The Chilling Effect In Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill

The Chilling Effect Hollywood films have been an essential element of American culture throughout the twentieth century. The prevalence of the films produced by major studios makes them significant indicators of mainstream acceptance of various images on the screen as well as in the society; these films depict contemporary ideas and lifestyles of the era they attempt to mimic. Lawrence Kasdan's, The Big Chill, is the ultimate 1980s baby-boomer movie, presenting the definitive portrayal of the emerging yuppie archetype during a decade of greed. From running shoes, jogging, camcorders, and Motown, to self-analytical manipulation, and guilt-ridden upwardly mobile lifestyles, this film accurately depicts a time of money-hungry status seekers.
During the decade of the eighties, mega mergers spawned a new breed of billionaire, with Donald Trump, Leona Helmsley, and Ivan Boesky displaying the sudden rise and fall of the rich and the famous. Forbes Magazine's list of the top 500 companies was replaced with a growing listing of the 400 richest people to date. With a spending motto of "Shop till' you drop," binge buying and credit became a way of life. Designer labels were everything even for the youth of the nation. Video games, aerobics, minivans, and talk shows became part of American life. Double-digit inflation along with Reagan's war on drugs, accompanied the loss of many to AIDS while both hospital costs and unemployment were rapidly rising. The spendthrift eighties were a time of greed and narcissism in an attempt to climb the ladder to success. Families changed drastically during these years. The eighties continued the trends of previous decades with more divorces, more unmarried couples living together, and more single parent families. The two-earner family was even more common than in preceding decades, more women earned college and advanced degrees, married, and had fewer children. A study by UCLA indicated that college freshmen of the time were more interested in status, power, and money than at any time during the past 15 years. Image was becoming more important than reality, an attribute of the eighties that is still growing today.
No other film of the decade best depicts this era better than Lawrence Kasdan's, The Big Chill.
As seven ex-student radicals descend on a big estate in South Carolina for a reflective reunion after one of their own kills himself, each dumps on one another with their problems. The sixties are over, the idealism is gone, and time has come for this cast to face life in "Yuppie-land". At the reunion, the entire group has taken on new lives and new obsessions since the old days. Sam Weber, who had been interested in making a difference in society, had become a TV star. Sarah Cooper was a medical doctor and mom, Harold Cooper was a family man, who ran a chain of shoe stores. Meg, who had started her career as a defense attorney, is now a real estate lawyer, who wants to have a child. Michael, who yearned to be an investigative reporter, was now a writer for People Magazine. Nick, who had been a psychology major, was currently dealing drugs for a living. Karen Bowe, who was a talented poet in college, was a mom, and married to an emotionally cold, controlling husband, Richard. Lastly, there is Chloe, who was in her early twenties, and was Alex's last girl friend that he was living with in the house he was renovating, on a big property owned by the Coopers. Chloe was the one who discovered Alex, dead in the bathtub, after cutting his wrists. Alex was brilliant and the best of them, who could've been an excellent research scientist, but he made another choice and never
achieved much in his life, as he wandered from job to job. The film asks how friends might maintain or jump-start relationships when ideals fall by the edge of material security in the suburbs. And on yet another, it asks how anyone gets through the complications of intimacy, pretended or for-real.
The opening scene, with the song, "I heard it Through the Grapevine" as background music, shows each college friend of Alex's finding out and reacting to the news about his death, intertwined with scenes of the mortician dressing Alex's body in his funeral clothes.
As the bickering group of seven congregate to discuss how Alex embodied their best hopes and dreams, they easily come to conclude that because the era of peace and justice had vanished, there was no choice but to become a guilty corporate liar, a coke dealer, or a suicide. The group reminisces about the lost ideals of a lost generation. Sarah is close to tears, wondering if her political zeal had ever been real: "I hate to think it was all just fashion," she laments. The decade is again portrayed through Harold's athletic-shoe company, called "Running Dog," seemingly a parallel on the phrase "imperialist running dog" fabricated by a guilt-stricken capitalist of the time. Harold is also depicting the era of the eighties while tugging on his well-starched white shirt, then his expensive suit jacket, in an attempt to cover an array of faded and nasty-looking black tattoos, displaying the former countercultural obscuring his
past. The eighties began focusing on a refined and tuned image of self. The insufferable Michael, a failed novelist now on the staff of People magazine, finds himself ready to interview a 14-year-old blind baton twirler. "Good investigative journalism," he quips, then tries to deliver to his editor a self-serving story about the funeral reunion itself: "Lost hope. That's it. Lost hope," Michael mumbles on the phone. When the editor demurs, Michael rebuts with this: "Boring? You think everything is boring. You wouldn't say that if it was the Lost Hope Diet." This indicates the birth of self-image as a competition against self. As all films are based on conflict, The Big Chill presents characters having to overcome and contain subjects such as class divisions and status. The sinners, sellouts, and burnouts of this cast realize they are caught in a decade of self-righteousness, self-absorption, and an inability to shut up. They depict the changing times of the eighties with having difficulty in moving on. As any group conversation took place, a race to boost their individual egos was clearly evident. It was a time of selfishness and self-indulgence. Lawrence Kasdan accurately depicts the decade of the eighties not only through the apparent aspects of plot, but more significantly through each character's own experiences and lives.