A Future, In Hindsight.
Youth is indeed wasted on the young.
That’s the overarching point most 80s-time travel movies and body swap movies were trying to make. You were either too naïve or too wrapped up in your own time to fully appreciate the weight of the next 30 years. You made impulsive decisions at 18 that your 50 year old self is still paying for because you didn’t understand your own potential, you didn’t get probability, and if you knew then what you know now – You could have been a better person. You could have lived a better life.
“Right now, you’re just browsing through time. Choose the things you’ll be proud of. Things that last.”
Kathleen Turner plays Peggy Sue, a forty-two-year-old woman in the middle of a divorce who faints at her 25th high school reunion and wakes up back in 1960, carrying twenty-five years of marriage, baggage, damage, and hindsight into a reality where everyone around her still believes the future is wide open.
Because there’s a point you get to, if you’re lucky enough to get there, where you realise there are more years behind you than ahead. The forward momentum slows down. You’re not racing toward something anymore, you’re coasting, and the rearview mirror starts getting your attention more than the windshield. You take stock, replay the conversations, run the numbers on decisions you made at nineteen, at twenty-two, at thirty-five, and you wonder what would have happened if you’d taken the other exit. Not necessarily out of regret, just out of that particular middle-aged curiosity that settles in once the fog of ambition burns off and you can properly see the road you actually took.
The past starts looking rosier than the present, or the future. All that potential you used to carry around, that feeling of infinite choices and infinite possibility, you can almost taste it again when you look back far enough. And Peggy Sue gets to go back.
But life, as it turns out, isn’t a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Remember those? You’d get to page 47 and the story would ask “do you open the door or go back to the cave?” and you’d flip to page 83, and if it killed you, you’d just go back to page 47 and try the other one you bookmarked with a finger. Peggy gets to go back to page 47. She gets to play with other possibilities like sleeping with the cool artsy rebel, she befriends the class nerd, but ultimately, she knows what derailing his future would cost.
Every alternative leads to its own dead end.
Francis Ford Coppola was a strange pick to direct this, but in 1986 he wasn’t in a position to be choosy. One from the Heart cratered in 1982, his $27 million neon love letter to Las Vegas barely earned a million and dragged Zoetrope Studios into foreclosure. The man who made The Godfather and Apocalypse Now was taking director-for-hire gigs to stay solvent, and Peggy Sue came to him after the project had already worked through Jonathan Demme and Penny Marshall as directors, and Debra Winger as its lead. Coppola came aboard and brought the family.
His nephew Nicolas Cage said no to the role five or six times before agreeing on one condition: he could go, in his words, “really far out.” Cage showed up to rehearsal doing a nasal honk he’d modelled on Pokey from The Gumby Show, wore false teeth, and nearly got fired for it. But Coppola let it ride, apparently to Kathleen Turner’s chagrin. The whole production worked twenty-hour days, six days a week, because Coppola was contractually obligated to deliver on time or lose final cut.
Turner earned a well-deserved Oscar nomination. She was thirty-two, playing a forty-two-year-old reliving her days as an eighteen-year-old. When Peggy gets a phone call from her grandmother, a woman who from her adult perspective has been dead for years, Turner goes from teenager to grieving middle-aged woman in the space of a single breath. Even Roger Ebert gave it four stars and said her performance had to be seen to be believed.
I love Back to the Future, and Heavenly Kid, and every movie that allows us to rub two decades together. I used to imagine my older self looking back at me as though I was living in some memoir I’d write in my 50s. But I didn’t live for the future, all I tried to do is give my future self something interesting to write about. When I remembered to.
In every other 80s nostalgia trip, the past was better. But this movie runs the whole thought experiment and arrives somewhere much more familiar to me. The choices you make are fundamental to who you are. You made them, you’d probably make them again, because you’re made of the life experience those choices gave you, for good and for bad.
Even with the full benefit of hindsight, even standing back at page 47 with all the answers, could you really choose differently and still be you? I wouldn’t change a thing. Well, except for that one time in 1991, and maybe that time in 2018.
I watch this more than any other time travel movie when I feel like I need to do some soul searching. It puts things in perspective. It’s a good way to realign my regrets into something that feels a little more productive, to examine the roads I didn’t take by remembering why I took the ones I did. It’s not therapy, but it puts me in the right mood for a bit of recalibration.
The past was great. But it wasn’t better. I don’t miss the past.
I miss not knowing how the future would turn out. -Pop
Peggy Sue Got Married arrived on Home Video in 1987, after an October 10th, 1986 theatrical release.