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
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food routine just became anything but.
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