On this date back in 1986, Peggy Sue Got Married was released in theaters. I enjoyed the movie as a teen, but it hits completely differently now as an adult.
In the film Kathleen Turner plays Peggy Sue, a woman whose entire identity revolves around the fact that she got married to her high school sweetheart, Charlie Bodell (Nicholas Cage). Things have not gone well for the couple and at her 25th high school reunion Peggy Sue is forced to tell her old classmates that she and Charlie are planning to get divorced.
A freak accident causes Peggy Sue to pass out at the reunion and she is transported back in time 25 years to her high school days. This time, Peggy Sue has the opportunity to make different choices based on how her life turned out.
I think all of us at one time or another have thought, “if I only knew then what I know now.” Who hasn’t thought about “the one that got away,” which people we should have asked out and the ones we wish we hadn’t.
A couple of weeks ago my wife and I hit a deer with our car. It was late at night about two blocks from our home and the deer came out of nowhere, leaping out from behind a tree directly into our path. My wife slammed on the brakes and the impact was minimal; other than a pretty hard jolt, we weren’t hurt and the car didn’t suffer any damage. The deer slid, flipped over a couple of times, got up and continued running.
The funny thing was, on the way home from dinner my wife and I decided to stop at Braum’s and get an ice cream cone. It’s impossible not to start thinking about all the decisions, both big and small, that had to happen to put us and that deer at the same place at the same time. What if we had decided to skip the ice cream? What if we had pulled into the drive-thru lane on the left instead of the one on the right? What if we had been going one mile per hour faster, or slower? What if I had used the restroom before we left the restaurant? It’s actually quite maddening when you start to think about the probably millions of decisions that put us there.
And if you really think about it, our lives are just a culmination of all the choices we make. Billions of choices, some big and some small. In seventh grade, a friend of mine heard about a Halloween party and talked me into going with him. We didn’t want anyone at the party to see my mom drop us off so we brought our skateboards with us, had my mom drop us off about a block away, and skated up to the party. There was a girl there, Susan, who told all her friends “he’s the coolest skater ever.” Roughly eight years after that chance meeting, the two of us got married and have been married for 31 years.
This is the core of Peggy Sue Got Married. Peggy Sue finds herself back in high school with twenty-five years of knowledge and experience. She knows what happens to her life after she marries Charlie, a decision she deeply regrets. Not only has she lived the consequences of a lifetime’s worth of decisions, but now she has a chance to change them.
The film also explores (someone comically) the ways a person could financially gain from knowing the future. In the film, Peggy Sue writes a song she suggests her boyfriend’s band write and sing (the lyrics are to the Beatles’ “She Love You (Yeah Yeah Yeah)”). In Back to the Future, Marty McFly returns to the past with a magazine that tells the outcome of every baseball game, ostensibly allowing him to bet on games and win money. But what could you do with only your own memories? “Invest in Apple” is most common Gen-X response, although depending on how far back one was to travel, Bitcoin or NVidia might be better choices. But honestly, how many Super Bowl winners can you recall off the top of your head? Knowing that Madonna will become a huge popstar or that someone will invent the iPhone doesn’t do you much good, financially speaking. It it were 1978 I’d buy all the original Star Wars figures I could and never open them, but a person would have to wait decades for something like that to pay off.
Along with pondering her life choices, Peggy Sue spends a lot of her time trying to get back home. There’s the age old question: if you could go back to high school again knowing what you know now, would you? I’m always fascinated by how quickly some people say yes while for others it’s an emphatic NO. For the record, I think I would. Like anyone I’d correct a few wrongs, some with how I treated others and some with how I treated myself. Imagine how liberating life would be while knowing which decisions are the right ones and which are the wrong ones.
In the end we’re not sure if Peggy Sue’s trip to the past was real or all in her head. She doesn’t make any significant changes in the past that affect her future, but she does walk away from the experience with a new perspective on how her life turned out.
You don’t have to travel back in time to change your life. You can start tomorrow.
