I feel that there are countless ways to avoid mourning the pains of life, and most of what we call culture, today, consists in them. The magazines, the TV shows, everything on your phone, social media: they exist, and profit from the fact that you don’t want to “go there”.
And this group, which united in their radicalism at the University of Michigan–which I will recall to your awareness, if it was ever there, was the home of Tom Hayden, originator of Students for a Communist Society, the SCS–remains all these years later, after so much life experience, fundamentally superficial, although still searching for deeper feeling.
Yes, they say they love one another, and on some level this is true. They are open with each other, to the extent they are able to be. They can be themselves with each other. But all of them at some point found refuge in intellectualism, and found companionship with those who sought the same comforts in the same way at the same time.
It is not different in principle than friendships founded on a mutual admiration for the Lord of the Rings. It was founded on escapism. It is easy to conceal escapism when claiming to care about the tragedies of the world, but if your activism makes them more and not less likely, avoiding them is not the true source of your caring and action. Caring about the real world is not what truly motivates you.
I am of course a bit cynical. I have been “betrayed”–I use the word loosely to try not to sound too much like a drama queen–many times. It seems logically likely that I have often failed to perceive the very real words of genuine companionship and caring that have been offered me over the years, and I am perhaps overanalyzing this movie, which after all was not a great movie. It had a big effect on me when I first saw it, though, some time in my teens, which is why I chose to watch it again now.
It is deeply comforting to make blanket statements about “the world”, but of course no such thing exists. There are countless ways to be foolish. I continue to discover new ways–both in myself and others–daily.