The Wackness

If you spent any of your teenage years sorting through the cultural wreckage of the mid 1990s, you should see The Wackness. In it you will watch Gandhi take a bong hit:

But the movie offers so much more than comedy by reputation that you think only once or twice, or three times at most, "hey, isn't that Gandhi cutting Ritalin into tiny lines and snorting them?" It may be that director Jonathan Levine caught me off guard with his invigorating fusion of humor and heartache; or that Ben Kingsley captured me with his portrait of a lonely, wasted life; or that Josh Peck conquered me with his soporific eyes and timid voice. I don't know exactly what it was, but the whole of the film worked on me, charmed me, and made me remember in such visceral proportions the unsatisfying and sick but entirely desired escape from emptiness into extinction, that last logical refuge of a mind and body convinced that the solution to pain lies not in the grieving nerve but in the anaesthetic applied to it: that disorder of the soul we call love, and young love in particular.

Recollection of past pain never hurts as much as the present pain that comes from no longer feeling the ghostly panic--the quickening pulse and closed throat, the ice melting in your lungs and stomach, in your heart, and the body screaming with each breath about love--that once followed without thought the mistaken face, the name's coincidence, any of a million of life's contingencies that returned you to her.

Being young sucks worse than anything and is grand and irreplaceable.