A visit to True/False Film Fest (and also back in time)
How to transcend the college town nostalgia trap, maybe.
This edition of Deez Links is brought to you by Gap.
I, of course, have long been obsessed with the hometown as a site of reflection. But the college town — mine being Columbia, Missouri, that crunchy-frat center jewel on the strand of I-70 that cinches the “Show Me” state — has always occupied a murkier place in memory. If the stories one tells oneself regarding hometowns and childhoods tend to revolve around the basic narrative structure of you vs. the world (parents, high school, rules!), the hallowed college days are more slippery to define. As every 18-year-old unleashed unto acres of green lawns and pretty brick lecture halls learns soon enough, the constraints and choices become yours to make, for better and for worse. And so life begins.
Which is all to say that I don’t really think about college as much as one might guess, given my yen for nostalgia and the fact that my years at the University of Missouri were inarguably transformative. I’d first driven into Columbia as a very sheltered, very religious small-town girl who had not done much of anything except School; then I exited in 2015 so eagerly that I almost never look back — except once a year, right at the end of February/start of March, when my old college town reliably plays host to the True/False Film Festival. It’s a tradition 23 years in the making, wherein Columbia tamps down its identity as a node of SEC football and lets its indie, arty, nerdy-queer Berkeleyesque understory shine for four precious days.
My True/False packing list:
Gap VintageSoft Arch Logo Hoodie — cuddly and eminently borrow-able, helped me feel collegiate without stamping “Mizzou” all over myself
Gap Organic Cotton Vintage Soft T-shirt — there’s something about this highlighter pink that kept me insistent about spring, even when the temp randomly dropped 30 degrees overnight
Gap Organic Cotton Poplin Big Shirt — good for the coffee catch-up with folks I did not have decades of sartorially casual rapport with…
Plane foot swing — I don’t bring alllll my plane accoutrement for a 3-hour flight, but being able to tuck my feet up on a flight now is non-negotiable
Gap Easy Double-Knee Barrel Pants — the only “hard” pants I needed for the weekend
Gap denim workwear jacket — good solid pockets
Vitamin C gel packets — I kept getting sick after every trip earlier this winter; NO MORE
Gap Vegan Suede Bucket Bag — have been using this as my work bag but it also lent itself for maximum stuffing on days when I wasn’t sure how the Midwest fool’s spring was going to play out
Lacrosse ball — to work out the neck kinks after watching docs all day. Also non-negotiable as this is no longer a 24-yr-old spine I can confirm
Portable charger — the better to confirm everyone is, yes, at Shakespeare’s Pizza again : )
Gap Logo Tote Bag — For maximal cross-country schlepping. I put my film camera in the front pocket with the cord hanging out to remind me to take it out at security. We must protect the memories we choose to keep.
For documentary heads, True/False means premieres, exposure, networking, and parties, all at astonishingly Midwestern prices (a decent balm for the soul if you didn’t get in at Sundance). But for my group of college friends, whom you would have known on campus as the highly annoying journalism school nerds, True/False was such a favorite time for us as students that it quickly turned into an unofficial reunion weekend. For a few years after graduation, I went back to Columbia for T/F very dutifully. It became the weekend where we’d meet new boyfriends and girlfriends, where we’d gossip about the friends who refused to come back and feast on Shakespeare’s Pizza in all of its saucy, doughy glory. The last time I went to T/F was roughly three days before the U.S. shut down over COVID: One of my last good memories of that spring (and year, really) was swaying drunkenly on the street with my college best friend as a bunch of students who were drinking on a rooftop patio sang “happy birthday” down to me. A spring birthday has always made me obsessed with newness; going back to True/False first always felt like tithing to the past first.
But then COVID properly hit. Everything shut down for a while, and our crew grew up in different ways. For a few deeply sad years in the interim, I lost touch with that college best friend, which made the thought of going back to CoMo totally pointless. I was busy writing and promoting a book about “the place I came from,” meaning my hometown, but it felt like there was a lid tightly capping all memories and thoughts of college. For later examination, I guessed. Distance as growth? Then, last summer, this friend and I started back up again, and I broached the topic of reuniting. Our respective lives had become so different that this one special weekend at our college town offered us a portal, a rare alignment between two planets that otherwise didn’t have much overlap anymore. I wanted to see her, to introduce her to my extremely New York boyfriend (frankly, I wanted to introduce everyone to my extremely New York boyfriend — who, when I asked if he had ever been to the Midwest before, asked if New Orleans counted.) A bid at return was in order. It was time to integrate.
When we flew into St. Louis and began the drive down I-70 Thursday afternoon, I began vibrating with anticipation as all the banal little landmarks came into view: the Ozarks billboards, the flat little farms, the inexplicably giant American flag still flying on the side of the interstate. Once in Columbia, I hustled us in and out of The Broadway hotel — which I had never actually seen inside, had only had drinks on its rooftop when it first opened senior year, in what felt like the pinnacle of sophistication — and onto campus as quickly as I could, the better to point out the decrepit apartment buildings where I’d lived my senior year, whose name as “the J-slums” could finally become self evident. A few steps over was Shakespeare’s, as ever, though now comfortably situated under the hulking heft of the luxury student condo complexes that first started swallowing up the town when I was a student. “That’s not how it used to be,” I said for the first of about a million times that weekend.
My boyfriend was an indefatigable good sport as I pointed out everything I barely remembered. “I threw up somewhere around here,” I said outside a parking garage, gesturing vaguely at the ground. I took us to look at the journalism school, the quad. “I had a geology class there,” I said to provide more exciting local color (If nothing else, this trip made it very, very apparent why, junior year, I had not been chosen to join the university “Tour Team”). At the student center, I darted around the basement anxiously looking for the The Maneater office, which suddenly became as urgent as looking for my mother. I finally gave up and had to get directions from some students in the Women’s Center; the newspaper office was now apparently upstairs, shrunken down to a single room. There, a dozen baby-faced Maneaters looked at me curiously when I poked my head through the door. I explained that I was an alum; they were polite and sat quietly until I was done looking around the room. I left with my tail in between my legs, unsure if I had been secretly expecting a hero’s welcome or at least recognition somewhere in the office — on a note, a photo, a leftover tchotchke — that I had ever even been there. I forgot to ask them if they still did Hooch Fest.
At the journalism kid watering holes of choice — Shakespeare’s and a little bakery/cafe located inside the indie movie theater just off-campus — I could at least reunite with everyone. My freshman year RA, my sophomore year editor, everyone’s favorite heartthrob who used to walk around campus with his shirt unbuttoned to his belly, my sweet senior year roommate, my sweet sweet beautiful college best friend who still apparently wore her hair in a bob. We hugged each other tight when we saw each other, then quickly lapsed into cautious chatter about the films we were seeing, the states we now lived in. There were a few moments when I felt such a grief to realize how unfamiliar we all were to each other, an emotional distance that felt so at odds with the fact that I could still remember vivid details about so-and-so’s situationship from a decade ago, or the granular details of someone’s roommate drama, or the real reason why I always packed all my laundry in a suitcase every Sunday and drove to my friends’ bigger apartment to use their in-unit laundry rather than the one in my building (because someone’s old ex had also lived in that unit, and he once found a dead bat in the dryer amongst their clothes). Like, I write the above as if I’m trying to say that we all had drifted equally, but if I’m being honest, what I think I want to say is that I got a distinct sense that I had really spun off a little too far, a little too self importantly, and that sitting around the table eating pizza and Blue Moons made apparent what the cost of that was. The time for catching up easily had long since passed; it felt like all I could really do was rekindle a few funny stories here and there for the mems and then genially wish everyone well.
Nostalgia, now that I’m starting to get it in a real way, is more complex than I thought it would be. All weekend, I kept walking by bookstores, restaurants, shops downtown that I could technically point at and say that I remembered walking by them, even if I had not ever actually gone inside. When I first sat down next to my college best friend, it was true that suddenly the world clicked into place with finer clarity than it had in years. I felt helpless to feel so glad but with too much to say. One of the documentaries from the weekend that I watched inside the giant Methodist church, School for Defectors, seemed to taunt me by portraying the irrepressible joy of teenagers; in a critical moment, a senior logs on to see whether she got into college, and she collapses in an ecstatic scream to receive confirmation that yes, there would be a place for her in the world. In another, To Hold a Mountain, a young girl leaves her mother and her farm in the Montenegrin mountains to go to school off screen; in every successive scene stitched from the seven years of her life on the farm captured on film, she looks both older and slightly more peevish each time.
In the end, what helped was my boyfriend’s subtle insistence on closing some of the memory gaps by making new ones. We finally ventured inside those vintage shops I walked by all those years; we finally tried the buffet at Indian House that my roommates used to talk about all the time; we wound up inside Iron Tiger looking at pages of flash art and skipped one of our screenings to get tattooed together. At the honky tonk bar on Friday night, we watched the young bouncer’s eyes widen with something like horror at the dates on our drivers licenses and then spent the night making up line dance moves. In the morning, shortly before packing up the car to begin the journey back to home, I hugged these friends good-bye without knowing when we would see each other again. People really don’t warn you about how easily that happens. Or how precious it is to be able to know when the portal will open again.
