The Hangout Movie
Part of the reason I started this blog is because I've formed a lot of bizarrely passionate opinions on topics that matter to me and pretty much nobody else. I love The Lion King, but the fact that it has songs sung off-screen is, on a narrative and musical level, cheating. I think so many people have pointed out that Nickelback sucks that hating Nickelback has become hacky. Unless they have an actual diagnosable phobia, I get annoyed at people who still think clowns are creepy. But the one that sticks out the most in my mind is the fact that I’ve developed pointlessly specific thoughts on how “hangout movies” have been defined in film discourse so far.
In the most general of senses, hangout movies, a term Tarantino seems to have made up, are movies that emphasize spending intimate moments with our characters as opposed to watching them go through the motions of what we generally think movie protagonists are supposed to do. Instead of rescuing a child or killing a bad guy or saving the world, these are the movies that would rather spend time with characters talking about music or going to a party or walking the streets of an old European city and waxing philosophic about love. We are literally hanging out with these characters. True, we may not be in the same room with them, but we’re participating on an emotional level. Tarantino made up the term to describe how he feels about Rio Bravo. The characters are, on some level, his friends, and though I think the way we talk about hangout movies has shifted away from what Tarantino really meant when he made up the term, that’s the general feeling hangout movies ultimately seek.
However, I think the term has been too narrowly defined. There’s many an article out there that’ll say that hangout movies, by definition, don’t have a story or act breaks or any of the elements that make up traditional film structure. They’ll lead you to believe that all hangout movies are just a large cast of kooky characters getting high, listening to cool music, and discussing the minutia of sex or art or any subject matter related to the plot. This can be true, but I don’t think it has to the case.
Paradoxically, I also think the definition can be a little too broad and ill-defined. I’ve been going over a bunch of user-made IMDb and Reddit lists of hangout movies, and as this Film School Rejects article correctly points out, many people seem to mistake character-driven stories for hangout movies. (The primary differences being purpose and sensibility, but we’ll get there soon enough.)
I know what I meant when I talked about "hangout movies" in the past, but I didn't have an effective way of describing it. So I rewatched a bunch of films I consider hangout movies and came up with a few concrete traits to help me explain myself better. I don’t want to give you a rigid definition. Your tastes may differ from mine, and I don’t think hangout movies are a “genre” in the classical sense so much as a sensibility. Instead, I’ll offer some potential ingredients. You can have a hangout movie without these parts, but these are some of the things the best ones have in common.
Also, for the sake of a challenge, I’m going to try to go this whole post without bringing up the usual films that articles about hangout movies generally bring up. No Dazed and Confused. (No Linklater in general, really.) No The Big Lebowski. No American Graffiti. Let’s bring some new movies to the conversation, shall we?
Spoiler warning for any movie mentioned below.
1. Where and When
Think about the most memorable hangout sessions you've ever had with your friends or family. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, who you were hanging out with is the most important part of that memory. However, I’d be willing to bet that an equally important aspect is where you were and when you were hanging out. Maybe you had a few hours to kill before your soccer game in high school, so you'd walk to your buddy's house to play Halo. Maybe you went to the boardwalk in the beach town you go to with your family every summer. Maybe it was just shooting the shit at the quiet bar near your college campus.
And it’s not just physically where you were, but when in your life that hangout session took place. That crappy diner you feel oddly attached to in your hometown? You’re not nostalgic for it because of the food. You long for it because of the memories you associate with that booth in the corner or the smells wafting from the grill behind the counter. (Or your local diner was legitimately not crappy at all and you'd order the Killer Cakes with chocolate chips and bacon and how dare you shit talk my diner!)
Most hangout movies aim to capture that sense of nostalgia or present you with quiet moments that feel genuine and relatable on some level. Like your memories, good hangout movies ground you in a moment, and the details matter. As such, setting is important, and it’s not only where, but when.
Some hangout movies root us in a place we don’t necessarily want to be so that way, we can root for our characters to overcome their surroundings. Many a hangout movie protagonist find themselves dropped into a place that's alien, so they have to meet new people and make the best of their situation so that they can keep their head above water. As we the audience watch, we relate because we’ve all been the new person who doesn’t immediately fit in.
One such example is 2016’s Sing Street, a film about a kid named Conor who starts a band with a fellow group of social outcasts to impress a girl named Raphina. (That’s an extreme over-simplification, but you get my point.)
Our story takes place in Dublin in 1985. Knee-deep in Thatcher’s UK, prospects in Ireland were low, and people were leaving for London in droves. Not immune to the souring economy are Conor’s parents, and as a result, they’ve decided to send him to a cheaper catholic school. And remember, this is Ireland, so when I say, “catholic” I mean catholic. Add some bullies, some teenage angst, and a touch of parents on the perpetual edge of divorce and you’ve got yourself a recipe for some genuine misery.
However, in spite of the inherent bleakness of the setting, Sing Street is one of the most affective hangout movies in recent years partially because of how it attaches itself to the most redeemable parts of the ‘80s. Specifically, the music. Times were rough, but one gets the feeling from watching Sing Street that things couldn't be that bad when you can turn on the radio or flick on the TV and see The Jam or The Clash or The Cure or Hall & Oates, even if it's in the living room of your drab low-income household. As Conor learns about these bands thanks to the guidance of his older brother, it’s easy to see how they influence not only the music he makes with his band, but how he lives his everyday life. He started as a timid loner who went to school in a concrete prison. Then he discovered music. Now the world seems limitless.
Another film that earns its hangout feeling from characters bonding in a less-than-ideal setting is Short Term 12, a film named after the group home for teenagers in which it takes place.
Short Term 12 goes into some extraordinarily dark territory. Some of the children have experienced the worst kinds of neglect and abuse. Some are already turning to self-harm. Not helping matters is that they all live together in what can be described as a giant dorm. And not the nice dorm you got if you shilled out some extra cash. Your shitty freshman year dorm. The one that felt more like a holding cell.
However, I classify Short Term 12 as a hangout movie because it’s ultimately about the value of support from people who care, and despite the exceptional amount of heartbreak, there are plenty of moments of genuine joy. The supervisors, including our troubled protagonist Grace, do their best to make the lives of these kids better, and for the most part, they do a great job. They don’t do it for the money or the glory. They do it because they want to help, and their spirit clearly makes their way into the kids, who also do their best to cheer one another up. Kids are kids, and sometimes they can be shitty to one another. But they also understand that as long as they’re stuck in this place, they have to have each others backs. Thus the only reason Short Term 12 feels like home is because of what they put in, and they put in a lot. Think about that shitty dorm. I bet you had a few good times in there, right? I know I did.
Sometimes, the purpose of the setting in a hangout movie is to watch our characters grow in a place they don’t want to be. (This is why, for example, so many hangout movies take place in high school. Nobody wants to be in high school, what with the monotony and the often painful experience of adolescence. But I'm sure many of you have some of your best memories there as well.)
However, not every hangout movie is about finding yourself in poor circumstances. Sometimes, they’re about taking our characters someplace we long to go and letting us, and our protagonist, bathe in it.
One such example is a film we’ve covered before, Call Me By Your Name.
On the surface, Call Me By Your Name is a film about a seventeen year old discovering his sexuality with Oliver, an older male grad student. Elio, our protagonist, is a staunch book worm and a gifted musician. He’s already discovered the pleasures of the mind. However, Call Me By Your Name is about discovering new depths of fulfillment. Specifically, the pleasures of the body and the pleasures of emotion. Of course, the relationship ends. But then there’s a new pleasure to discover: The pleasure in the knowledge that you can feel so strongly for someone that you can lose yourself in your feelings for them, even if those feelings leave you despondent.
What we’re essentially dealing with here is Inception levels of satisfaction, and if the goal is to surround yourself in beauty, what better place to do it than in Northern Italy, a place with thousands of years of culture to inspire you and light up those certain synapses in your brain? Just look at it:
Look at it!
LOOK AT IT!
Maybe you've spent more time abroad than I have and you don't find the setting as inspiring as I do. But If I had the opportunity to discover my sexuality again, it wouldn’t be in my room with my laptop and a spotty internet connection. Preferably, it would be in the Italian sunlight in an old villa with someone I cared about. Maybe it would end in heartbreak, but at least I wouldn’t feel like such an asshole every time I look at certain actresses and pop singers. (There’s no such thing as too much information.)
Another such example of a movie that lets us luxuriate in a beautiful setting is the criminally underrated Chef.
Our protagonist, Chef Carl Casper, is a well-known chef at a well-known restaurant in Los Angeles. Despite his popularity, Carl’s boss doesn’t allow him to challenge himself or try anything new with the menu. Nevertheless, he spends all his time working, and thus he knows nothing about his son Percy and it’s implied that his work life has cost him his marriage. Carl doesn’t know it, and the movie does a brilliant job not rubbing your face in it (a small part of why I like it so much), but he's deeply unhappy. Thus when he's fired after a spectacular meltdown at a food critic, it’s almost a relief.
So what’s a disgraced chef to do? Go to Florida, get yourself a food truck, get your son and your sous-chef, and with an amazing Latin/American jazz and blues soundtrack, hit the road and serve some cubanos!
Over the course of the road trip back to LA, they hit up Miami, New Orleans, and some of the other more cultured American cities. Wherever they go, they absorb everything about it, be it the pork in Miami or the beignets in New Orleans or the blues and BBQ in Texas. It’s through this absorption that a father witnesses his son learn to love the same food that’s made up his whole being, and now that he knows him, he can learn to love his son on a level he’s never experienced before.
Plus there’s incredible food porn and amazing music. Chef is awesome. See Chef.
2. Transformation
Some hangout movies tell more traditional stories. Some are just a sequence of events that happen in chronological order, and can only charitably be called a “story.” That doesn’t mean that this style of hangout movie is inherently “bad.” After all, Dazed and Confused doesn’t really have much in the way of story and it's the definitive example of a hangout movie. (Though it has more structure than you think.) However, all hangout movies have one thing in common: They are internal. They’re internal in the sense that they often bring out a sense of nostalgia and discovery in the audience, but moreover, they’re internal in that they deal with characters who need to find themselves and discover who they really are and what they really care about.
Hangout movies are about transformation. Sometimes this is a shift in our character's worldview. Sometimes it’s simply a reaffirmation of who this character really is. Sometimes it’s something in between. But the journey our protagonist makes is (mostly) an emotional one. Conor and Raphina escape Dublin for London. It’s a shortsighted plan that might lead to disaster for both of them. But they might find a life Dublin can’t give them, and the ending revels in the possibilities while acknowledging the truth of what they're really doing. The past may still haunt Grace, but she’s not going to pass her trauma onto her child because she’s ready to be a parent now. Elio understands that heartbreak sucks, but there’s beauty in the act of letting yourself feel as much as you possibly can. Carl gets the life of his dreams, but he almost falls back into bad habits.
None of these characters save the world. None of them shoot a monologuing bad guy out of a moving vehicle or find a god device that’ll allow them to stop the evil robot and save their loved ones from a fiery explosion. But they all understand themselves now, and they all have a chance at peace thanks to everything they’ve learned on the way.
Many a hangout movie begins with a character in a place of repression. These characters often have a spark to them, but it’s hidden because they’re not in an emotional place where they can let it out or it’s being suppressed by the people in the place they inhabit. They then discover a new world and a new group of people, and suddenly the universe is boundless.
An example of this lies in another Irish themed hangout movie, 2015’s Brooklyn.
It’s 1951. Eilis (ay-lish) lives in a small town on the Southeast corner of Ireland. She lives with her sister and her ailing mother, she can’t find a job except for a weekend shop gig at a store ran by a loathsome old lady, and none of the local men really catch her eye. There’s no opportunity for advancement or education, so she makes the difficult decision to leave her family behind and try to make a life for herself in America.
At first, her new life is overwhelming. The trip itself was a nightmare, she lives in a boarding house where the more socially experienced women intimidate her, and her department store job is stressful. Moreover, when you come from an small isolated community in Ireland, New York City can be hard, and homesickness comes easy.
But soon enough, this new place begins to agree with Eilis. Her new friends are eager to help her. At the behest of the local Irish priest, she starts taking classes at night. She doesn’t work for a gossipy nightmare whose sole purpose seems to be making life miserable. She meets a charming Italian man from a lovely family. It takes some time and some work, but at some point she realizes that this big scary place now feels like home, and as we watch Eilis transform, those of us who’ve experienced moving to a new city feel every bit of it.
Another example of finding one’s self in a new place is Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, a director who doesn’t get his due credit when it comes to making hangout movies. (And yes, My Neighbor Totoro is the more hangout-y Miyazaki movie, but I like Kiki’s Delivery Service more. Sue me.)
The world of Kiki’s Delivery Service is cohabited by witches, and when a witch turns thirteen, it’s tradition that they leave home for a year to sharpen their skills in a new town. Kiki, our protagonist, is now of the age. Life at home isn’t bad, but she’s unfulfilled. The world is too big, and Kiki has a natural sense of wonder. She leaves home and finds herself in a small fictional city called Koriko. (A city clearly inspired by the small towns you’d find in Norway or Sweden.) The town, at first, is hostile. The traffic cops want to fine her for her erratic broom riding, the locals are rude, and she’s convinced herself that she’ll probably have to sleep in the streets for a few nights. The outside world is meaner than she’d ever thought it would be, and her sense of wonder is almost destroyed right out the gate.
But then Kiki meets Osono, a pregnant baker who offers her a room. Suddenly things start looking up. Kiki realizes that she can use her broom-riding skills to shuttle packages, and she opens up her delivery service. While flying building her business, she makes friends with Tombo, a local boy who’s obsessed with aviation, Ursula, an artist who lives outside of town in the woods, and a few old ladies who are impressed by Kiki’s candor. Koriko starts to grow on Kiki, and Kiki starts to grow on the town as she wins everyone over.
Not all of these types of hangout movies are about moving. But it’s an affective tool because moving is a scary right of passage we all go through. I watched Kiki’s Delivery Service for the first time within a year of moving across the country. I project a lot of my shit on it.
Sometimes, it’s about meeting new people in a new place. Other times, it’s about bonding with those with whom we’ve already formed a connection: Family and friends. In hangout movies, this bonding is usually necessary because a relationship has become strained, whether it’s from a defect in our protagonist’s personality or an insecurity or a being dealt a shit hand.
One such example: The Descendants, which you may know as that movie with George Clooney that should’ve won best picture.
Matt King is a workaholic lawyer in Hawaii. (If your movie is set in Hawaii, there’s a fifty percent chance it’s a hangout movie.) Due to a recent boating accident, his wife Elizabeth is in a coma, and for the first time he has to take care of his two daughters, ten year old Scottie and seventeen year old Alex. Neither handle their mother’s coma particularly well, and making matters worse is the massive land deal Matt has to decide on regarding a massive piece of land his family has to sell. There’s also the minor issues of Matt discovering that Elizabeth was cheating on him and the doctors telling him that she's braindead and going to die soon.
And so Matt and his daughters, along with Alex’s bro-y friend Sid, go to find Elizabeth’s new man so they can give him the opportunity to say goodbye and maybe get a little revenge. Along the way, he gets to know his daughters, and he begins to understand the effect his neglect has had on them, as well as his marriage. Through bonding with his daughters, he begins to understand that though Elizabeth wasn’t a perfect person, she understood the parts of her life that truly mattered, and she gave those parts her attention. Unlike Matt, she didn’t live in a bubble. She saw what was actually there, not what she wanted to see. Perhaps Matt can now do the same with, say, a large piece of land nobody other than his greedy family members wants him to sell.
We can find another example of finding peace at home in Chris Rock’s Top Five, another criminally underrated film.
Chris plays Andre Allen, a famous comedy star from New York who’s spent his whole career churning out stupid schlock. An alcoholic, Andre’s marrying a shallow reality star who helped him get sober, and now in an effort to prove he’s a serious actor, he’s releasing a drama where he stars as Dutty Boukman, a leader in the Haitian Revolution. Tailing Andre for the day is Chelsea, a reporter for the New York Times who’s raising a daughter by herself and making money on the side writing clickbait for various sites under a pseudonym. (In other words, the writing equivalent of churning out stupid schlock.) Andre has beef with the Times due to their overwhelmingly negative coverage of his career. But he allows her to tag along.
Together, they spend the day crisscrossing across New York City. They go through the motions of Andre’s press tour, they visit Chelsea’s apartment, they go to Andre’s old stomping grounds in the inner-city where Chelsea talks to his childhood friends and family, they go here, they go there. Along the way, Andre tells Chelsea about the experiences that led to his sobriety, as well as his decision to give up comedy. Andre also grows closer to Chelsea, and after some toil, Chelsea finally gets the truth out of him: He’s giving up comedy because he’s afraid that he can’t be funny sober.
However, Chelsea reminds Andre of his roots. The people he grew up with. The times he didn’t need to be fucked up to be funny. Where he’s from, and the culture that made him the man he is today. True, Top Five isn’t necessarily about fixing a relationship with a particular person. However, it’s still a story about a man who grows by re-discovering where he came from. Matt would’ve learned his lesson a long time ago if he occasionally left his office, went home, and spent time with the people who care about him. Andre learns a very similar lesson, but through slightly different means.
Traditional structure tells us that characters have to journey into unusual circumstances, learn how to cope with them, defeat an "evil", and return home a new person. I think the same is true for hangout movies. The journey part can be a literal journey to a new place or it can be where you’ve grown up and lived your entire life. However, the rest of the steps happen inside. The evils are of the mind and of the soul, and they take the form of insecurity and repression. To defeat them, they have to change and they have to learn.
You know that corny line in every boxing movie about your greatest opponent always being yourself? Maybe that speech is in the wrong movie.
3. Stakes
Many an article will lead you to believe that hangout movies don’t have stakes. It’s easy to understand why. After all, nine times out of ten, when we say “stakes,” we’re usually talking about massive world ending stakes, and it’s hard to see what such grand designs have to do with, say, a bunch of teenagers getting drunk in the woods.
Stakes don’t always have to be high. They do, however, have to be tangible. (Provided you’re bothering with stakes in the first place.) The Avengers aren’t going to stop Thanos from snapping his fingers in the confines of a hangout movie. But again, hangout movies are about internal transformation, and the stakes, simply put, are about the completion of that transformation. We’re not scared that The Empire is going to win. We’re scared that our protagonist’s life is going to revert back to the way things were before the story began. Hangout movies are about growth. The stakes are regression.
Sometimes, we fear that our characters will fail to learn their lesson. As we’ve gone through the story, our characters’ lives have become undoubtedly better. However, something’s still holding them back.
Eilis, our increasingly confident protagonist from Brooklyn, is starting to truly find herself in America. She’s completed her training as a bookkeeper, and thus can make a life for herself beyond the boarding house. She’s also found Tony. Tony isn’t like boys at the dances back in Ireland. She can see a future with him. But unfortunately, after the sudden death of her sister, she has to go back to Ireland. Tony and Eilis marry at city hall, and then she goes home.
The marriage might be enough to stop somebody with less prospects from staying home permanently. However, now that she’s trained for a profession, she can find a job in Ireland outside of the horrid shopkeep’s store. She also meets a man named Jim, and though he isn’t as exciting or youthful as Tony, he’s from a good family, he’s kind, and he can give her a life in her homeland so she can take care of her mother, who only has Eilis now.
Her family’s here, the world she’s known her whole life is here, and though she may be happy staying in Ireland forever, we the audience selfishly want her to get on the next boat back to New York and jump into Tony’s arms. Now we fear all that time in America was for nothing. Now we have stakes.
Another character who might not have learned his lesson: Carl, our road trippin’ chef from… Chef. Over the course of their trip, Carl and his son Percy have grown closer than they’ve ever been before. Carl shows Percy the joys of cooking and the way food can connect us to our purest emotions. However, as the trip’s winding down, Carl sits his son down and explains, in the nicest terms he can muster, that things are going to go back to the way they were before his trip: Carl will be working long stressful hours and Percy will see him every other week. Percy begs his father to let him work weekends and after school once he’s finished his homework. But Carl says no, and our hearts break. We’ve been down this road before.
But then Carl watches the video Percy made consisting of one-second shots of every day of their trip, and once the video’s done, we can read it in Carl’s face: Things can never go back to the way they were. Carl picks up the phone, calls his son, and barely contains himself from begging him to come work for him. And once the call is done, relief floods the audience’s veins. The good times aren’t coming to an end after all. They’re only just beginning.
I feel guilty about not adding a new movie in our chat, so let’s throw in a third example: Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También, another road trip movie. (A lot of road trip movies qualify as hangout movies.)
Julio, a carefree kid from the middle-class, and his friend Tenoch, an equally carefree upperclass kid, have gone on a road trip with Luisa, an older woman who’s just ditched her husband after he confessed to cheating on her. Both want to sleep with her, so they’ve made up a beach called Heaven’s Mouth and they say that’s where they’re heading. So far, it’s been good times. They drive through breathtakingly gorgeous country and engage in hilariously inane conversations. However, as the omniscient narrator tells us over and over again, the two teens routinely ignore the suffering world around them, and that inattention eventually begins to affect the vibes when it’s turned on each other. Julio and Tenoch reveal that they’ve slept with each other’s girlfriends, after they’ve both had sex with Luisa of course, and our hangout vibe is dead. “Oh no!”, we the audience think, “What if the whole trip’s ruined!?”
After yet another fight, Luisa threatens to leave. She brokers a sort of truce between the boys, and eventually, after reaching a beach which happens to be called Heaven’s Mouth, it seems that all is forgiven. They can laugh and joke with one another again. They even discover that they can go one step further, and our trio has a three-way. In an ideal world, these boys would understand that sexuality is a spectrum, and if you feel a certain way about a fellow man, you should feel free to follow your heart. However, this is not an ideal world, and this sexual encounter essentially kills their friendship. The two return home, and for better or for worse, the real world infiltrates their lives and drives them apart.
Hangout movies don’t always have a happy ending.
Some hangout protagonists may fail to learn their lesson, but more often than not, they rebound. However, some don’t put the hangout vibe in jeopardy of their own volition. Some protagonists might run afoul of the world they’ve learned to love and are cast out. Or some are outright screwed out of it. The difference is that the previous three examples are about the decision to stay in a new world with a new attitude or not. The following are stories of characters who already know they want to stay, but the world may not want them anymore.
One such example is The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a movie I’ve accepted that I’ll either love or hate depending on my mood at any given moment for reasons I’ll go into some other time. (At the moment, I love it.)
Charlie has been hospitalized for depression following the suicide of his best friend. He’s well enough to return to the world, but now he has to start high school. Things don’t go well at first, but then he falls in with a group of misfit seniors who accept him and show him a great deal of affection and support. For the first time in who knows how long, he’s happy. However, he begins to develop a strong crush for his new friend Sam. Not helping matters is the fact that he starts going out with Mary Elizabeth, another new friend whom he doesn't feel anything for, but feels obliged to date because she asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance and doesn't want to hurt her feelings. Charlie's never entered the dating pool before. He doesn't know what you can't do yet.
One night while playing Truth or Dare, Charlie’s dared to kiss the prettiest girl in the room, and he impulsively goes for Sam. Mary Elizabeth is crushed, and he’s given the advice to stay away from the group for a while. The prospect of being kicked out of the first group of friends he's ever had takes its toll, and Charlie’s mental well-being turns for the worst. He's perfectly aware of the fact that he did something terrible, but we still fear for what happens next. It’s one thing for the good times to end. It’s another if the consequences can be a little more dire, particularly when mental health is a factor. And things might get worse later. Charlie is a freshman. All his friends are seniors.
Another example of our hero being cast out comes from another film we’ve talked about before: An Education. (There's a lot of Hornby in this article. Still haven’t read any of his books. Still embarrassed to admit that.)
Jenny, our protagonist, is an exceedingly bright sixteen year old living in the suburbs with her overbearing father. Jenny's obsessed with absorbing culture. She loves French music and food and jazz. However, her father always holds her back from engaging with the outside world. After all, jazz and paintings won’t help her get into Oxford.
She then meets David, an older man who shows her the world and everything in it. With the world at her fingertips, education and Oxford seems less important. Why bother with the repressive environment of home and school when she can simply marry David and live a charmed life forever? It’s a good question, and one she poses in a needlessly brusque manner to all her teachers who beg her to stay in school.
Unfortunately, David reveals that he’s already married. Nobody should be too surprised. David is, after all, a con man. Nevertheless, having spurned school and blown off Oxford, Jenny’s future looks increasingly bleak. She could wind up married to an uncultured boar like her father, living in a small repressive suburb away from everything she loves. Just like her mother.
We want the hangout to last forever, but we know it can’t. So we have to settle, and this is where the true stakes of hangout movies reveals itself: Happiness. Part of the reason hangout movies feel so intimate is because the goal is so universal. We may be entertained when Iron Man defeats the bad guy, but when he takes off the suit, do we care if he’s happy? Maybe. After all, we like Tony Stark. But at the end of the day, the world is saved, and that’s all that matters. We don’t want Eilis to don a robot suit. We want her to choose a path that’ll let her live her life to the fullest. It’s what we all want in the end.
4. The X-Factor: Where does our enjoyment come from?
I started work on this article by writing down a giant list of movies that I already thought were hangout movies or could be hangout movies. I then showed this list to as many people as I could and debated which films did and did not belong before rewatching a little over half of them.
One movie in particular that I put on the list started a debate or two: Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. (I'd include a trailer, but it turns out all the cuts are spoiler-y as shit.)
Suppose for a second that I intended for anything I’ve said so far in this article to be taken as a set rule. Spirited Away certainly has a setting, and our protagonist Chihiro does a considerable amount of self-discovery throughout the story. But it can be said that the stakes are too high. Chihiro may literally forget who she is forever, and her parents could spend the rest of their days as pigs until they’re eventually eaten. This isn’t a world she wants to stay in, and everyone wants to help her leave.
However, I still basically consider it a hangout movie because the joy I get from watching Spirited Away doesn’t come from Chihiro freeing her parents and escaping the world. It’s all the friends she makes during her days in Yubaba’s bathhouse. It’s sitting with Chihiro on the train as it glides across the ocean. It’s the simple act of being there, and as long as that’s where the emotional response from the film comes from, you can argue that it’s a hangout movie.
That's the difference between a character driven movie and a hangout movie. Hangout movies earn your emotions from being in the moment. Character driven movies earn them through other means.
One of the many movies I watched for this article was 2015’s Mustang, a brilliant movie about five sisters in a small coastal town in Turkey.
I went back into it thinking it was a hangout movie. If you’ve seen Mustang, you may have scoffed at the last sentence, as Mustang goes to some incredibly dark territory in its second half. (And the first half, if we’re being honest.) However, there’s something about the camaraderie between the sisters that gets to me. Specifically, how they treat one another and look out for each other’s backs. (Also helpful, coastal Turkey looks stunning.) However, the movie’s so affective for me as a whole because of how it tears that hangout feeling down, so as credits rolled, I realized that I didn’t think it qualified anymore.
But as I said, there’s such a thing as a sad hangout movie. Short Term 12 and The Perks of Being a Wallflower ultimately achieve the hangout feeling because they ground you in a place and pull you in by investing you in the characters and persuading you to root for their friendship and growth. It’s not about building everything up just to tear it down.
As we’ve talked about over and over again, emotions are complex. You can still laugh your ass off if you’re sad and all the joy you feel in any given second could come crashing down just by remembering that project you have to finish or going on twitter. But hangout movies understand that as long as we’re together, there’s something. Shitty feelings always seem less shitty when we’re with our friends and we’re discovering new things together. That’s why hangout movies are so powerful. As Tarantino said, these characters are our friends. It’s always good to see them again.
The Lists:
The list of movies I watched for this article (in the order I watched them):
Chef
Everybody Wants Some!!
Mustang (Concluded that it's not a hangout movie.)
Sing Street
Top Five
American Graffiti (This is actually my first time watching it. It hasn't aged well in a lot of respects, but it's fascinating as an artifact.)
Short Term 12
Almost Famous (A little more plot-y than most of the movies on this list, but I still count it.)
Brooklyn
Y Tu Mamá También
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Kiki’s Delivery Service
Call Me By Your Name
High Fidelity
Before Sunrise
The Descendants
Adventureland
The Big Lebowski (Again, a little more plot-y than most of the movies on this list. Count it anyway.)
Pulp Fiction (This might be a hot take, but unlike many of those user-created lists, I don't think it's a hangout movie. Tarantino might not think it is either.)
Dazed and Confused
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
An Education
And here's the rest of the master list. Sadly, I didn't have time to watch these, so I could be horribly wrong including any one of them. But luckily these are all great movies, so you can watch them and make a decision for yourself as to whether or not they count. (The ones with a question mark next to them are the ones I'm really not sure count.)
Boogie Nights
Chungking Express
C.R.A.Z.Y.
The Edge of Seventeen(?)
The End of the Tour
The Florida Project
Friday
The Great Beauty
Her
The Intern
Kids
La Dolce Vita(?)
La Haine
Lost in Translation
Magnolia(?)
Margaret(?)
Paterson
Porco Rosso
Rachel Getting Married
A Single Man(?)
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring(?)
Spirited Away
Stand By Me
Superbad
Things to Come
Two for the Road
We Are the Best!
Wild(?)
