You don't want to write. You want to find an excuse not to, and I'll just be one more thing to blame if you don't.

Beneath the decidedly seventies surface of Between the Lines — shag hair! a young Jeff Goldblum! sepia pastels! — is a timeless concept: a group of young kids, freshly out of college, have fashioned their identity out of a workplace that is exclusive and a little bit past their prime, and are trying to negotiate their understanding that the aspirational world they envisioned a few years ago is rapidly disappearing.

Perhaps it is my continued retreat into the burnishing embrace of Capital, but earnest interpretation of these characters' love of their work, and of the Back Bay Mainline does not exactly ring true to me. Matthew Monagle wrote in 2019:

The film has countless moments of insight into the struggle of the American journalist, from the staff’s shabby living conditions — the film offers perhaps the most realistic look at big city apartments ever committed to film — to how well-meaning writers navigate the competing interests of truth and financial trendlines

I think it requires a level of charity bordering on incredulity to treat Goldblum's character as someone meaningfully pushing back against the world around him — the film ends, very tellingly, with him parlaying his beat (and a few white lies) into getting a free beer. With the exception of a very young Bruno Kirby (playing a cub reporter) and a Jon Korkes (who runs the paper), nobody in this film is meaningfully interested in journalism; what they're interested in is being A Journalist, and to that effect this film feels warm and resonant, equal parts sympathetic and cynical. 1 ^[1]

And this, I think, is a more meaningful thesis than to dwell too much on the demise of the alt-weekly. Cultural institutions are virtuous, whether they're formed under the auspices of a company or not — one way to rot such institutions is to cherish their outputs and ignore their inputs.

★★★