Billy Joel’s Weaponized Nostalgia and Spiritual Truth
I’m not sure what I thought pop culture would be like when my generation got into middle age. I certainly didn’t expect it would be dominated by ideas and figures from my 1980s childhood released into the wild again and again like some monstrous zombie army, hungry for our eyeballs and the reanimated feels of our youth. And yet here we are, faced each new TV and film season with seemingly endless (and largely lifeless) remakes. Wondering what Gen Z did last summer? “I Know blah blah blah” came out last week. Do you miss “The Office,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Murder, She Wrote,” or “X-Files”? They’re all in discussion. And if you prefer documentaries, there’s “Thank You Very Much” about short-lived SNL star Andy Kaufman or “Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything.”
On its face, the new HBO docuseries about the life of pop star Billy Joel seems like it might offer something more substantial. Despite his achievements and longtime popularity, Joel has never been the subject of a major documentary. Plus, it’s five hours long—just how much fan service can you do?
And yet, told largely from the point of view of Joel himself, “Billy Joel: And So It Goes” has a sweetness to it that belies a lot of the history it’s telling. Almost 80 at this point, Joel has seen the heat of the day: suicide attempts as a young adult; falling in love with his best friend’s wife; their marriage and subsequent divorce; alcohol abuse; professional struggles; and on and on. But having survived all of that and learned from it, Joel seems now mostly happy and at peace. No one really wants to complicate that portrait, either: first wife Elizabeth Weber, whose work as his manager proved a potent force in ensuring his eventual success, hints at some bad behavior later in their relationship, but it’s water long under the bridge at this point. As we might say of anyone about their mistakes of long ago (which we all have), give the guy a break.
Maybe the documentary filmmakers are correct in allowing Joel’s life story to be lit so heavily by the gentle hues of his seniority. Billy Joel was the first music act whose work spoke to me. His was the first record I ever owned, the first concert I ever saw. Watching “And So It Goes,” I was shocked and thrilled to discover how little I actually knew of Joel’s life, or that he had albums of early material that I have never listened to. These are the gifts of a musician bio-docu-series: shiny “new” songs for us to discover or old ones to reconsider, and the opportunity to deepen our parasocial bonds to an artist who had made an impact on us. I left the first half of “And So It Goes”—the only part released to the press—appreciating the lovable retired Long Island fisherman Joel seems to have turned into even more than I had the musician before.
But having gotten to the end of the first half of “And So It Goes” glad for how Joel’s life has gone, I did also wonder, “Does it have to go so long?” Even knowing that some of my favorite Joel songs were still to come—stay tuned for my Ted Talk on “The Downeaster Alexa”— I couldn’t see what more there was to say. In a sense the documentarians’ affection for their subject had left their story without teeth or drama.
And this is ultimately the issue in (and also key to) nostalgia programming. Intent on drawing us back to supposedly halcyon days, it inevitably buries aspects of those days that really weren’t, for instance the latent-to-blatant misogyny in so many stories and figures of our past. “And So It Goes” was directed by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levi. The two give Weber the chance to narrate large portions of the first episode; in fact she’s by far the most interesting character in the piece. But it is striking that Joel is allowed to stay so reticent about the mistakes he clearly made in their relationship. In its silence the film effectively puts Weber in the position of having to excuse and forgive Joel all over again. Nostalgia stories are so often a nod to history that actually masks a cover-up, the elevation of vibes over truth.
Today nostalgia and spirituality are often characterized in similar terms—we construe them as reassuring and affirming, in contrast with the challenges and sometimes inhumanity of the present moment. On July 31st Fordham celebrates the feast of St. Ignatius, co-founder and first head of the Jesuit order and the developer of a unique form of spirituality built around the imagination.
But for Ignatius (and many other spiritual figures in the history of the church, including Jesus) spirituality was anything but safe. The encounter with God posed an inherent threat to one’s ego and priorities—and that was its blessing. In allowing ourselves to be led by the Spirit and inviting God in, we opened ourselves to insights about our lives and our choices that we couldn’t predict or control. Ignatius knew from his own spiritual experience that ultimately those insights would affirm and empower far beyond what we might have imagined. But the path to that grace was scary, because it involved surrender.
To be clear, Billy Joel’s spiritual life is not explored in “And So It Goes.” Still, the ease that he has about him at this point, that sense of being at home in his own skin—smaller in size than he perhaps once imagined himself, and yet happier too—bespeak exactly the kind of hard yards and conversion that Ignatius first experienced, then wanted for everybody. Ignatius famously resisted sharing his own story, out of a concern that it and he would be idealized away. Long before the advent of Hollywood, saints’ lives offered their own form of Catholic nostalgia.
(Perhaps in part to thwart his handlers, Ignatius filled what he did share with tales of his own suicidal ideations, strange behavior like refusing to cut his nails or wear shoes, and weird spiritual experiences. He also spoke about relationships he had had with women before his conversion—but like good studio execs, his people then edited them out.)
Maybe the second part of this mega-documentary is less hagiography and offers more answers, a deeper understanding of Billy Joel’s own pilgrimage through life. But ultimately, maybe the real gift of “And So It Goes” is the promise that Joel’s life at this point offers. If we undertake the journey to truth, it will cost us. But then it will set us free. It may very well be, as Joel famously sang, that “only the good die young.” But that’s not to say the rest of us can’t die happy, or changed.
