The Nostalgia Plot

'Sex and the City,' pop punk revival, and re-reading 'The Marriage Plot' by Jeffrey Eugenides

I recently began watching Sex and the City for the first time. I just finished the second season and it’s been an enjoyable watch so far, though some have warned me that the series drops off significantly from now on. The characters are funny, relatable, and even if their NYC is an illusion, enough time has passed where it’s become an anthropological illusion, a time capsule of when the Twin Towers still existed and glitzy Manhattan was the place to be.

And there are certain things that stick in my mind. Like why are so many of the guys so badly dressed in clothes that are too big for them? How does Carrie not see from the very beginning that Big is not that into her (which makes her season 2 finale conclusion—that she is simply too untamable for him—a serious huff of copium)? And Carrie sure does smoke a lot. Was that normal in the late 90s?

I once read a piece in The Cut in which women wrote in to lament the purchases they regretted the most. Many of the writers blamed SATC for all the cosmos and martinis they thought they had to always buy. The comments section was exasperated at how such an old show continued to so heavily influence young women. Unfortunately for those commenters, SATC just recently came out on Netflix. I’ve also come across SATC-related pieces like this one by

emily north

that seems to indicate the show still resonates with young people today. So it seems SATC will outlive us all. Bad news: cocktails have now reached prices once reserved for rooftop bars.

It’s also made me think of why certain shows become nostalgia watches, or more often, anemoia (“nostalgia” for a time and place you’ve never actually known) watches. With the undying popularity of shows like Friends and SATC, one could conclude that for our nostalgia watches, we tend to fall back on shows that are comforting fantasies: both Friends and SATC let us live vicariously in a fun and affordable Manhattan where our best friends are all around us and reachable 24/7.

But how does that explain the nostalgia-watching of a viscerally unpleasant show like Girls? Yes, it may capture a particular culture of a particular time very well, but most people hated that particular culture. Even those that liked it had to pretend they hated it. Nothing about the show is glamorous, none of the characters are aspirational, and in the end, almost everyone is miserable about their lives (except Shosh) and disappointed in each other.

Why hasn’t a show like, say, Master of None become a delightful nostalgia watch? Yes, the show is full of shit, but nobody said Friends or SATC was realistic. For many people, especially Millennials, why wouldn’t they want to go back to a 2015 era when the internet still promised sustainable creative careers for everyone who wanted it and “foodie” was still something of a proud label to have? Yes, it was grossly unrealistic that Aziz Ansari’s character could live in a huge sun-dappled apartment and dine out constantly at NYC’s buzziest restaurants because he was in a commercial once, but Friends and SATC are guilty of similar stretches of the imagination. Is it because of Ansari’s whole babe.net thing? I thought by now, most people thought the whole thing was overblown. My guess is that Master of None was too self-important in believing it had things to say about social and cultural issues, not to mention regarding itself as artsy (e.g. needless homages to Antonioni). That would explain why a show like Suits (of all shows) has had a resurgence: it’s dumb and fun and doesn’t pretend to be anything more.

There’s a right way to do self-importance, like how Frasier does. Like Master of None, it’s pretentious, but cleverly and knowingly so, with its pompous protagonists usually getting what they deserve by the end of 23 minutes (please watch the Dinner Party episode). Watching Frasier makes me feel like a kid again, not just because I was actually a kid when I first watched it, but because the characters feel like a child’s idea of what grown-ups are like. Frasier and Niles are almost always wearing suits and talking about opera and wine. Their close-but-bickering fraternal relationship reminds me of how my brother and I are like with each other, especially when we were younger and more intellectually competitive (more so on my end, to be honest, since he was smarter).

Nostalgia fever has even hit movie theatres, with more and more of them showing the classics. On the big screen, I just watched Peppermint Candy (directed by Lee Chang Dong, best known in America for Burning), which itself is a chronologically reversed story of yearning for the past.

The past couple of years, I’ve even heard that pop punk is coming back. Pop punk! The definitive art form of turn-of-the-millennium suburban isolation, where you made a garage band with your 3 buddies down the street and wrote songs about that girl from class because that was your entire world. It somehow doesn’t seem to work in an era where you can tell an AI to write you a love song for the latest girl or boy who also swiped right on you.

I checked my bookshelf to read anything that made me think about nostalgia, which led me to re-read The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. I read it a little less than a decade ago and this may be my second or third time reading it. I can’t quite remember. When I first read it, I was trying to read as many campus novels as possible because I myself was (re)-writing a college-set novel at the time. A couple of college friends, once I told them about my project, mentioned the The Marriage Plot, which was also set at Brown. But they’d also hated the novel.

But I ended up loving The Marriage Plot and having just spent this weekend re-reading it, I’ve found that it still captivates me. The story is about three Brown students—Madeleine Hanna, Mitchell Grammaticus, and Leonard Bankhead—and the love triangle they find themselves in throughout their college years, as well as the first post-graduation year. Madeleine is a prim and proper bookish WASP beauty who suppresses her love for Regency and Victorian literature on a campus where all the cool literary kids worship Derrida. In her semiotics class, she falls for Leonard, a tall and handsome eccentric from Oregon who aspires to be a world-class biologist. Chasing Madeleine is Mitchell, a philosophy (and later, religion) enthusiast who’s nice-looking and smart, but not enough to stand out to Madeleine, especially when compared to someone like Leonard.

My friends disliked the book because they felt it was about a bunch of self-involved hipsters (uncoincidentally, they’d been supreme hipsters in college). I get their point of view. Madeleine’s gorgeous and rich, but she’s racked with the existential dread of possibly having an uncool soul because deep down, she thinks that “most semiotic theorists had been unpopular as children, often bullied or overlooked, and so had directed their lingering rage onto literature.” Plus, she doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life because even in the early 1980s, professional Jane Austen enjoyer is not a viable career. Mitchell is mopey and sexually insecure, with his lofty interests likely being at least partially motivated by a desire to rise above his suburban Detroit heritage. Predictably, he goes on a backpacking trip through India after graduation. Leonard is the most so-called real of the trio, having come from a poor broken home poisoned by his parents’ alcoholism. But he also easily digests Deleuze and gets laid a ton.

The characters are archetypal, not to mention Mitchell and Leonard are obviously based on Eugenides himself and David Foster Wallace, respectively (speaking of which, I just borrowed Consider The Lobster from the library, which will mark my first DFW experience). But they are not lazy stereotypes or worse, mouthpieces for the author’s own self-serving agenda. Each character is recognizably human, like how Madeleine half-heartedly applies to jobs and internships during senior year, as if not taking post-college life seriously could possibly delay or even cancel it from happening. Or how Mitchell feels psychologically paralyzed when seemingly surrounded by so many who are mentally, physically, and socially beyond him. Or how Leonard feels the ticking countdown on his ambitions because he believes he’s creeping towards the age when all great scientists must make their breakthrough discoveries.

Madeleine’s love of love reminds me of myself at that age too:

The more of A Lover’s Discourse she read, the more in love she felt. She recognized herself on every page. She identified with Barthes’ shadowy “I.” She didn’t want to be liberated from her emotions but to have their importance confirmed. Here was a book addressed to lovers, a book about being in love that contained the word ‘love’ in just about every sentence. And, oh, how she loved it!

Madeleine definitely would’ve been a Swiftie.

There’s a difference between (a) lionizing pretentious college students and their try-hard pseudo-intellectualism vs. (b) using such high-mindedness to contrast just how innocent and juvenile they actually are. Going the (b) route is why a movie like Metropolitan works so well. And it’s also why The Marriage Plot is so bittersweet and touching. They’re all experiencing love and lust and heartbreak for the first time and the novel captures that so well with its multiple viewpoints.

One particularly haunting scene happens when Madeleine, much to Mitchell’s shock and delight, invites him to her family’s home in New Jersey for Thanksgiving in their sophomore year. Mitchell, already having fallen for Madeleine at first sight since a freshman-year toga party, sees this as a chance to prove himself worthy. He is helpful around the house and he draws from his dorky well of cultural tastes to bond with them over Cole Porter and Kingsley Amis. On his last night there, in the twilight hours, Madeleine comes up to his guest room in the attic, wearing what seems to be just a long t-shirt. She sits on his bed and even he knows she wants to be kissed.

But his sudden (and wholly unfamiliar) sense of romantic smugness causes him to dawdle, which is not helped by the fact that her parents are a floor below, not to mention a year’s worth of relatively conclusive evidence that she just sees him as a friend. A couple of minutes of hesitation proves to be a couple too many, and she leaves, forcing him to wonder “what if?” for years to come because upon returning to campus, she immediately starts dating the first of several guys who aren’t him. Their cruel fate is that years later, they do end up sleeping together, only to realize that their moment, however brief it may have been, had come and passed already.

Even though the story’s set in the late 70s/early 80s, the campus culture feels evergreen, from the downplaying of privilege by the privileged (“Everyone in the room was so spectral-looking that Madeleine’s natural healthiness seemed suspect, like a vote for Reagan”) to the reassessment of the canon (“[Mitchell] was perfectly aware that certain once-canonical writers (always male, always white) had fallen into disrepute. Hemingway was a misogynist, a homophobe, a repressed homosexual, a murderer of wild animals”) to the student demands for their university’s divestment from military and oil businesses.

It's also funny to see that whether you’re a Pulitzer-winning novelist like Eugenides or a Substacker like me, the same details of our alma mater appear to have lingered in our memories: the “smokestacks of the Narragansett Electric factory” (though Eugenides didn’t note how the lights on those stacks never seemed to blink in any discernible pattern) and the “black iron fences like those in a Charles Addams cartoon or a Lovecraft story.” Despite the Grand Canyon-esque chasm in our literary achievements, I like to think Eugenides and I mined our memories in the exact same way in our attempts to capture our college experiences.

The novel’s chapterless format (it’s subdivided into 6 section) lends itself well to becoming lost in the story, kind of like how a degenerate gambler would feel in a casino. Had I not kept an extensive journal throughout those years, the first section of The Marriage Plot, which takes place in the last few days before and after graduation, would’ve had to suffice.

As best as I can remember, I’ve only ever teared up twice when reading a book. The first time I read The Marriage Plot was one of those times. Towards the end, Leonard’s manic depression has gotten so bad that it has abruptly ruined his and Madeleine’s honeymoon. Her optimism in his mental illness ever improving finally starts to falter. Nevertheless, she wants to keep trying and takes him from her parents’ home in New Jersey to see an apartment in New York City, where they can start their lives together (she is going to attend grad school at Columbia). It’s a dream apartment and they take it on the spot. Yet this monumental step forward only further reveals that there’s no path forward. He is a shell of his formerly exuberant and effortlessly fascinating self; now he’s a miserable black hole of anti-joy.

They share a sad little celebratory pie at a nearby diner as she tries to designate it as their little place. Only a few hours after that, knowing that unless he does something, she’ll stay with him for far too long, Leonard leaves her and they presumably never see each other again.