado. You can manufacture proof of your joie de vive by paying a guy to let you bungee-jump from a balloon. He’ll photograph the whole business for an extra $10.95: “See how alive I once was?” you can say.

They have their value, these memories; I don’t want to set up a false dichotomy; good times and old friends. But it just seems they enjoy an inexplicable command of place. Why do we trot them out so—our passport of “experiences”—when we want to account for our histories? They hang about like a cheap screen-saver, monotonously scrolling through a Kodak catalogue of our most vivid encounters.

And what do any of them say for what we know of life, or whether we ever really lived it? If they’re so crucial to an authentic existence, then how do you make sense of people like Emily Dickinson? In her little house, with that little yard, in that little town—hidden behind her own smallness, disguised behind her own strangeness. You can’t argue she didn’t truly live, though by the number of experiences she had, it would seem she was only a sad little provincial, and that Paris Hilton got the better end of the stick.

And what of the stylites or the anchorites? They too were chained, like my buddy, but not for a joke; chained for keeps; so that they could stand still in the dark—so that they could drown in their God.

But in the way of things, the interior experience holds so little weight against the experiential. Dickinson is lauded now, but if her counterpart lived down the street? We’d all be shaking our heads at the waste. And most sobering yet (a fitting way to end this, it seems) how is it that even if we admit the false accounting of superfluous things—How fast? How far? How late?—it still has a certain power over us—though we’re old enough to know better, and should be able to tell a real story from one that’s not even worth making up.