For Auld Lang Syne, My Dear
Why do we have New Year's movies and what are they doing to us
Well, we are officially in a New Year. I felt guilty about not putting this out on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, but I think it’s better to do this while the dust is settling.
This New Year’s in particular has felt the weirdest of my entire life, and so have my film pairings.
Sunday I went to a screening of Phantom Thread, my first revisit since seeing it on Valentine’s Day 2018 on 70mm at Alamo Drafthouse (the best Valentine’s Day ever - fueled by endless chips and queso, Prosecco, followed by the second half of the double feature: my 4th theater viewing of Call Me By Your Name. the best, still.); Monday I watched Eyes Wide Shut (more of a Christmas movie when you think about it); and on New Year’s Eve I went to see When Harry Met Sally (it was my first time seeing it on a big screen).
When Harry Met Sally is a New Year’s staple for me, but normally in my canon are sillier things like Last Holiday and Bridget Jones’s Diary — those are probably the films I should’ve watched this year and yet…
On New Year’s Eve I hunkered down at Molly’s with a crew; with their less than ambient Christmas lights still strewn about and a couple Hendrick’s G&T’s (and an edible), the existential part of the night came in full force after the clock struck 12. Going into 2025 doesn’t feel like resolutions, and coming out of 2024 doesn’t feel like I have all of these things I need to accomplish in 2025. What happened was I realized I spent so much of 2024 trying to accomplish goals set before so many things changed, then clawing through surviving the second half— resolutions just feel like bullshit.
My friend Katie and I, sitting at this bar as I got quiet and introspective (something I am not known for), went off on our just-above-melancholy tirade— her on a soapbox, me melting into my seat at the bar. We started to unpack all of the things that 2024 was, yet wasn’t supposed to be; the things we wanted for 2025, but being disgusted with the idea that lessons learned have to be disguised as resolutions. It was then (and yesterday morning) that I realized what the problem with New Year’s and New Year’s movies is.
Eyes Wide Shut and Phantom Thread are not quite the problem, but the movies touting Live Your Life to the Fullest ! and Life is for the living ! Live as if you’ll die tomorrow ! are just draining anymore. I spent so much of 2024 reaping the sowings of that lifestyle and I am burnt out. I was burnt by the amount of cortisol it takes to run out of yourself, and burnt by the people who wiped out all sense of logic in my brain and set me ablaze in ways I didn’t know I could be. Bridget Jones and Last Holiday are cheery and lovely, but put in direct contrast with the dark underbellies of psychological torture in Phantom Thread and Eyes Wide Shut, it makes for a very unnerving cocktail of emotions. You have this hope and yearning for love and more in life, coupled with the mind games and terrifying social-politic ramifications of all of the above. To make sense of all these emotions is to throw yourself into a spiral you didn’t ask for, yet you put onto yourself.
I’ve always been someone to consume film, tv, books, et al with a lens of "What can I learn from this right now? How can I relate and better myself from this thing?” and maybe that’s my problem. I can’t watch something just to watch it, there’s always some sort of big-picture affect I’m giving it. Endless swirls of what could I have done better or differently? and if I could just do X, then maybe Y would happen. It’s driving me nuts. And it’s the same logic as having New Year’s Resolutions based on what you did in the previous year. So here’s what I propose as a solution: Sulking (or Slinking) into the New Year.
How you sulk or slink into the new year is as follows: On New Year’s Day, you catch something on your phone that throws you off guard, so you binge a whole TV show trying to ignore the feelings, yet try to process them simultaneously, and then you cry yourself to sleep. Wake up the next morning and go into the office like none of it happened and resume regularly scheduled programming.
In this day and age, trying to better yourself and your choices is a constant practice and we are so overtherapized that it makes life that much more complicated. We have to be in peak physical shape, be eating this and not that, in therapy to be deemed ‘healthy,’ and never be too emotional or messy for our friends and loved ones.
This year, I say fuck it. I have 3 marathons (and plenty of other races) on the docket, but I’m still going to eat dino chicken nuggets and every dessert craving that enters my brain. I am in therapy for trying to better myself (and my anxiety) at baseline, but part of having any sort of relationship is for that messy human connection we all crave and were meant to have. Some of the relationships I had in 2024 felt like I had to constantly bargain with my emotions and reason through them in order to validate them existing (that is simply not how feelings work!). Every conversation about emotions with former or potential partners was almost like a business negotiation— I ended up numbing myself by trying to justify having the feelings I didn’t even get to feel.
2025 started with a balanced whimper - the enlightened and sulky high in a dive bar in Gramercy, waxing poetic on what 2024 took out of me and how I am dreading 2025; then a track workout that went far better than it should’ve with my hangovers. I joked if nothing else goes right in 2025, at least I’ll have running; I’ll have running and the community it gave me before the worst came and only got better as the worst got even worse.
So cheers to the New Year, and slinking into it in whatever way you need to. We’ll drink that cup of kindness yet, for Auld Lang Syne.