The Six Degrees of Freshman Year

Spectator wants you to pick the next first-year columnist. Three finalists will run during the week and readers may vote for their favorite online at Columbiaspectator.com.

“I’ve got something really annoying to say,” I said. “It reminded me of the Iliad.” We were lined up at the urinals in the men’s bathroom, just after we walked out of the movie theater. Without waiting to hear my rationale, the guys met my confession with groans and much eye rolling, which can only be described as good judgment on their part.

We’d just been to see The Nines, the indie meta-thriller starring Ryan Reynolds (of The Amityville Horror). We’d been filling the role of Columbia students all night, to a sickening degree. On the subway, after crowding behind an enormous map, we played a slight variation of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. “This movie stars Melissa McCarthy. Of Gilmore Girls. Lorelai Gilmore = Lauren Graham. Total Barnard alum. And she lived in Furnald.” We continued as the trailers began, hissing at the “RVARD” briefly visible on Mark Ruffalo’s T-shirt.

During one point in The Nines, Ryan Reynolds visits New York and lisps something about how life is always good when you’re in the city. I turned to my friend and pointed frantically, as if a ridiculously intricate coincidence had just unfolded on the screen. Before I turned, I briefly thought about restraining myself, perhaps to realize that not every glowing reference to New York City (or slickly jaded reference, for indeed, I now nod meditatively whenever somebody refers to the hard-assed inhabitants of our good town) is a comment directed towards us of the class of 2011. But as I turned, I realized that my friend was already gesturing at the screen. Yes, that’s us now.

We’ve assumed our identity with gusto, and we’re everywhere—the sophomores look at us with knowing grins. You’d think we’d be slightly embarrassed of ourselves by now, after those soul-destroying icebreakers of NSOP. During a John Jay scavenger hunt around campus—just before trying to harass the employees of the MTA in the 116th Street subway station—I saw a placard instructing “tourists and Columbia students” not to ask for photographs. We deserve to be lumped with the tourists, because we are tourists on the subway. We are, perhaps, slightly out of the ordinary, a collegiate hodgepodge just beginning to refer to the 116th Street stop as home. We don’t mesh well (the brash Los Angeles dude cracking sex jokes as the quiet Midwestern girl pleads for modesty), we ask each other about intended majors ten thousand times in a row. We’ll continue having weird urges to cite the Iliad, using our tenuous connections as a point of common reference (excluding SEAS students), probably until another Lit Hum book comes along and we can find a slightly more appropriate parallel.

Really, though, I still like my analogy to The Nines. It’s a tricky chicken-and-egg question, whether only we Columbia freshmen would have been able to draw a Homeric comparison, or whether we instinctively sought out the most readily available film lending itself to an aggressively ambiguous subtext. Still, let me recommend this movie, though I don’t know whether you’ve moved past the stage of making trips down to the Village to watch (I quote a sample text message): “this totally pretentious artsy horror film that got good reviews from NPR—come along!”

The Nines follows three different incarnations of Ryan Reynolds (all of which are frequently undressed), which begin to overlap as he devolves into madness and sees himself walking through the hallways. He is accused of trying to destroy the world, of having created the world, of playing with the human race as if it were a game of The Sims, and of being on crack. Spoiler alerts: the script plays with the relationship between mortals and immortals (see, Iliad!), except it realizes that, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that the Greek gods are actually jealous of our fragile humanity, death is going to sting when it hits. Once you boil out the convolution, this plotline is basically Homer improved, yes?

No, my friends weren’t all that convinced either, and the bespectacled gentleman in the adjoining urinal looked absolutely livid when I said “Iliad.” But all of them could—more or less, kind of—follow my train of thought; at least they nodded kindly as I tried to extricate myself from my first giddy reference to the Core Curriculum outside of class. Nobody else I’ve ever known would do the same. And really, we’d all been called out on our bullshit numerous times over the night. It’s satisfying just to have someone else recognize the names we cite—so wait, just why exactly do you claim to like Resnais’ films?—and it’s quite a bonding experience, despite our occasionally open contempt for each other. I’ve only met, like, four people I dislike since I arrived on campus, and three of them are my closest friends in New York anyway.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.