On Watching Quadrophenia in Middle Age

This year I have made a point of listening to as much new music as possible. Now that I've hit middle age I am shocked by how backwards-looking people my age can be. I hear their fear and derision towards a changing world and pray that does not become me. It has become increasingly clear to me that indulging in the comforts of nostalgia in middle age too often is a soul killer.

Despite my resolution to stick to new stuff, I ended up rewatching the 1979 film Quadrophenia this weekend. It's based on the 1973 concept album by The Who of the same name, but without being a rock opera. The Who's music is always in the background, the main characters don't break into song, other than to hum or sing their favorite pop songs to themselves. (One of the best scenes involves two characters singing rival kinds of music in adjoining public bathtubs.)

The story is set around Jimmy, a young working class man engaging in the "mod" subculture of mid-1960s London. Jimmy and his mod friends often tangle with "rockers" from the same working class neighborhoods. The mods wear smart suits, ride scooters with lots of mirrors, and listen to British rock bands like Kinks, Who, and Small Faces. The rockers prefer motorcycles, black leather, and American rockabilly like Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran.

Jimmy finds himself in a personal crisis. He works a crummy office job (that he eventually loses) while living at home and clashing with his parents, who disapprove of his lifestyle. He strikes out hard in love and alienates his friends. It's implied that he's suffering from mental illness, but isn't getting treatment for it. (In the album he is, but the film is far bleaker.) Perhaps worst for him, a mail truck destroys his scooter.

The mods and rockers tangled on the beaches of Brighton, and the film ends with Jimmy going there, trying to relive one glorious weekend where he led his friends into battle and won the affection of his crush. He discovers that the "ace face," the coolest of the mods (played memorably by Sting) is actually just a bell boy. Jimmy steals the bell boy's scooter and drives it to the white cliffs over the beach. Watching it you fear that Jimmy is going to kill himself, but since the film opens with him walking away from the cliff at sunset, you know that he doesn't. (Although some people seem to miss this.)

Instead, he sends the scooter, the symbol of his allegiance to the mod life, over the side of the cliff. The shot of it crashing on the rocks freezing into a still photo as Roger Daltry sings the line "You stop dancing" is one of my favorite final shots ever. It hits like a punch to the head, especially after the beautiful, sweeping footage of the cliffs. The whole mod thing, which promised liberation, was just a dead end trap, and Jimmy has rejected it.

It's a scene that hit me hard in my 20s, when I like Jimmy was still trying to define myself. In middle age it hit harder, but for different reasons. By the time one reaches 40 plenty of compromises have been made and beloved things left behind. At some point you have to recognize that you are no longer young, and that the aging people around you who insist on being young look absolutely pathetic.

Seeing that scooter go off of the cliff was a reminder of what I've had to quit. First and foremost I quit academia, which ended up being as imprisoning as mod life, even if I was decked out in boxy tweed instead of the slim threads of Swinging London. So much of what we put our hopes and dreams into ends up going wrong, it seems.

But beyond that dramatic life change, getting old means losing people. They got lost to death, to distance, to drifting and sometimes in explosions of anger and recrimination. I think back to my two years in Chicago and how one of my closest friends from then is dead and the other is estranged from me. Places get lost, too. When I go back to my hometown I don't usually recognize too many people. Most of my old haunts in the town where I went to grad school are shuttered now.

As I said, however, nostalgia is a bad disease in middle age. Instead of looking back, it's best to see forward. I don't go to rock shows much anymore, but I do have fun doing impromptu dance parties with my daughters, for instance. The possible onset of a pandemic had me soul searching a lot recently, and I realized that even though I never managed to be a respected professor or writer, I'm happier than I thought I'd ever be back in my young confused days, and that's all I really need.