College graduation. Commencement. Whatever you call it. It's here. I have no idea as to how to act or what to do. And, in the dying throes of my column, I go down blaming pop culture.
We all knew everything we ever needed to know (or that Hollywood thought we needed to know) about the end of high school and high school graduation. Everyone has seen numerous TV and movie characters go to prom and probably lose their virginity, give heartfelt graduation speeches and have one last hurrah before they part ways. From "The Brady Bunch" to "Saved by the Bell" to "American Pie" (1999) to "High School Musical 3: Senior Year" (2008), anyone and everyone had their take on reaching that point in their lives. Whether or not our actual proms, graduations and summers lived up to the expectations set by these fictitious models is irrelevant. There were models and there were models in abundance.
College is, of course, another favorite subject of TV and film. The partying, the hookups, the vacations and the carefree lifestyle are all perfect opportunities to watch storylines go wild. Yet here's where the tricky part comes in. I'm going to give you two issue numbers of Amazing Spider-Man: 28 and 185. The first one was the issue in which Peter Parker graduated from high school. The second is the issue in which he graduated from college. Peter spent about 13 years as an undergrad compared to his-two-and-a-half in high school. Am I the only one noticing a reluctance on the writers' parts to have him leave college? I suppose, eventually, one writer realized that 13 years just may be one year too many. Yet Spidey is not the exception to the norm.
Take a look at pop culture. You'll find kids of all ages stuck in time, whether it's in high school or in college; rarely does the Graduation Reaper comes knocking on their doors. You don't really see many films where the main character is going through the crisis of trying to figure out what to do with his life after school ends while simultaneously juggling his or her last remaining classes. You don't see many depictions of college graduation ceremonies, which are apparently infinitely more chaotic than any high school one. And you certainly see very few portrayals of the awkward first months after college where one must reassess what they are doing now that classes, papers and grades don't provide a comfortable framework for life. Next time you see someone after 21 or so is when they are comfortably settled with a decent-paying career at the age of 25 or 26. That's when it's okay to tune in again.
There are exceptions to the norm, mind you. "The Graduate" (1967) is a famous example, and even the recent "Adventureland" (2009) tackles it a bit. Granted, "Adventureland" turns the last weeks of college and graduation into about five minutes of film before becoming a story about a summer job (a very college-aged thing), but it does manage to provide a post-college tinge of melancholy to everything.
And this melancholy is exactly why this subject is not exactly the favorite of Hollywood. It's sad. A lot sadder than high school graduation. High school is often portrayed as a purgatory, whereas college becomes the sweet paradise, the reward for a life well led. College is usually a sort of utopia, a place of parties, late nights, sleeping in, rushing papers and living and hanging out with your friends. Who wants to show that being taken away? To show college graduation is to inevitably show tragedy.
Of course, it's not all bad news, I suppose. We all have to graduate from college in order to get to the point where we are successful, happy and mature and the statuses of our lives are once again fit for television. The upcoming rough patch, the awkward change, is necessary so that we don't find ourselves turning into Peter Parkers, overly competent folks who are unfortunately stuck in the same darn undergraduate classes for over a decade. And as much as I have loved writing for the Daily for the past three years, I'd start to feel a bit odd at the age of 30 if I knew my only audience was 5,000 kids, most of whom only looked at my column when they had already finished the Sudoku.
Things have to change, or else they stagnate. After all, have you noticed how many college movies are pretty much the same? Don't you want to move on to the much wider plethora of story opportunities?
And you know what? For once, it might be fun to be going somewhere that pop culture fears to tread.
Thanks for everything, folks. Whether you agreed with what I was saying or hated it, it meant a lot to me just to know that I was not simply screaming out into the void. And even though I was complaining and lamenting every which way, I loved every minute of it. I never thought this column would last more than a semester when I pitched it in the fall of 2006, but I guess even I can be wrong sometimes. This old curmudgeon is going to miss ranting on these pages. This is Toohey, signing off.
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Devin Toohey graduates today with a degree in classics. He can be reached at Devin.Toohey@tufts.edu.
