Lessons from Bill & Ted

I might be overly partial to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure since there's an off chance it's actually named after me and my brother, but I've been thinking a lot about the scene where Bill and Ted encounter Rufus and their future selves outside the Circle K, and I'm decently positive this is one of the most intelligent scenes in film history.

I'm no cinefile, but I do "work in film," and I've seen enough of them to wax philosophical in the only way it's possible to wax about film: superciliously. So think back for a moment to that scene outside the Circle K, when the dudes meet their future selves. Just beneath the surface, there are some pretty powerful forces at play: specifically, man's stuggle with a personal sense of perspective.

Present Bill and Ted are some pretty stressed out dudes. They have good reason to believe they're about to flunk out of school, Bill's worried about his lusty father, and Ted's got military school on the mind. They just met this futuristic bro, Rufus, and dementia is NOT something they need right now. But then future Bill and Ted, cavalier and care-free as Bill and Ted are supposed to be, roll through in a magical phonebooth and are like, "Listen to this bro Rufus. Tell the princesses we say hi!" And they dial some historical code and take off. They're the same dudes, but from a temporal perspective, the differences between them are remarkable.

This past weekend, I was chilling with some William Morris mailroom bros, and their conversation was so jarringly familiar that I couldn't help but think of Rufus and the Circle K. As they waxed about sweeps, floating, and "getting a desk," I romantically mused about these concerns, and how even though I used to feel them, they were now totally a thing of the past. I wanted to be like, "Bros. Haven't you read Camus? NOTHING MATTERS!" But I didn't want to spoil the pinnacle of their tenuous friendships, so I let them joke about rookie mistakes and how HR can be a fickle ally.

I was talking to my buddy Branson about the shifting nature of our personal perspective, and he said, "Do you think we're gonna be chauncing ourselves in three months for having this conversation now?" I was just like, "Maybe."

A lot of people write off Excellent Adventure on account of Bill and Ted's mad colloquial discourse or the fact that they're not so sweet at guitar, but those earnest bros understand that life is about being "excellent to each other," and a little stress every once in a while isn't the worst thing in the world. It gets you listening to Rufus.

Movie poster courtesy of SoundtrackCollector