OF A GOLDEN AGE

Yesterday Pajiba ran a column on Elijah Wood by contributor Michael Murray. He tries to put a finger on what’s so fascinating about Wood, and describes what I agree is the most memorable scene in Deep Impact:

As a tsunami is about to wash over the world, Wood — mobile and courageous on a zippy dirt bike — dekes in and out of the doomed motorists jammed on the highway.

My dad hates Elijah Wood and has since Wood starred as the kid in the updated Flipper movie. But I loved that movie (and still do: the statute of limitations on childhood taste has not run out), and countless others he made in the ’90s starting with Radio Flyer.

Deep Impact continued a fundamental shift in my taste. 1997 had come and gone with Titanic, which my friends and I liked a lot . . . then some of those friends saw it twenty times, while others decided a month later that they hated it. The combination of schizo obsession and backlash seemed even more ridiculous after the release of Armageddon, one of the biggest waste-of-time pieces of tripe I’ve ever endured, but for some reason people LOVED it and hated Deep Impact. I began to think about how this quieter, box-office-failing movie was better regardless of its level of commercial success. That’s not to say I didn’t continue to see questionable things and often do now.* But I started to understand the relationship between good movies and entertaining movies and their overlap.

It’s hard to explain the place Wood holds in my pop-culture memory because you just had to be there. In a way, our whole generation grew up on the same trajectory, and I’d seen him in movies from childhood to adolescence and onward, playing various parts that felt really truthful even though they spanned different historical periods, different backgrounds. I flipped through the December/January issue of Teen People — a teen magazine so honestly good I asked to get a subscription — and saw this spread on Elijah Wood:

For some reason, this magazine spread is one of my strongest sense memories to this day: I remembered this exact photo (and spent a lot of mental energy finding it online), the colors of the title font, how the shirt he’s wearing is blue because you see it on the next page. I was listening to a CD I’d just received for my birthday — 1996′s Yourself or Someone Like You by Matchbox 20, one of my first favorite CDs and one I still love for its importance to me then — and one of those songs is embedded in the memory too. The CD rode a continuous wave of successful singles and sold millions and millions of copies. I can’t listen to this album without thinking of this story on Elijah Wood in this magazine, and I can’t think of Elijah Wood without thinking of this album.

There’s some mental coin flip where this particular moment on this particular day won the memory game: An actor I like but don’t love, in a fairly typical photo spread, for an embarrassing movie (The Faculty!), sitting in my room, looking out the window into town, listening to a fairly typical mid 90s pop rock group. I feel a connection to Elijah Wood because of it, and I still think he’s great even though I fell asleep during each installment of Lord of the Rings.

* Here’s a clause to strike fear in your heart: Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D.

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