“We watch his program… We buy his toys, we go to his movies… he owes us. Doesn’t he owe us, huh? He owes the Griswolds, right? Fucking-A right he owes us!”
Clark and Ellen Griswold would be about my age at the time that they mounted their cross-country trek to Wally World in National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983). Their career, social, and financial concerns somewhat correlate to my own as someone easing into middle age.
I say somewhat, because the Griswold family seems pretty comfortable financially, or at least that is how it seemed to me as a country kid. No matter how Christmas Vacation (1989) tried to sell me on the importance of Clark’s Christmas bonus, that 5,000 square foot house clearly sat in a well-off cul-de-sac (as a tangent, the characters with which I relate the most in the Vacation movies are DINK neighbors Todd and Margot). The Griswolds may not have an in-ground pool (yet), but they also aren’t living in an RV like Cousin Eddie. I mean, Clark also goes out and buys a brand new car just for their trip. But the general ideas about adulthood are about the same.
I also say somewhat because I made a conscious choice not to have kids, which puts me into a different perspective on the movies than others who grew up watching it in the 80s and 90s and are parents now. But it doesn’t diminish the experience so much as maybe limit my ability to empathize. The National Lampoon’s Vacation movies are successful because they are a lot of things to everyone. Boomer head-of-household stress is the foundation on which the sight gags, Second City alumni cameos, boobs, and pratfalls are built. Clark and Ellen struggle to keep it together as the casualties mount, and that panic just beneath the surface surely resonates with parents who have endured a vacation that is one mishap away from tragedy.
Those family trips are well-worn territory for me, but only from the kid role. I recall trips in the family van to see various national monuments and battlefields. We’d freeze water in milk jugs to keep the sandwiches cold in the cooler, and then we’d have ice-cold water available as the jugs thawed. Keeping the family sated keeps the rest stop delays to a minimum. That’s some pure Griswold ingenuity there.
But the parent stuff, from the point-of-view of an adult, is something that I don’t grok. As an example, I take for granted all of the tchotchkes and baubles near the registers of interstate-adjacent gas stations. That stuff doesn’t register with me as anything but background noise, but it is pure catnip to kids, isn’t it? That’s why they place it there. The ___ family pulls the Wagon Queen Family Truckster off of I-70 so the kids can use the bathroom on the way to Aunt Deb’s house out in Dayton (where they’ll stay the night before resuming the trek to see Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin and the world’s largest wicker basket). And as mom or dad pays for gas, the kids are drawn by the siren song of keychains and mood rings and sampler packs of bubble gum shaped like the local sports franchise mascot. Vacation reinforces that these experiences are universal even though I never have to say no to a big-eyed kid when they want a SpongeBob lanyard and the trip budget is already tight from that splurge on ice cream yesterday. The Griswold kids are a little old to fall for these shiny things, but the movie does show that highwire act of enjoying a lengthy road trip while not running out of money.
There is also a muleheadedness about Clark that I don’t get. I am stubborn in 1,000 ways, but not in the same ways. This is most explicit in the finale, in which he holds a security guard at gunpoint so that he and the family can ride the rides that have been closed down for construction. Doubling down on a mistake—in this case not bothering to check if the park was closed before leaving Chicago and then forcing the park to open because he demands it—is classic Boomer logic. This is present in other spots too, like when he is baldfaced lying to Ellen about his intentions in the swimming pool, or when they crash in the desert because of refusal to ask for directions, or when he leaves the corpse of Aunt Edna on a porch rather than disrupt his travel itinerary for one day.
These behaviors create the friction and pathos from which springs the comedy. It’s a comedy movie. I get that. Nor do I expect all of the jokes to land from a 40-year-old movie, especially jokes from a National Lampoon’s movie. But I find it interesting the ways in which I’ve become an adult distinctly different than the ones scrambling to get to the amusement park emblazoned with a cartoon symbol of Clark’s lost youth. That is the real motivating factor across all of the Vacation movies, a scrambling desire to connect with one’s own childhood (visiting relatives you don’t even like; home movies; recreating “a good old-fashioned family Christmas”; pursuing a younger woman who showed interest while your entire family sleeps in hotel rooms 30 feet away). That nostalgia has never been my kink. Maybe I’ll get there in a few more years, but I doubt it.
Thankfully I don’t need a pathological compulsion to reflect on or recreate the good old days in order to enjoy National Lampoon’s Vacation. This (and its sequels) is about that stale look back at growing up in the 1950s, but I do have a tiny bit of nostalgia for the days of watching the Vacation series on a crummy tube TV with tracking lines blurring half of the image. Maybe I am more like Clark than I’d care to admit. I am writing this 40-part series, after all.
Other candidates released in 1983: Trading Places; Octopussy; Return of the Jedi; The Big Chill, High Road to China; The Man with Two Brains; The Meaning of Life; Scarface
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.