Wednesday, February 9, 2022 — 5
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

About a year ago, I ran into 

an old friend during the com-
mute home from one of my 
classes. Given the state of the 
world in 2021, that commute 
was, of course, entirely vir-
tual, and consisted merely of 
moving a cursor from the big 
red “Leave Meeting” button 
on Zoom to the power down 
button on the Windows start 
menu. But during my cursor’s 
brief virtual transit across the 
screen, it passed by a familiar 
face, somehow unchanged in 
the years since we’d first met: 
the “Minecraft” launcher icon.

It had been at least a year 

since I had played or thought 
about “Minecraft,” and on that 
day, I was eager to jump back in. 

The game was a huge part of my 
childhood, so I was hoping to 
recapture a piece of my youth. 
Yet, for as much as I remember 
loving it, the gameplay didn’t 
captivate me like it once did. 
Despite the amount of time that 
had passed since I last played 
“Minecraft,” I still remem-
bered exactly how to progress, 
which incidentally made my 
achievements feel trivial. It’s 
hard not to compare this lack-
luster experience to my Her-
culean memory of my younger 
self, 
whose 
existence 
was 

largely defined by overcoming 
the game’s various obstacles. 
I sped through the beginning 
of the game with ease, but my 
playthrough ended abruptly — 
not because I made a mistake in 
the game, but because I pushed 
the technical capabilities of my 
underpowered laptop too far. 

By attempting to load into the 
Nether Dimension, I tanked 
the game’s graphical perfor-
mance and allowed a low-level 
enemy to kill me before I could 
even see it. I pushed the game 
to its limits; I broke it, and it 
broke me. Frustrated and dis-
appointed, I closed the game 
for what remains, to this day, 
the final time.

Even though I was disap-

pointed by the gameplay of 
“Minecraft” during my last 
playthrough, something else 
unexpectedly captivated me: 
the music, composed by Dan-
iel Rosenfeld (a.k.a. C418). I 
had never cared much for the 
soundtrack 
of 
“Minecraft,” 

but when I first heard the mel-
low piano arpeggio of C418’s 
“Wet Hands” fade in on my 
most recent playthrough, I was 
immediately transported from 

soulless, 
resource-gathering 

gameplay to another realm, 
one far beyond the menial 
tasks (both in the game and in 
real life) that kept me tethered 
down to this temporal dimen-
sion. I was instantly lost in 
ancient memories of the game, 
memories I didn’t even know I 
had. Within my mind, I casu-
ally meandered between entire 
years of my life: I had become 
unstuck in time. I remembered 
the first few times I played 
the game, coming home from 
school 
and 
building 
grand 

buildings on my own in creative 
mode. I remembered staying up 
late to play survival mode with 
friends and the genuine fear 
we felt as we slayed monsters. 
I even remembered the lone-
lier later years, returning to 
playing by myself as my friends 
slowly lost interest in the game, 

just before I did too.

 

‘Minecraft’ gave us the soundtrack to a generation

‘Big Mouth’ puts the 

‘coming’ in coming of age

Hindsight is 20/20: A look back on ‘(500) Days of 

Summer’

The coming-of-age trope has 

been a classic for centuries, con-
sistently employed in film, televi-
sion and literature to fill our hearts 
with the nostalgic saga of matura-
tion. The bildungsroman — liter-
ally “novel of education” — serves 
as a glowing example of personal 
growth, recounting downfalls and 
mistakes from which one learns and 
matures into a better person. The 
archetypal bildungsroman often 
romanticizes this journey, down-
playing the painstaking process 
of growing up. For example, “The 
Perks of Being a Wallflower” glo-
riously uplifts a socially awkward 
freshman to a life of enjoyment and 
discovery. The story has its down 
moments, but they are ultimately 
smothered by a more powerful joie 
de vivre. Even “Little Women,” a 
narrative full of family tragedy and 
painful young love, is told in beau-

tiful detail and ends with ultimate 
success. “Call Me By Your Name,” 
“The Breakfast Club,” “The Princess 
Bride” — all these classic coming-of-
age stories tell us that life will be 
beautiful if we can just get through 
a couple of awkward moments. Net-
flix’s television series “Big Mouth” 
tells a different story. 

Created 
by 
childhood 
best 

friends Nick Kroll (“Kroll Show”) 
and Andrew Goldberg (“Family 
Guy”), the series is a profane retell-
ing of their own experiences in 
middle school — acne scars and all. 
Now in its fifth season, the series 
has developed a complex cast of 
tweens accompanied by an array of 
personified, monstrous pubescent 
emotions. Where most coming-of-
age stories show how things might 
get worse before they get better, in 
“Big Mouth,” things just keep get-
ting worse, forcing us to endure the 
extreme (and often graphic) truths 
of puberty.

The older I get, the less I like hind-

sight. I know that since we’re only 
the sum of all of our past selves, that 
self-reflection is healthy and so on. 
However, there are moments when 
I think back to some of the things I 
wore or liked or did or believed when 
I was younger and I vow to never 
reminisce again. When I think back, 
especially to high school, I’m forced 
to recognize that I was probably a 
pretty fucking unbearable teenager. 
This is a relatively easy thing to for-
give — I think I’d be hard-pressed to 
find an adult who’s especially fond 
of their high school self — but some-
times looking back genuinely makes 
me mad.

My coming of age was a clumsy 

one. I was frequently so wrapped 
up in my fixation of the month that 
I forgot to develop any sense of self-
awareness. My conceptions of life 
and love and all of the Big Stuff were 

more heavily informed by those fixa-
tions than by my actual experiences. 
I loved the ideas of things more than 
I could possibly love them for what 
they actually were.

One of those fixations— and a foun-

dational text for my understanding of 
love — was “(500) Days of Summer,” a 
rom-com but not a love story. It warns 
us of this right from the beginning 
by way of a golden-throated, omni-
scient narrator (Richard McGonagle, 
“Regular Show”) whose matter-of-
fact commentary bookends the film. 
As impressionable as I was, I don’t 
know if I was ever really convinced 
that it was a love story, if only for the 
simple fact that the couple at its cen-
ter don’t end up together. My biggest 
takeaway, though, was always the 
protagonist Tom’s (Joseph Gordon-
Levitt, “Mr. Corman”) romanticism: 
his belief in fate and certain absolute 
truths about love. I never registered 
that those things were doomed to 
keep him from learning anything 
substantive about himself or how he 
conducts himself in relationships. 

Rather, I figured they were things to 
strive for and emulate.

I can’t be too hard on my younger 

self for that, though; “(500) Days of 
Summer” is sort of a deceptive film. 
Its suggestions of Tom’s inalterable 

idealism-to-a-fault are subtle enough 
to go over the heads of people more 
intelligent than 17-year-old me. In her 
defense, though, the ending is played 

like a happy one. When the 500 days 
that revolve around the titular Sum-
mer (Zooey Deschanel, “New Girl”) 
inevitably come to a close, he meets 
a woman, aptly named Autumn 
(Minka Kelly, “Titans”), and a recur-

ring intertitle marking the days ticks 
from “500” back down to “1.” 

Design by Abby Scheck

 Design by Grace Filbin

MAYA LEVY

Daily Arts Contributor

KATRINA STEBBINS

Senior Arts Editor

JACK MOESER
Daily Arts Writer

Indian-ish Nachos With Cheddar, Black Beans and Chutney By Priya Krishna, Ritu Krishna

Normalize tailgating 
on non-game days.

University of Michigan students now have access to 

New York Times Cooking — which means your normal 
 

food routine just became anything but. 

Activate your 

free Cooking 

subscription.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com
Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

