My wife was watching it and I joined her.
It also made me feel a little bit older —but in a good challenging way.
Aging to me is not something to fight against —paradoxically, but more like a distillation of experiences that is bound to remain flawed. And that’s how beauty thrives: by owning our flaws instead of trying to deny them. Authentic beauty cannot be bottled, therefore, I keep wondering why so many believe they’ll be the ones who tame it.
Embracing such a contradiction doesn’t come naturally. In my experience, what does come easy is dismissing the younger generation’s triggers, entanglements and silences a priori, especially through these noisy days. In short, the bias that comes with aging is not the problem but our refusal to acknowledge the inevitable: change never goes our way.
As a former high school teacher who got to witness such negligence from school authorities —while working my way around it as best as I could not to gaslight students, this movie was reassuring of something I also got to witness: teenage emotional depth.
They are not adults so, I kept reminding some of my colleagues, why would you expect them to behave like one —yourself?
An important part of being a teenager is defying boundaries, questioning authority with passion and innocence and insolence as well as exploring new ways to do the usual. Such experiments, naturally, will be over the top from time to time —and in doing so, succeeding to their eyes, or fail clumsily only to be repeated but, as adults, allegedly more mature, such attempts could also be perceived as refreshing reminders that things are changing —and so we must too.
Jenna Ortega (Vada) was amazing and so were all the other victims who desperately are trying to grasp, get a grip, overcome, support and make sense of a tragic event they, as a demographic group, are not responsible but are forced to endure the consequences of the grown up’s negligence that enable school shootings in the US.
The curiosity teenagers show for connecting with others —sometimes despite their best efforts to shadow it, is always a beautiful choreography to my eyes. And I believe that many of those times we should try to watch and learn from them. Such a raw intimacy that isn’t beaten by screens or bigot endless ads seems like a powerful reminder for the future.
The Fallout delivers good acting, a great script and a meticulous take on the way teenagers are coming of age in the first quarter of the XXI century. Framing a window to witness teenage despair, courage, love and optimism in a world that keeps bringing them down might seem pretty straightforward when telling a story through film yet, if you pay attention, sobriety is becoming increasingly rare in the stories we get to watch on demand.
In my opinion, teenagers today have to sort their way into a world of crisis and denial. Are we going to also step up for a brighter future or are we going to keep making them feel unworthy of our help because they are not fulfilling the expectations we set for them?
More about The Fallout (2021)
- Written and Directed by Megan Park.
- Read more about the film: Wikipedia, IMDB.
- Listen to The Fallout Soundtrack, by Finneas O’Connell on Spotify, YouTube.
P.S. I was listening to LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver album —yes, I still listen to full albums, when unexpectedly, its song Sound of Silver felt like my golden ticket to The Fallout awkwardness. And I danced. I can’t explain it any further but I can suggest you also listen to it on Spotify, YouTube.