31 Movies of May, Day 29: Lost in America
May 29th viewing: Lost in America, chosen by my deep longing to take a road trip right now.
Year of Release: 1985
Directed by: Albert Brooks
Written by: Albert Brooks & Monica Johnson
Starring: Albert Brooks, Julie Hagerty, Garry Marshall, Michael Greene, Tom Tarpey, Charles Boswell
Accompanying Beverage of Choice: Supper Club (American Lager, 5.2% ABV), Capital Brewery, Middleton, Wisconsin
(Support Independent Breweries - buy local* when getting buzzed during quarantine)
*in spirit
I want to start out with the central premise of this movie. The central premise of Lost in America is that the most yuppie thing you can possibly do is to become a hippie.
That’s essentially what Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty spend 96 minutes doing, right? They start the movie off as the very definition of affluence - they live in a house that in 2020 value is worth $1 million, they’re looking at buying a new Mercedes, and Brooks’ character takes home six figures a year in salary in 1985 dollars. They’re rich! They then decide they don’t want to be like that any more. They want to live, as Brooks says repeatedly throughout the film, like Easy Rider.
Easy Rider came out in 1969, about a decade and a half before this movie was made. And every time it got mentioned in Lost in America, the first thing I could think of was Fight Club. Fight Club came out in 1999, and once it had been out for a decade, it, too, became an anti-consumerist, off-the-grid touchstone for people who were mostly affluent white folk (albeit, probably a bit more toxic of a crowd than most Albert Brooks types). But fans of Fight Club are generally all talk. They don’t actually go and get punched in the face at night, or make their own soap in their basements. Lost in America explores that idea with the Easy Rider generation, and comes to the conclusion we’ve mostly reached with Fight Club fans, only it did it 30 years earlier - they’re generally full of shit and have little comprehension of how privileged they are.
The grand epiphany of the movie is that our main characters were never really downtrodden, even after they had lost their precious $100,000 “nest egg” and were forced to settle in to a random Arizona trailer park. At their lowest point, they were still able to come to the realization that they could always grovel back to their high society peers and talk their way into something at least vaguely resembling the life of immense comfort they were used to. Selling all their positions and moving into an RV, calling themselves “off the grid” - it was all just cosplay. Not only were they yuppies at heart, they were yuppies in action. The only reason they were able to pursue that Easy Rider life was because they had been sell outs for years prior, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars each year via cushy marketing jobs and equity windfalls from home ownership.
That’s not to say the movie embraces yuppie life. Brooks seems very aware of the shallowness in which his characters lived. But it’s a shallowness that came with all of their life’s needs met and then some, something many other people never get to achieve. They are very fortunate people, and they come around to that knowledge, maybe not necessarily in a conscious way, but certainly in an appropriately depressing way.
