Popcorn Noises

Cold Pizza Friday LV

A Braver, Newer World

Most of the time, when I sit down to write something for this ramshackle blog, I experience a lot of self-imposed pressure to be either really smart or occasionally really funny and, most of the time, the results are…well, they just are. At this particular moment, though, I don’t really feel like being smart or funny at all and don’t have the motivation to attempt to fake either one. Sorry.

Remember the scene from The Big Lebowski where John Goodman freaks out and pulls a gun in the bowling alley because their friend on another team—“Smokey”—slipped his toe over the line and refused to mark the frame a ‘0?’ The long-haired, “fragile pacifist” Smokey is played by a guy named Jimmie Dale Gilmore, who is not an actor by profession, but a country singer/songwriter. As far as I know, he hasn’t produced a ton of famous or memorable work, but has been slowly chugging along for several decades, which is admirable in its own way (if a bit tragic). He’s worked with Willie Nelson and spent most of the 70s in a Colorado ashram studying under a guru, just in case you were thinking he was the rough-and-tumble, young-Johnny-Cash kind of country singer. I honestly haven’t heard but a couple of his songs and, while his warm, warbly voice can have a pleasant quality in measured doses (like Neil Young in his softer moments), the songwriting can be sorta cheesy.

Ever see Kicking and Screaming, the 1996 post-collegiate directorial debut of Noah Baumbach (a.k.a. “that guy that works with Wes Anderson sometimes”)? There’s a flashback scene somewhere in the middle where our protagonist ‘Grover’ is at a “townie bar” with his new love interest ‘Jane’ (played by Olivia d’Abo), where they’re getting drunk and flirting and blah blah blah. At one point, Jane saunters over to the jukebox, starts pressing buttons, and tells Grover over her shoulder that “They only play country music in this bar.” I think it’s supposed to be some combination of coy, ironic, and earthy / ‘authentic’ (since the scene suggests country music at a working class bar has more to do with the ‘real world’ and ‘real feelings’ than college rock at a college bar). But as Jane and Grover go back to babbling and making eyes at each other, what should come wafting out of the background but the sonorous strains of Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Braver Newer World.”

Frankly, the whole of the song is not great. There’s a lot of glassy jangle on the guitar, lots of harmonic minor scales that sound vaguely-yet-stereotypically ‘Eastern,’ and vague lyrics about love being all you need or something. But that part where Gilmore hits the chorus and sings the line containing the song’s title—“It’s a braver, newer world you’ve found!”—has a surprisingly strong melodic cadence, a sense of uplift that grows out of Gilmore loosening up his voice a little bit. It’s the part of the song that comes on as Jane and Grover meaningfully lock eyes and it’s the only hook from the track that really sticks. Now, in movie context, it’s pretty clear that the “braver, newer world” is supposed to be our collegiate heroes falling in love with each other, but there’s also the extra level of irony (this is a 90s movie, you see) in the way the film as a whole is meant to chronicle the lives of young people who have a hard time going out into the brave new world of adulthood. They’re sad and pathetic and self-destructive and don’t seem to care much about anything beyond their friendships.

This, I think, is something that hits uncomfortably close to home. I realize Kicking and Screaming is not without its flaws and that, in hindsight, it does seem to set the tone for lots more contemporary movies about neurotic man-children and the cute pixie dream girls who love them (though a key difference here is the fact that all the happy love stuff is in the past; Grover and Jane break up at the beginning and never reunite), but who among us does not occasionally find themselves bemused and discouraged by the long, blank road ahead? Someone once told me that going to college was a step toward real life in the same way that climbing a tree gets you closer to the moon, which seems apt when considering something like this movie. At times when you don’t feel like trying to be witty or intellectual (or any other ‘successful’ adjective), Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s melodramatic wail of a hook can sit like acerbic mockery, making you want to hit the existential ‘snooze’ button a few more times just to postpone growing up.