Can We Talk About "Meatballs"?

A GenX Cis-White Dude wrestling with nostalgia

I wrote a work thing about why a Bitcoin ETF Doesn’t Matter this week. As soon as I came up with the title I immediately had this running through my head:

It’s the greatest motivational speech of all time, so I slotted in a quote at the top.

But I’ve had my struggle with Meatballs. When constructing lists of movies from my youth to show my kids as they were growing up, Meatballs (and followup, Stripes) gave me a lot of pause.

Why Meatballs was Awesome

Meatballs came out in 1979. I was 12. Bill Murray was 29. Growing up in a Western Mass. a lot more rural than it is today, there was no cable, there were no VCRs, certainly no computers, and we got one or two stations on the Black & White TV’s rabbitears. My parents were teachers — my father by vocation, my mother by necessity as my fathers mid-life battle with booze eroded his earning power. I never really considered us “poor” growing up, but we were on assistance, and a ride to the movie theater and money for a ticket was a birthdays-and-special-occasions few time a year splurge.

The late ‘70s and early ‘80s delivered plenty of popcorn-bangers, from Deliverance and Airplane to Star Wars and Life of Brian. And as a young boy in a small town, Movies, along with the local library and my church, were the most profound indoctrinators of culture in my life.

At 12, I was basically the same age as the Meatball’s almost-protagonist “Rudy the Rabbit.” Rudy was disconnected from his parents, had few friends, and no guiding forces in his life that we know of until Tripper adopts him for the summer, an unlikely man-child father figure.

I was Rudy. I took up running in the woods and became slightly less spherical in response. In Tripper I saw a casually cool, funny, big-brother/father figure I ached for, which, looking back over decades, echoed through my life and through having kids of my own.

But more than just the cliche personal connection, Meatballs was deeply subversive. The entire construct of the movie pits a crew of unknown Canadian nerds against the Rich Kids from Camp Mohawk. As my parents were teachers, I free-rode their tuition benefits from private school to private school. I was the kid with patched courdoroys surrounded by preppies. So when Tripper grabs a log and starts pounding the floor in mock agony screaming “It just doesn’t matter, because all the really good looking girls will still go out with the guys from Mohawk because they have all the money,” he was reaching right into my little nerdy and neurodivergent 12-year-old brain and whispering “I see you.”

Like so many kids, I aped what I saw, because it felt right. In The Hollywood Reporter’s 40 year anniversary piece, Rich Cohen dug this too:

He’s less John Belushi than Albert Camus. The way he carries himself is a lesson in how to confront life — with amusement, at a remove. Yes, he’s a smart-ass, but he’s a smart-ass of the deepest order; he heckles the system because it cannot be fruitfully engaged. This attitude is what’s made Murray, though a Baby Boomer, such a powerful avatar for Generation X. His pose is our worldview, which puts us closer philosophically to Humphrey Bogart than to the Boomers or Millennials. It’s all about cynicism and exhaustion, steering clear of causes. We are the little brother who has seen our big brother and big sister go through it. We know it’s fixed — who gets onto what team, who gets into what college. The biggest trick is convincing you that you actually have a chance.

In an era rife with doomerism, I think this is a nugget worth pondering. My fascination with markets and money from this age onward was largely because I always knew that, for all the proclamations, no big complex system like the market or the economy is ever really “fair,” but at the same time, realized it’s where the power was. In the face of broken, unfair systems, being a sarcastic asshat was a go-to response of mine for a long time. Still is in some ways.

So yeah, Meatballs was awesome, influential, heartbreaking, very GenX, and a little subversive. But…

Why Meatballs Wasn’t On The List

Ultimately, I chose to keep Meatballs, and Stripes, and quite a few other “‘80s-era classics” off the playlist until my kids were older than I was when I saw them for one reason.

Women.

My goodness, it’s difficult to go back and watch a lot of “‘80s movies” now. While positively tame compared to more wildly offensive films of the era, the gender dynamics of Meatballs represents the closest thing I can think of to an accurate portrayal of how many young men I knew treated the young women I knew at the time: targets to be acquired.

Viewed from 2024, the scenes where Tripper repeatedly and physically pushes himself on love-interest Rox would certainly get almost any employee — much less a camp counselor — immediately fired. While played (sort of) for laughs, at best it’s a kind of “don’t bend over for the soap” trivialization of sexual violence that makes me physically uncomfortable to watch. That, in the end, Trip ends up with the girl makes it even worse.

The message to a 12 year old boy in the audience, lionizing this goofy camp councilor who had the gift of gab and endless cool, was clear: this is how you get the girl. This is a model. And that model stuck in my worldview for a time. How could it not? It was completely emblematic of the culture around me. It was only two years later that the infamous “Porky’s” came out, the ultimate cringefest love letter to teenage male libido.

To be clear, I’m not trying to engage in some sort of “media makes monsters” argument. But by the late ‘80s, I was shocked to learn first hand that being a pushy wise-ass towards that staff writer I had a crush on at ABC, repeatedly making inappropriate innuendos and fishing for dates not only didn’t work, but was creepy and gross. I learned. I apologized. I got better. But it wasn’t a model I was planning on incepting in my pre-teen son.

There are no “Good Old Days.” There is Only Now.

My experience of Meatballs — and with a lot of culture — is paradox. On the one hand, it carried legitimate lessons on how to be a better, more compassionate human being. It helped hone a worldview of wry cynicism which probably got me through the next decade. It entrenched what still feels like accurate critiques of class (leave asside that few middle-class families could afford to send a teen to a sleep-away camp for an entire summer in 2024).

But at the same time, it simultaneously reinforced some awful models of human behavior, and reinforced stereotypes that, across the decades, I’m quite happy to see fading.

Both of these things can be true in same movie. Heck, they can be true in the same scene.

In meditation, a common instruction I’ve received for dealing with pain - whether it’s a bum knee or a recursive thoguht - is to go into the pain, explore it, dwell in it, and ultimately to see myself, quite literally — that the pain only exists because of my attachment to something: Body, Sense of Self, A Story.

That’s the middle ground I intentionally try to find when looking back in time: to hold the contradictions in mind all at the same time. To live in the contradiction and discomfort and hopefully learn from it.

I embraced the paradox of Tripper unknowingly at 12 - or perhaps blindly masked it, assuming there never was one to begin with. Today, when presented with nostalgic and uncomfortable, I try and embrace the paradox intentionally.

And tomorrow? Well surely I will look back on my today-self in the today-world, and shake my head in disbelief at my naivete, insensitivity and stupidity, hopefully with a little compassion.

Otherwise why bother?