Adventureland (2009)

directed by Greg Mottola

Micajah Henley

One of the marks against me as a lover of cinema is that I never loved Mike Nichols’s classic, The Graduate. I mostly blame it on the fact that I saw Wayne’s World II long before I watched Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross storm out of the church and leave on the bus looking uncertain about their future. I gave The Graduate another chance after college, thinking I would finally connect with it the way I was supposed to, according to all the canonical lists of great movies. Revisiting the movie, I was even less interested in Ben Braddock and the “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me” moment. I had bypassed feeling connected to the twenty-something protagonist and latched on to Mrs. Robinson herself—the aged graduate who says “I studied art” in a hotel room with the boy next door. So, when it comes to a movie that depicts post-collegiate life, The Graduate is not for me.

Just before I graduated high school, I sat in the front row of a packed movie theater to see a comedy with a modest budget starring the girl from Twilight, two SNL heavyweights of that era, and someone who I incorrectly thought was the co-star of Superbad. In my defense, all the posters kept the names of the cast below the title, and at the top was “From the director of SUPERBAD.” That movie was Adventureland, and I liked it just fine. What I didn’t know was that by the time I was in grad school, I would also get a summer job at a theme park, become obsessed with Big Star and the Replacements, and eventually skip town to be with a woman I met while working at the park together. In about half a decade, Adventureland became my The Graduate.

The movie starts in the summer of 1987 with James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), who has graduated with a major in Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies with plans to study journalism at Columbia University. I double-majored in History and Philosophy/Religion with a minor in English and thought it wise to obtain an MA in Southern Studies in Oxford, MS. Different paths yet equally irrelevant to the job market. Most college graduates, especially those with a liberal arts degree, have probably echoed a similar sentiment when Brennan says, “What am I supposed to do? I’m not even qualified for manual labor” after trying to get entry level jobs for the summer without having any experience outside of contributing to his school’s literary journal.

The answer, of course, is that he goes to work at the amusement park, Adventureland, a job he’s fortunate to get because his childhood friend works there. As someone with two undergraduate degrees who was home for the summer after his first year of grad school, I too was only able to get a job at a theme park because of my personal connections (Mom). Brennan tells the managers of the park, played by Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, that he would like to work on the rides. Hader’s character responds, “You’re more of a games guy.” During my interview for a Central Florida theme park job, I also said that I was interested in working in rides and attractions. I was told, “This is a merchandise job for Kidzone.”

What people might not know about working at a theme park is that there is an unofficial yet fully realized hierarchy among the employees. I was in merchandise working in stores, but more commonly working outside at carts and kiosks. Above merch are those who work in rides. No one goes to the park to experience the thrills of the Central Park Kiosk, but everyone wants to ride the rides and avoid eye contact with employees in the dump stores wearing clothes designed to humiliate and neuter. Ahead of rides were those in entertainment. These people walked through the park dressed down like celebrities in tabloids with iced coffee in hand, as if they were avoiding being recognized as the dancing flower in the parade. Within each of these groups, however, there is a deep sense of camaraderie.

After undergrad, my girlfriend of over two years came back from a trip to India with an existential need to reinvent herself, which started with breaking up with me a month and a half before I went to grad school. Like Brennan, I felt compelled to tell everyone that I had just recently had my heart broken and suggested that this was somehow important. I was certain that graduate school would be my refuge and that my cohort would be filled with people who also loved Flannery O’Connor and could teach me a thing or two about Faulkner and Eudora Welty. At the very least, I was expecting to have the deep and meaningful relationships that I had had in college. This was not the case. And I don’t blame them. I was the most depressed and anxious version of myself who was probably impossible to be around—a guy who spent his free time alone listening to either stand-up comedy or the National.

When my first year of graduate school ended, I left Mississippi and went back to Orlando to stay with my mom and work at the theme park. I spent the summer buying movies for a dollar at a nearby pawn shop and writing a screenplay as an affordable form of therapy. More importantly, I was bonding with all the people I was working with, something I had been missing for about a year. Many of them were younger than me by five years or more. The rest were senior citizens unwilling to let go of their baby boomer work ethic. But what joined us together was the shared experience of suffering through the Central Florida heat, the good, the bad, and the hilarious guest interactions, running through the park in dangerous thunderstorms, sneakily sending text messages at our work locations, and the truly awful matching uniforms. But before any of that could happen, what brought us together was the mutual affection we had for the park itself.

One of my favorite things about Adventureland is how much the filmmakers clearly love Adventureland. The way they set Let’s Dance-era Bowie over a montage of the rides and large bulbs that light the park is a separate movie that I would equally enjoy. In all sincerity, I would gladly watch all the B-roll that the second unit has to offer set to Yo La Tengo’s original music for the film for no less than 90 minutes and love it just the same. Despite all the parallels between my experiences and that of the characters, what draws me to the movie even more now are these glimpses of the park that are not from a tourist’s perspective, but from an insider’s point of view. It doesn’t judge the characters for working there or criticize the guests for indulging in consumerist, escapist Americana. There are no sight gags, and there is nothing to push the story forward. They’re just a series of brief montages throughout the movie that capture the heat of summer, the romanticism of amusement park life, and the rare opportunity to witness the sublime in something as seemingly insignificant as an amusement park.

My favorite shift was being an opener, arriving at an empty park before the sun comes up while the many of the lights are on and the music is still blasting at full volume. It’s a unique and wonderful experience to feel like you have an entire park that is one of the largest travel destinations in the world to yourself. Walking around my section of the park and unlocking all the locations while the sun came up is a memory that I may be chastised for wanting to save in an After Life scenario, but it’s one I would consider and that would be hard to talk me out of.

Another part of Adventureland’s appeal is that it’s a full-blown rom-com. It may be the only romantic comedy to have this much Lou Reed in the soundtrack, but it’s a rom-com nonetheless. The movie is completely guilty of the generic three act structure. Brennan and Em (Kristen Stewart) meet at the park and share a love for music and a Ziploc bag full of joints and have a number of romantic scenes before parting ways because of a scandal between her and a married maintenance man who also works at the park, prompting her to go to New York. After a bus ride soundtracked by the Replacement’s “Unsatisfied,” Brennan arrives in New York to complete his hero’s journey by reuniting with Em and losing his virginity.

My experience was not as scandalous, but it was potentially cuter. I was covering a shift at the SpongeBob SquarePants store wearing the largest pair of blue pants with somehow even larger pleats, a yellow collared shirt that was so stiff it could stand up on its own, and a red tie that cut off nearly the top button of an oatmeal-colored cardigan. One of the women who performed as SpongeBob was in the back wearing Dickie coveralls and a grey T-shirt to sweat through while in costume. The worst two things to be wearing for two people at the right place, at the right time, yet this is how I met my fiancée. We started dating a couple of weeks later and would go on dates at the very park where we worked. It wasn’t long before she bought an extra toothbrush to keep at her apartment and we began carpooling to work together. The park I had visited regularly throughout my childhood and began working at during a difficult time in my life carried a new weight.

She eventually left the theme park to tour the country dressed as a furry, red monster. When she came back from the six-month tour, she was ready to move back to her home state of Kentucky, and I joined her just a few months later after I was fired from this theme park job. Ironically, being fired was probably the best thing that could have happened to me after she left. It pushed me out of the state of Florida and to Kentucky, where we have lived for nearly five years.

My favorite shot in Adventureland involves Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, and Martin Starr together in their games uniforms watching the fireworks on the fourth of July while “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by Crowded House plays. It’s a moment that reminds me why I loved working in a theme park, the excitement of new love, and how cinema can capture these specific feelings in a single image. Theme park and amusement park jobs are wonderful summer jobs, but they can be incredibly difficult full-time jobs. The cart of ice I pushed around to shovel ice into bins to keep drinks cold throughout the day over the summer began to feel like a punishment analogous to Sisyphus. I had overstayed my welcome and had to follow this woman I loved to a place I had never been until the day I moved there. At the same time, however, that park was our vacation destination just days after we got engaged a couple years later—probably for the same reason Em kept her games tee when she fled to New York.

The two most iconic shots in The Graduate emphasize the sexual revolution and the disenchantment of American ideals for graduates of the late ‘60s. There’s no denying that it’s an American classic, but a story about a rich kid who lives comfortably in an upper-middle class neighborhood and eventually sleeps with the girl next door and her mother doesn’t say much about post-college life in the 21st century. Adventureland imagines the tail end of the Reagan era as a time of dwindling optimism. While Benjamin can look forward to the future of “plastics,” Brennan is handing out game prizes made by Malaysian kids who are being paid 10 cents for their labor. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to afford his trip to Europe with his more fortunate friends or be able to attend grad school with his amusement park earnings. After being told during his graduation dinner that his family is making less money because his dad was laid off, Brennan says “this trip was my graduation present.” It’s a forgettable line, but it’s one that gets to the core of the disappointment of the Gen X characters and the millennial cast who are witnesses to a bogus war and a recent economic recession.

Even as our hero leaves on a bus for New York, “Unsatisfied” by The Replacements plays and Paul Westerberg sings, “Everything you dream of is right in front of you and everything is a lie.” The movie could end there with a parallel ending to The Graduate that would be even more bleak, with a lonely Brennan on the bus by himself. Instead, it ends with Brennan meeting Em at her apartment where he tells her he won’t be going to grad school but will live at the YMCA and get a shitty job. Yet everything we’re seeing on the screen tells us this is a happy ending for Brennan. At the risk of reducing the movie to something didactic to the point of being corny, it seems to promote the pursuit of Adventurelands both desired and unexpected. For Brennan, Adventureland was the college campus that enlightened him, then the amusement park that challenged his understanding of the American dream, and finally the place that will revive him. Yet this movie isn’t The Graduate II or Brennan Takes Manhattan—it’s Adventureland. It’s about the place he went to unwillingly, and it’ll likely be the time in Brennan’s young adult life in which he learns the most about himself, America, and relationships with others. Or, I’m projecting all of this, and I’m the corny one who jumps at the chance to retell the story of how I met my partner. Both are possible. One is absolutely correct.

Micajah Henley is an adjunct professor at a community college, co-host of the podcast You Forgot One, and writer of the forthcoming book for the 33 ⅓ series on Sandinista! by The Clash. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky with his fiancée and their cat.