McConaugheMay Day 15: Glory Daze

An impossible task for me to look at this with any sort of objective feeling. Glory Daze is a deeply Santa Cruz movie. Hell, it even explicitly takes place in Santa Cruz, vaulting it high above the rest of my Santa Cruz Canon list. It's about the burnouts and losers and dirtbags that I grew up with. They were such stupid assholes and I loved them dearly. I hated that town because I was stuck there, but these guys were the ones who got to love the town fully; transplants there because they loved the surf and the vibes, making rent month to month, some of them pretending to be broker and more interesting than they really were, bonded by the need to not be back in the "real world." This was 1995, before my time, but Santa Cruz didn't change much in the next 20 years. Those views were still there, those boys were still there, the quiet weirdness of a man with a fishbowl on a bus was still there. I don't have nostalgia for the town or my time there, but how can I pretend to not feel a certain twinge at seeing my childhood home immortalized on film?

Glory Daze is partly an obvious Animal House riff, with a focus on a group of slackers living in a party house forced to raise money and, eventually, grow up. It’s not a particularly unique story, but it’s the lived-in texture of setting a film in a specific town in a specific era that makes this film worth a watch. The town is shot so lovingly that I could smell the salty surf air and remember the taste of food at the Shadowbrook restaurant. This is a movie made with love and affection for a place outside of LA, and that care shines through like a star. Star Ben Affleck offers maybe his best performance would be as a Santa Cruz dirtbag version of Jim Belushi, and while the beginning scenes led me to expect a pure misogyny fest like Animal House or Revenge of the Nerds, this film is undeniably more tinged with awareness than those movies. Not fully, it's still incredibly dude-focused, but more in the way that these guys are dude-focused, that the women in their lives are a part of their identity but not given their own identities.

Which, I need to clarify, is still bad!! But I prefer that to movies that try to have that cake and eat it too by pretending they also care about the female characters while giving them nothing. At least here, these are lonely men who know that they're lonely and actually are told, fairly explicitly, that they aren't actually seeking love so much as just wanting some feeling of validation. It's the sad kind of punk, the feeling of waking up in the morning in a filthy fucking house with people you love and hate and realizing you don't have a whole lot in the ways of goals or creativity or spiritual satisfaction. The party's got to end at some point, and everybody leaves except the people who gotta clean it up.

I don't miss them, or the me who was there, or even the town, but there's some small part of myself that does hold a fondness. Can't pretend otherwise. Glad I left, glad I changed, but there's still those people and that version of me that never left that town. That's as real as anything else.

Cannot imagine anyone else genuinely enjoying this film unless they grew up in Santa Cruz, too, just a heads up to any of my McConaugheBaes who might be tempted.