“The Holdovers”: Or, How I Used Grief to Get Ahead

Full disclosure: I’m inserting a story about my own life into the Trojan Horse of a pseudo-review of a relevant period piece, partly due to self-obsession and partly because I’m kind of over movie reviews lately. I realized what I was really looking for was the synopsis on Wikipedia, not the coitus-interruptus sensation of reading a spoiler-free editorialized teaser. I’m not here to gush about a groovy soundtrack or artful cinematographic choices, nor to beguile the reader into sufficient curiosity so that they too will take the two-hour journey into a world foreign to most of us outside the transcultural stratosphere of global wealth and privilege. If that's the result, though, I'm OK with that; the movie was good, in my dubiously trustworthy estimation (a 97% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes definitely says more). "The Holdovers," promoted on Peacock ahead of Oscar season, intrigued me, as does everything prep school since my tenure at Phillips Academy Andover. In the movie, Paul Giamatti plays a hardass prof, Paul Hunham, with several chips on his shoulders who's been tasked with minding the adolescent boys stuck on campus at a New England prep school (the fictional Barton Academy) during winter break, chiefly due to their absent, idle-rich families dropping the ball. Left behind on a now-empty, snow-encrusted campus, Professor Hunham's charges exemplify a peculiar passive abandonment I observed in my own school days. One, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), steals the show as the lone holdover whose parents prove unreachable to give permission to fly off on an impromptu holdover ski trip in a classmate's father's helicopter -- compounding his sense of abandonment but cementing the film's main plot structure as a "Good Will Hunting"-adjacent duet between Giamatti and Sessa. Suddenly, I'm reminded of reading "Harry Potter" as a young child (paperback, please) and identifying with another (fictional) pseudo-orphan (little did I know I would later attend a legendary boarding school myself). I recall Harry's turns as a holiday holdover and the peace of on-campus solitude standing in stark relief against the background of an abusive home. Anyway, let's get into it.

While recovering from mononucleosis this winter, the exhaustion and existential depression I felt engendered a quasi-tranquil twilight state that called for absurd, non-demanding early 2000s reality shows to always be playing in the background. After bearing witness to the infamous “dookie bubble” episode of Bravo’s very own “Being Bobby Brown” (2005), I admittedly needed a palate cleanser upon realizing that Whitney, Bobbi Kristina and Bobby Jr. had all passed tragically, leaving Bobby Brown to stand tall, or be dust in the wind... (did I mention the fever dream aspect yet?)

 I don’t like to get into talking about my childhood, because then I feel like I have to answer the inevitable numerous questions that logically come to the minds of most people I’ve mentioned things to. Each thing to explain is a hot point on a connect-the-dots picture of my trauma. “Where’s your mom?” I was removed from her care at the age of 2 when her schizophrenic symptoms overwhelmed her ability to care for me. “What about your dad?” My mom was in a lesbian relationship and used a sperm donor she found in a local newspaper. Then I bounced around foster homes before articulating, precociously at age 3, in a phone call to my grandmother: “I want to be with my biological family.” So, my grandmother took my mom and her still-psychotic, folie-a-deux partner to court and won guardianship. What I didn’t know was that scleroderma would kill my newfound protector, for whom I remember feeling constant, severe separation anxiety, ten years later, a month before my first period. I channeled my grief into the orderly process of paper applications to boarding schools, which my mom's brothers suggested for me (due to my intellect, they assured, not because there was now no one in my immediate family able or interested enough to take me in). It was the first year Andover's admission process was need-blind, and my tearjerking essay earned me a full scholarship, already more fruit than most people's trauma will bear. The trouble for me was holding on to that fruit, never mind tasting it.

I didn't set out to be engrossed in this movie, but the character of the school's kitchen manager, Mary (Da'Vine Joy), was too compelling, with her primal heartbreak resulting from the banality of evil in the form of race and class divides: her husband killed in an industrial accident, her son in Vietnam after attending Barton free as the child of an employee, highlighting the apparent disposability of working-class bodies against a backdrop of knowing, massive and impassive wealth. The confusion people sometimes display when confronted with my parentage stems from its incongruity with the role I was assigned upon matriculation: Andover student, white, privileged, “normal.” And compared to those society assigns and considers “below” me, I am all those things, but not so much in comparison to my own assigned cohort. We crave to fit in, and as usual I felt I did not by virtue of not fitting into a neat stereotype: the scrappy kid from a low-income urban-dwelling family, the impeccably starched scion of an industrialist, or even the middle-class kid like me who had just one or two sympathy-generating plot twists in their lives -- a dead parent or a standalone traumatic event. I've since accepted my alienation was a product of a fear of rejection that started when I was a toddler in foster care (if not before), and that all of these so-called "neat" narratives are masks that hide each of our nuanced emotional milieus, and that we can all relate to one another outside of the boxes we and others place us into for convenience and conservation of mental bandwidth.

 Family who couldn’t have cared less when I was in foster care as a toddler or living with a dying guardian as a preteen popped back into my life upon newly seeing me as a source of blue-blooded clout. Namely, my uncle and his now-husband, who I presented to classmates as my parents — gay dads from New York City; what could be hipper? They dropped me off in August of my freshman year and picked me up a month or two later when I was placed on an involuntary leave of absence after spending much of my time in my room, self-harming in a dissociative state and hypnotically watching the blood blot tissues that I then stuffed in my dorm desk. My uncles made much of how discovering these tissues affected them before dropping me off at the psych ward the school had recommended. In the ensuing "school" year, I developed a trauma bond with these "dads" in worthless family therapy, spent hours wandering the streets of New York alone, and visited family friends' apartments for lessons in math and literature. I was in a crisis and isolated from kids my age, which was a kind of comfort zone of bleak familiarity. The next fall, I went back to Andover as a lower ("sophomore" in less pretentiously esoteric parlance). My uncles' status as "Andover parents" was thus reinstated, which was surely a massive relief.

I tried to imagine watching the film as someone who hadn’t gone to a boarding school that strongly resembled the movie's filming locations. I tried to imagine looking at the grand chapel, the wood paneled walls and halls, the formal classrooms, green glass lamps lining study tables in a lavish library without feeling twin sensations of homey warmth and fraught anxiety rising in my chest. But while these settings form an important substrate for my formative teenage memories, the decades — centuries — of Andover’s history more closely resemble the 1970s world of “The Holdovers,” from legacies and gentleman’s Cs to the particular culture of elite, all-boys education: ball-busting pubescent cruelty and biding time to take over a bloated family business (including the presidency in the case of Bush Jr., ‘64). The boys in the movie wore wool suits and neckties emblazoned with the school shield to class; by the time I reached Andover, which went coed in 1973, dress codes had been done away with in the name of freedom of expression and trust in the student body's upper-crust collective taste to win out over the exposed midriffs and profane T-shirts universally reviled by public and private school staff.

To feel accepted and/or rejected by a universally respected institution while having no soft place to land familially is an emotionally hardscrabble existence. My wealthy friends’ abandonment was genteel yet real: dropped off at ultra-luxe child repositories like Le Rosey as young as 8 after navigating early life under the watchful paid eyes of maids and nannies, my peers’ nihilism was attractive for its peek into the vacuous pain that can bloom within privilege, beneath wealth's veneer as a cure-all (an understandable perspective for any given member of an eternally squeezed underclass, for whom money would indeed solve many immediate problems). Andover as an institution sought to undertake a process of transformation from a fairly homogenous stop on the journeys of the children of the elite into a melting pot of the kind that purports to create global citizens. In the movie, in a bar in the school's Boston-area town: the contrast of Hunham and Tully's automatic erudition with the left-behind townies’ aggressive incomprehension exemplified a divide. At Andover, townies would pass, leaning out of cars and yelling "Catboner!" upon seeing a Phillips Academy student or gaggle thereof. "Apply again next year!" was the cutting retort from on high as we so astutely recognized sour grapes when we saw them.

 The film’s final reveal was sickeningly relatable to me: Angus' father isn’t dead after all, but rather haunts the halls of a sanitarium. The son visits him and excitedly, hopefully fills him in on the latest goings-on at Barton, only for his father to respond with a schizophrenic delusion: “I think they’re putting something in my food.” Like Angus, I lived in fear of my mother’s schizophrenia taking me over too, rendering me pitiable and lost in a nightmare. My stint in the mental hospital after my self-harm episode seemed to corroborate this bitter pill. I too lied when people asked about my mother, preferring to say she was dead rather than get into the messy truth. It all came to the same: She’s not in my life, kind of like a dead person, but is institutionalized, not buried. It felt somehow worse than her really being dead, the layers of shame and feeling I must lie, simplify, edit my life. I wanted to turn my story into something others could digest, rather than the pockmarked, disjointed history that burned to tell the truth of. Internalized cultural attitudes -- mental illness is trashy; being relatively poor in a given setting is shameful -- pile invisible weight atop the already-heavy burdens many trauma survivors bear. In short, it's very difficult for me to be honest about my childhood without self-consciously feeling I'm "trauma dumping," even though I tend to take an apologetic, giggly tone during, no doubt in an attempt to preserve the other party's comfort.

“No one is entitled to my story. I am,” Professor Hunham exclaims after his unwilling sidekick Angus aids him in lying about his nonexistent success to a former Harvard classmate, who remembers Hunham's expulsion for hitting his wealthy roommate in response to said roommate falsely accusing his poorer counterpart of plagiarism. The commonly understood but arguably unnecessary anguish of clawing your way to an elite school/job/situation only to be kicked out for not being rich enough, stable enough, well-behaved enough, for not counting your blessings and keeping your head down, for being too sick or sad or socially inept, is a profound narrative akin to a tale of climbing a mountain only to slip and tumble back down. It's not quite Sisyphean, because at least that myth has a proscribed arc: the slogging misery is inescapable. Cruelest is not knowing, but hoping, that this next ascent will bear fruit. The best cure for this narrative that births enduring suffering is, as I see it, reframing my core beliefs that perpetuate the shame and self-loathing that infects my memories and experiences with negative confirmation bias and all but guarantees retraumatization. The movie ends, like many coming-of-age stories, with a cozy, subtly hopeful vibe that left me glad that, for my life and all our lives, "the rest is still unwritten." (I had to end with an early 2000s reference. Special shoutout if you remember Natasha Bedingfield's earworm -- and America Ferrera -- from "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.")