Garden State (2004)

directed by Zach Braff

Orlantae Duncan

Shortly after turning 30, I began to feel like I was aging in reverse. Instead of being anchored in a deeper knowledge and understanding of myself, I was lost; unmoored to the only body I owned, the only mind I possessed. After all these decades of wrestling with identity and self-acceptance, the picture was undoubtedly funny: a 30-year-old adult with only a series of rehearsed answers on his lips when asked about goals, desires, passions. A 30-year-old undergoing second puberty.

Marked by isles of sweat and foreign hair, first puberty was a fever dream. The town of Orange, Virginia transformed into a minefield, using the alchemy of rustic stoicism to turn carefree childhood into vigilant adolescence. “Discretion” was the mantra of my survival. A self-taught master of the double life, I learned quickly the value of using smoke and mirrors on weekdays to distract others from sketchy meet-ups and playground rendezvous on weekends. And as dangerous and ill-advised as meeting strangers may have been, it soothed a phantom pain the widening chasm of living a dual existence left me with. A 14-year-old closet case living in a town whose name is shared with a fruit designed for deception; whole on the outside, multitudinous on the inside.

Zach Braff’s 2004 film Garden State has meant many things to me over the years, both as an indie film and as a mirror. I am unsure how I experienced it the first time, whether rented or borrowed from a friend, however I do remember the first time I watched the trailer: in the privacy of my childhood bedroom, in-between commercials impatiently waiting for MTV’s Laguna Beach or The Real World to return when suddenly several seconds flashed across the screen of a lonely young man, demure and sullen, riding a motorcycle through the streets of a small town in New Jersey while Frou Frou’s “Let Go” softly played in the background. I recall thinking, possibly aloud, There I Am. I knew how silly and melodramatic it sounded (Braff’s Andrew Largeman being 26, white, and tragically straight), but that spark of recognition—of something—led me on a quest to find the nearest copy. A quest that went beyond labels or a teenage appetite to project onto any content even remotely “angsty.” What I saw instead was the story of an individual lost unto himself, pained by and unable to reconcile a previous version of who he was with the current version. A kind of double life, a kind of puberty.

“You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you have some place where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone…It’s like you feel homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist.”

To me, few characters have aged successfully since Garden State’s initial inception (Natalie Portman’s portrayal of “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” Sam comes to mind), and even fewer lines of dialogue, but what is salvageable I continue to be absorbed by with each return. Undergrad was a cluster of growing pains for me, between misplaced affections in same-sex friendships to truths faced about a mental illness that went unchecked for years, but what challenged me more was the rift my budding adulthood created between my past and present. Similar to Andrew Largeman, an aspiring actor living in L.A. called home for his mother’s funeral after years of absence, history became a spoiled corpse I would rather pinch my nose and turn away from. More than being queer, more than rejecting the faith I was baptized in, growing older meant accepting that the grandparents who raised me and the peers I grew up with never knew nor understood me at all. Braff knew what he was doing when meticulously crafting the film’s soundtrack and having The Shins’ “New Slang (When You Notice The Stripes)” play as Andrew sits in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office shortly following his return home, his pale face concentrating as Sam’s borrowed headphones drown out all other sound. I still mouth the opening lyrics like a silent prayer when rewatching the scene: “Gold teeth and a curse for this town / were all in my mouth / only I don’t know how they got out, dear.”

I have not been home in seven years, and before the pandemic communication was fairly scarce, reserved for the infrequent check-in here or news of a relative’s death there. I graduated from college, moved to a new city, came out, and found faith in the Church of New Beginnings, where the heavenly reward of jettisoning your past is the chance for a present; forgetting who you used to be piece-by-piece. I found community, personally and professionally, gained validation for my art, but felt no more secure than the 14- or 21-year-old wanderer of my youth. I turned 30, Andrew Largeman’s senior by four years, and could not account for the person I saw in the mirror.

What I still imprint upon, what fascinates and haunts me about this 18-year-old indie film, is Andrew’s ability to lean into the past toward the narrative’s end. What began as a familial obligation to return to the place he abandoned, ends with an almost willful acceptance of what cannot be changed. As messy, complicated, and unfinished some of the interpersonal drama between characters is by the end credits, Andrew has found space to begin healing. But what is healing when we have faced and accepted the past, yet still live with some semblance of hurt? I don’t know. Andrew is left with no answers, no epiphany, on how to begin living, but one of his last lines, “what do we do?” marks a step towards something revelatory; the spark igniting during the last exchange between Andrew and his estranged father, played by Ian Holm, when he unburdens himself of years of childhood trauma and forgives his father’s role in it, signaling puberty’s end:

“You and I are gonna be OK, you know that, right? We may not be as happy as you always dreamed we would be, but for the first time let’s just allow ourselves to be whatever it is we are and that will be better. OK? I think that would be better.”

Romantic poet John Keats, in a letter to his brothers George and Thomas, once described the experience of “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” He coined this phenomenon Negative Capability. I spent so much of my adolescence and young adulthood running from questions towards nebulous answers, trying to escape myself to find myself. I am under no illusion that the past provides all the answers to life’s personal miseries, but I am convinced that by perhaps acknowledging it (different from embracing it), I can find peace in the confusion and chaos. I can still be pained by history without becoming chained to it. Ask “what do I do?” as a call-to-action, as Andrew does. A kind of “beauty in the breakdown” as Frou Frou’s “Let Go” softly plays and the screen fades to black.

Orlantae Duncan is a writer based in Richmond, Virginia with a BA in English Literature from the University of Mary Washington. His work has previously appeared in Homology Lit, Cartridge Lit, and Allegory Ridge’s poetry anthology Aurora Vol. 1. He has also served on the editorial staff of The Rappahannock Review.