Up Series - Paul Almond & Michael Apted

The world has changed drastically since the Up project began in 1964. Our multimedia culture produces virtual worlds like Facebook, YouTube, and the blogosphere. We broadcast our lives to each other daily — some of us hourly or minutely who habitually announce what we’ve had for lunch on Twitter. I wonder if any of us truly understand how we are marking the passage of our lives. It is anyone’s guess whether today’s technology will survive ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years into the future, or we with it. It has been barely a century since the birth of the motion picture, and scarcely twenty years since the advent of the internet. Those of us who ascend into old age will have records of our lives unlike any generation prior. We will dig up old photos and videos of school friends, work friends, our children, our grandchildren, and so on. We will marvel and think, oh where we have been!

The Up films, then, stand as the great premonition of our age, and taken together achieves a kind of magic in how it unfolds the mysteries of life in all its minutiae — the great and small events, the marriages and divorces, the careers and aspirations, the good times and bad. We take for granted reality television, which represents reality only in that it doesn’t employ screenwriters. Any number of fame-seekers have washed up on our television screens, happy to make spectacles of themselves for their fifteen minutes. But those who have continued to participate in the Up films have done something altogether braver and more vulnerable, for when they started at seven years of age they could hardly have guessed how far the series would go or how they would feel about it later. They have opened their lives to us, and according to a few it has been to their detriment, but in revealing themselves they have revealed us. Watching the films, there is a profound feeling of being introduced to yourself — as you were, as you are, and as you might be.

I am twenty-five years old, and as I watched the seven films over the course of nine days — from 7 Up through 2005’s 49 Up — where my age influenced my perception. During the earliest films, I considered myself as a child - the my naivete, my outsized dreams. I wanted to be a professional wrestler. By fourteen I hated professional wrestling and had developed a passion for writing, and here I am. But I digress. Or maybe I don’t. Consider Liverpool lad Neil, who wanted to be an astronaut, or East-Ender Tony, who wanted to be a jockey.

In 1964, director Paul Almond assembled about a dozen British children from diverse social and economic backgrounds. Michael Apted has carried it forward since 1970. 7 Up and 7 Plus Seven total roughly ninety minutes and give us only a quick glimpse of its subjects. A few make strong early impressions, like rough-and-tumble Tony and the more aristocratic John and Suzy. Other, shyer participants only begin to emerge in the feature-length installments that document their twenties; former boarding school student Bruce wanted to be a missionary, and his soft-spoken warmth and compassion eventually led him into a career teaching inner-city and immigrant youth.

It is a marvel to watch how some personalities change. Nick spent his childhood on his father’s isolated farm in the Yorkshire Dales and was so introverted that at fourteen he spent most of his interview with his head tucked between his knees, looking at his feet. But in his twenties he seemed to blossom. Attending university to study physics and then emigrating to the United States, he developed greater confidence and began to speak more resolutely. Suzy was every bit an upper-class girl of seven; an image of her dancing ballet as a child is shown in all the films and seems the very model of primness and privilege. At twenty-one she seemed cynical. From twenty-eight on she had become a grounded and settled wife and mother.

Perhaps none of them endured as much upheaval as Neil. We notice a steady decline from seven to twenty-eight. It is clear that something caught hold of him in his teen years, which turned him from a happy-go-lucky child into a homeless drifter; when Apted inquires about his health, we know he’s talking about his mental health. There came a moment during 42 Up when I cried; we come to care about these people so greatly that we thrill at their smallest triumphs and grieve at their setbacks.

John scarcely seems to have changed at all. Beginning at fourteen he seems to disdain the very idea of the Up films and so regrets participating that he dropped out of the project at twenty-eight and forty-two. He returned at thirty-five to raise awareness of his charity work in Bulgaria and again at forty-nine, though he spends much of the time disparaging the project, describing it as a “pill of poison” and later equating it to I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here, which misses the point.

These films are not petty voyeurism. They are a microcosm. From the initial subjects have been born dozens of children and grandchildren, each of whom may have a story as unique and compelling as those who comprise these films. In them we see ourselves, our children, our parents, our neighbors. We pull back to see the world as full of people who were once young and someday will be old, who have loved and lost, despaired and rejoiced, succeeded and failed. We are the sum total of our lives, and observing these subjects fills us with a newfound understanding of our fellow man.

But it must be hard to see that from the inside. In 49 Up, the latest and most self-reflective of the films, Apted asks how participating in the series has affected their lives. Most respond negatively. The films stir up painful feelings and expose them to the world, and we, the viewers, are often too willing to make judgments on what we see. Working-class mother Jackie furiously criticizes Apted for asking inappropriate questions and editing the footage to make her into a symbol of downtrodden, lower-class hardship. (To an extent I agree; Apted sometimes works too hard to goose economic and political resentments, especially in the earlier films.)

Indeed, every seven years he revisits them, discussing their lives with an intimacy he hasn’t earned — and we the audience haven’t earned it either — and then distills them into fifteen-minute segments. It’s unfair. And it makes me almost want to apologize to them for taking part by watching. But I want to thank them as well. Despite their protests, most of them have come back for film after film. Perhaps they see some value in chronicling their lives despite the pain, or they’ve decided to tough it out — may as well finish the marathon when you’re halfway to the finish line. Time will tell how many will participate in 56 Up, which can be expected around 2012. I look forward to seeing them again, like old friends.

Watch a clip from 49 up here: