In The Simpsons episode "Grade School Confidential" of Season 8, there is a scene where Skinner and Krabappel, who have recently started dating but are looking to keep their relationship under wraps, attend a late night movie screening, only to have their covert date interrupted by Superintendent Chalmers, who has coincidentally shown up at the very same screening. Skinner runs off to pull a pajama-clad Bart Simpson out of bed and have him join them, in the hopes that they can convince Chalmers that they are here on a field trip with a student. Chalmers apparently doesn't find this at all suspicious (somewhat ironically, as the writers apparently regard Chalmers as a precursor to Frank Grimes, in that he was a "normal" character with an inclination toward questioning the mind-blowing lunacy of the Simpsons universe that the rest of the cast took for granted). During the film, Chalmers leans over and asks a frustrated, sleep-deprived Bart, "You think they actually filmed this in Atlanta?" Tetchily, Bart responds, "I don't know! I don't think it's important!" "Yeah," agrees a smiling and satisfied Chalmers, as if Bart has just made some profound comment on the nature of film aesthetics.
For the longest time, that Chalmers-Bart exchange had ranked as one of my all-time favourite Simpsons gags, although bugger me if I could tell you why. There was just something intrinsically hilarious about Chalmers getting hung up on something as banal as whether or not a picture was filmed on location in Atlanta when this absolutely insane scenario was playing out right under his nose. I couldn't have told you if there was any particular significance to that location being Atlanta of all places. Eventually, it occurred to me that perhaps we were expected to suss out exactly which movie the characters were watching - if you listen to the episode's DVD commentary, the production team do give off the distinct impression that there is an in-joke of sorts nestled in here (Josh Weinstein remarks that "It's just that it's the perfect type of movie for...", implying that they did have a specific film in mind). Skinner mentions that it stars Tom Berenger, which narrows down the list of potential titles considerably, and we know that the film is apparently set in Atlanta. I did a google search on "Tom Berenger Atlanta movie" and The Big Chill (1983) popped right up. Well, that was refreshingly straightforward, particularly seeing as how The Simpsons has sent me on some proper wild goose chases in the past. As a kid, I always took it as a given that the piranha movie described by Milhouse in the Season 7 episode "Marge Be Not Proud" was real and was later seriously disappointed to discover it's not (it should be, though).
Previously, I was aware of The Big Chill, but chiefly for that hilariously cruel piece of trivia regarding the then-up-and-coming Kevin Costner, who was all set to make his big screen breakout in this film (following a bit part in the 1982 film Night Shift) but wound up having most of his scenes scrapped in post-production; in the final cut, his character survives - ironically - as a faceless corpse who's being dressed up by a mortician during the opening montage (director Lawrence Kasdan apparently felt guilty about sabotaging Costner's prospective big break and guaranteed him a part in his next film, Silverado, by way of apology). The actual plot of The Big Chill - a bunch of old college friends reunite after so many years and reflect on the disappointments of post-campus life - had never really interested me; I'd written it off as a more glamorous, star-studded recycling of John Sayles' pioneering indie Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980). Now, though, I was suddenly compelled to get hold of a copy and watch it, if only in the obsessive interests of seeing if Superintendent Chalmers' question about Atlanta takes on any additional resonance if you're familiar with the film he's (hypothetically) watching.
Here's the kicker - most of The Big Chill does not take place in Atlanta, Georgia. In fact, hardly any of it does. The bulk of the story, which concerns a group of thirtysomethings reuniting for the funeral of their old college chum Alex (the role intended for Costner, who was originally going to be resurrected in flashback sequences), happens over the course of a single weekend in Beaufort, South Carolina. Turns out, the scenes set in Atlanta were mainly the ones involving Costner's character. D'oh! Much like Costner himself, the only glimpse we get Atlanta at all occurs in the opening montage, when Mary Kay Place's character wanders across her office and puffs a cigarette while gazing out from a window overlooking the city. Oh, so is that it? Is that what Chalmers was actually supposed to be talking about? If so then I guess he asks a reasonable enough question - that backdrop we see could very well be fake. (It's not the joke I was expecting, though. I thought that The Big Chill might be one of those talk-orientated films that takes place entirely in one interior setting, in which case getting hung up whether or not it was filmed on location would seem kind of absurd.)
The film itself? Well, my initial instinct turned out to be pretty much on the money, in that it is a more glamorous, star-studded recycling of Return of the Secaucus 7, with the added bugbear that it's blatantly trying to sell you a bunch of music on the side. The soundtrack, which consists largely of 1960s Motown favourites, is one of the film's most flagrant pieces of nostalgia bait and was apparently very successful, spawning no less than two tie-in LPs (note that the dreamy score music overheard during the indirect allusion on The Simpsons does not correspond with anything in the film itself). There's something about how overbearingly reliant the film is on its soundtrack to convey that sense of yearning for a bygone era that seriously rubbed me the wrong way, to the extent that the whole thing frequently played like a 100 minute commercial for a compilation album of 1960s hits. God knows, the characters themselves aren't astoundingly likeable or engaging, which may well have been the entire point. The film's title supposedly contains a double meaning, referring simultaneously to the relaxed get-together the characters have following Alex's funeral and the kind of emotional chill Kasdan would personally experience when contemplating how thoroughly his generation had traded in the ideals of its youth for a place in the establishment. Maybe we're not expected to feel terribly inspired by this particular group of characters, or to relish exactly what kind of future lies ahead of them, but very little of the talk in The Big Chill manages to be more than remotely interesting, the concerns and nuances of the cast being all-too-often overshadowed by the slickness of the production.
Amid all this, the absent friend Alex becomes the film's greatest enigma, a spectre whose memory hangs uneasily over the proceedings and goes largely unacknowledged, beyond the small smattering of awkward moments in which one of the party gingerly attempts to raise the subject. I believe that the original idea was to have Alex appear in flashback sequences in order to create a discrepancy in terms of the person he was and how his friends remembered him, but Kasdan clearly decided somewhere along the line that the story would have more impact if we never actually meet Alex firsthand, hence the near-total excision of all of Costner's scenes from the finished picture. This included the film's original ending, a flashback to a Thanksgiving dinner in which all of the friends, Alex included, were present, which might account for why the ending we get arrives so glibly and abruptly. What does intrigue me is just how committed Kasdan has remained to preserving Alex's enigma in the years following The Big Chill, to the point that none of his deleted scenes have ever been released to the public. On finishing the film, my very first instinct was to head straight to the deleted scenes under the Special Features tab (I had purposely chosen to track down a DVD copy with deleted scenes on the naive assumption that it would contain Alex's material), only to find it as every bit as Costner-less as the film itself. To date, Alex remains one of cinema's most mysterious off-screen characters. We know there's footage of him in existence, but unless Kasdan has a change of heart, we won't be getting to meet him any time soon.
Can we at least answer Chalmers' question as to whether the film was shot on location in Atlanta or not? Well, according to the end-credits:
FILMED ENTIRELY ON LOCATION IN BEAUFORT, SOUTH CAROLINA AND ATLANTA, GEORGIA
There's that mystery solved, then. Next I'm going to move on to pondering just what film, if any, The Stockholm Affair (the "taut political thriller" watched by Homer and Marge in "Colonel Homer" of Season 3) was parodying. Oh, and will somebody hurry up and give us Milhouse's piranha movie, please? We've been waiting for nearly twenty-two years.
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