Spoiler Alert: This article contains mild spoilers for the movie My Old Ass.
Writer and director Megan Park’s My Old Ass is an uncomplicated meditation on time and temporality. But “uncomplicated” in this sense works absolutely to its advantage. It’s sentimental but uninterested in manipulation; self-absorbed for the purpose of dismantling solipsism; straightforward in a way that locates emotional beauty in the mundane regrets of living; nostalgic for heartsick youth without begging the viewer to make a literal return to it. Most of all, the film—to me, at least—displayed the allure to be found in joyfully accepted fatalism.
The story follows 18-year-old Elliott (Maisy Stella) in the weeks preceding her departure for college. Born and raised on a quiet cranberry farm in Ontario, Canada, she’s since sprouted one too many relatable feelings of teenage restlessness and wants to get a jumpstart on adult life.
Both Elliott and Aubrey are fatalists; yet their diverging interpretations of how to grapple with the fixed future are the pithy heart of the film.
To celebrate her birthday, Elliot and friends embark on an incredibly high-schoolish, hallucinogenic-fueled overnight campout in the woods. Late that night after her friends go to bed, Elliott first meets her 39-year-old self (played by Aubrey Plaza, so I’ll refer to her as “Aubrey”). Supposing it to be a hallucination, the teenager and “young adult”—as Aubrey insists—exchange casual banter. But it’s surprisingly endearing: Aubrey tries to convince Elliott to cherish the remaining stretch of time left at home before she leaves for college because nothing will ever be the same again. It’s a laundry list that could only be made by a brain that’s matured enough to savor moments locked in the past: go golfing with your brother even though he’s uptight, watch Saoirse Ronan films with your other brother even though he’s a dweeb, be nice to your mom and dad, remember to enjoy your time left on the farm, and, most importantly, stay away from Chad.
The next day, she meets Chad. He’s an impossibly wholesome cranberry farm hand whom she immediately tries to suppress feelings for. Realizing that Aubrey wasn’t just a hallucination, she calls the number Aubrey left in her phone (“My Old Ass”). These calls are how the main exposition within the film occurs: sporadic phone conversations where the older self steers the younger self into enjoying the right things and renouncing the wrong things.
But Aubrey can’t keep Elliott away from Chad. Despite her best attempts, she falls for him amidst cranberry picking and boat rides across summery Canadian lakes (which any reasonable viewer must admit possesses such a gorgeous locale that not catching feelings would be the far unlikelier scenario).
There’s no way to tell the rest of the story without major spoilers; so, if you’re at all concerned about that, now’s the time to abandon ship.
Aubrey visits Elliott one last time to tell her to stop seeing Chad. They get into an argument. Elliott, assuming Chad’s issue to be some clandestine character flaw, asks, “Okay, will you just tell me what’s so bad about Chad?”
“There’s nothing wrong with Chad. That’s the problem. Chad is amazing. But Chad is dead, okay? He’s dead. And there’s nothing you can do to stop that from happening, so just forget it.”1
This halts the conversation. But after a breath and a beat, Elliott responds, “I don’t care, okay? I’m going to love Chad as much as I possibly can. I don’t care that it hurts. I don’t want to become like you and just be scared of everything. I’d rather love than never feel anything.”
Knowing how the story ends invokes opposite reactions in the two. One sees it in terms of its potential to elicit beauty, the other sees it as a gaping pit that can only wound. Which brings us to the central thesis of the film: that fatalism only becomes tolerable through acceptant hope, but it becomes intolerable through cynicism.
Fatalism is the idea that what will happen in the future is unavoidable and therefore we may as well resign ourselves to it. It typically breeds pessimism, paranoia, hopelessness, and cynicism—a resounding lament over the ultimate futility of our every action.
Both Elliott and Aubrey are fatalists; yet their diverging interpretations of how to grapple with the fixed future are the pithy heart of the film. Aubrey sees fate as a cold, senseless mistress to hide from; Elliott sees it as a window into savoring the highest of highs and lowest of lows, feeling everything as deeply and profoundly as it comes to her.
Cynicism is distrustful of people, skepticism is distrustful of our assumptions.
The dichotomy of cynicism and skepticism is displayed wonderfully between the two. Aubrey the cynic, Elliott the skeptic. While cynicism and skepticism seem functionally identical, they deviate in a crucial way: skepticism has hope while cynicism has none. The social scientist Jamil Zaki notes that this is because while cynicism is distrustful of people, skepticism is distrustful of our assumptions. Aubrey would much prefer guarding herself from the possibility of others hurting her, but Elliott is skeptical of the assumption that all love does is hurt. Cynicism’s lack of trust chokes out all of love’s potential, while skepticism does a cost-benefit analysis of love before deciding whether or not the possibility of hurt should dictate the possibility of love.
This illustrates a truism that can help us navigate life in general, and especially Christian life.
As the scholar Andrew McGowan notes, all Christians face persistent and difficult questions about how to inhabit time. And yet, there are very few biblical models that describe the proper ways to relate to it. We know how the story ends, but how our present choices contribute to the narrative isn’t always clear—especially in light of how small they seem in the span of eternity.
How Christians, and God Himself, relate to time has been hotly debated. Some depict God as totally outside of time, unhinged and distant, as if He got the ball of the universe rolling and then stopped intervening. In this sense, our choices feel futile or superfluous: if everything is just going to happen the way it is destined to happen, what difference can we make?
“If you weren’t young and dumb you wouldn’t be brave enough to do anything.”
But the philosopher Boethius, in The Consolation of Philosophy, argued that God was not just unhinged from time. Instead, He is eternally in the present, experiencing everything in line with His creations. This isn’t to reject God’s foreknowledge or His intricate interventions (in fact, Boethius proposes this as a supersession of foreknowledge because foreknowledge is too simplistic); it is to suggest that He is by our side in our present consciousness, not just dangling a string along and hoping we don’t fall into a pit.
Similarly, philosopher David Lewis provides an optimistic view of fatalism. Even though certain events in the future are fixed, this should not discourage us from believing that we have agency. In earnest, we have no choice but to act as if our choices do make a difference.
Importantly, we are able to enjoy time. Savoring the present isn’t hedonistic. It can even be a way of drawing us closer to God, of being able to affirm the inherent pleasure in things without allowing those things to rule us. C.S. Lewis, in his attempt to balance our relationship to pleasure, summarized it with this maxim: “Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”
Boethius and the two Lewises’ mentalities deconstruct the cynicism within Aubrey’s fatalism. Whether everything is or isn’t going to roll out as planned is irrelevant. There is no joy, no rational wisdom, found in our hopeless acceptance of determined endpoints; perhaps its very determined nature is what inspires us to act in ways that inevitably change what was once thought fixed.
From the perspective of the missio Dei (God’s mission to reconcile humanity to Himself), His human imagers have an imperative to mute suspicions of nihilism. Our belief that we can participate in this mission through the Spirit’s assistance is one of the major thresholds barring us from aimlessly drifting through life.
As James K.A. Smith reminds us in his book How to Inhabit Time, we are both “caught up in history’s unfolding and actors who shape the future.”
It is important to come to terms with this—to build a hope that can dismantle our cynicism—because our ideas on the matter will color our every experience.
We must not allow suffering to obstruct us from having the experiences that make life most worth living.
As Boethius wrote, “Everything that is perceived is grasped not according to its own force but rather according to the capability of those who perceive it.” Put another way, we comprehend things according to our unique minds, personalities, and beliefs about the world. Everything we experience is dyed the hue of our emotional state. This is why both Elliott and Aubrey’s outlooks on the situation are quite natural. Their interpretation of the situation is emblematic of their stage in life.
Studies have long noted that our tendency to take risks starts decreasing in our twenties. As we age, risk looks less and less appealing until it finally looks idiotic, careless, and rash. This is why Aubrey’s accounting of the situation can only see pain, while for Elliott, taking the risk for the experience of love cannot not make sense.
But this is part of the intricate design of how life is structured. If we didn’t have neurological dispositions telling us to take risks, we wouldn’t. This would guarantee more emotional safety, but think of all the wonderful art, the beautiful relationships, the world-changing business ventures, that would’ve been lost if our risk avoidance had started peaking earlier.
As Cormac McCarthy wrote, it’s “good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.” Or, in Elliott’s own words, “If you weren’t young and dumb you wouldn’t be brave enough to do anything.”
Finally, Aubrey’s stance is, in my opinion, totally unrealistic. People tend to forgive themselves for choices they’ve made in the past. Studies find that the majority of our regrets toward the end of our lives surround things we haven’t done as opposed to the things we have done. This is usually because, when we decide to not do something, we might make ourselves feel better in the moment, but the slow unfurling of the “what-if’s” leads to long-term disappointment that surpasses the initial comfort of taking the safe route.
Thus, perhaps the film’s most explicit lesson is Shakespearean: to love is literally better than to have never loved at all. This coming-of-age film is the perfect reminder that we must not allow suffering—even the direct, understood potential of suffering—to obstruct us from having the experiences that make life most worth living.
- I’m 95% sure that this is the dialogue, but I have no way to fact check it since it’s now left my local theater. Nonetheless, it still captures the gist of the dialogue. ↩︎
