Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)
This comic fantasy about a forty-something woman who travels back to her senior year after attending her high school reunion offered a circular notion of time, relationships, and generational ties.
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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.
Spoiler alert: This analysis of the film Peggy Sue Got Married and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.
It is 1985, and Peggy Sue Kelcher-Bodell (Kathleen Turner) is nervously readying herself to attend her 25ᵗʰ high school reunion, in the company of daughter Beth (Helen Hunt), rather than husband Charlie Bodell (Nicolas Cage), a once aspiring musician turned appliance store owner. Peggy Sue had been with Charlie since high school, having fallen pregnant with Beth before graduation, but is now separated from and preparing to divorce him following his repeated infidelities. At the reunion, she reconnects with old schoolmates, including married couple Maddy (Joan Allen) and Arthur Nagle (Wil Shriner), Carol Heath (Catherine Hicks), Carol’s former boyfriend Walter Getz (Jim Carrey), and school nerd turned wealthy inventor Richard Norvik (Barry Miller). Richard is voted homecoming king and Peggy Sue queen, but the latter becomes disorientated when she sees Charlie arrive, and passes out.
When Peggy Sue awakens, she finds herself back at her old high school, but in 1960, her senior year, having apparently momentarily lost consciousness while giving blood. Unsure of what has happened, and whether she is dreaming or has perhaps died, she nonetheless pleasantly accepts her temporary return to adolescent life, particularly living once more in her childhood home, and spending time with her then substantially younger parents, Evelyn (Barbara Harris) and Jack Kelcher (Don Murray), and sister Nancy (Sophia Coppola). She also finds herself, more ambivalently, back in a relationship with Charlie: re-attracted once again to the budding teenage musician and romantic she fell in love with, but also wary of the disappointment of her subsequent marriage to him.
Trying to make sense of her apparent trip back in time, Peggy Sue seeks Richard’s advice, hoping his prodigious scientific intellect can help her resolve the predicament and travel forward to 1985. Meanwhile, frustrated after a still virgin Charlie nervously spurns her sexual advances, she instead seeks out and sleeps with classmate Michael Fitzsimmons (Kevin J. O’Connor), a brooding loner with literary aspirations on whom she had always secretly harboured a crush. When at a subsequent date at a bar, he tells her of his desire to take him with her to Utah so he can engage in a polygamous relationship, she declines. She then sees Charlie singing on-stage with an otherwise all-Black R ‘n’ B group, and is impressed; unfortunately for Charlie, a music agent there to see him perform is not, and declines to sign him.
Disappointed by this rejection, Charlie spurns Peggy Sue’s efforts to reconcile the following day, and she herself then turns down a marriage proposal from Richard. She instead travels on her 18ᵗʰ birthday to visit her beloved – and, in 1985, long-deceased – grandparents, Elizabeth (Maureen O’Sullivan) and Barney Alvorg (Leon Ames). She confides to them her story of having travelled back in time; Elizabeth being a psychic, they believe her. Barney takes Peggy Sue with him to a meeting at his secretive lodge, where the members perform a ritual designed to send her back to the future. However, she is surreptitiously smuggled out of there by Charlie, desperate to make amends. He presents her with a locket, which 25 years on she will wear with pictures of their two children inside. Against the backdrop of a storm, they make love, which would result, as it originally did, in her pregnancy with Beth.
Peggy Sue subsequently wakes up in 1985 once more, in hospital, where she is informed that she had collapsed at the reunion with a heart arrhythmia and been fortunate to survive. Charlie, remorseful of his philandering, has been at her bedside the whole time. Nonetheless, Charlie’s anecdotal mention of a volume of writing by Michael Fitzsimmons, coyly dedicated to her and their night of passion, suggests her journey back to 1960 truly had happened. Peggy Sue’s own affections for Charlie likewise revived, she invites him round to dinner.
Reunion and midlife crisis
For participants, high school reunions usually involve forms of self-presentation that straddle the line between an attempted authentic performance of one’s adult identity and yet also conformity to one’s former classmates’ expectations of what they would be like as adults, based on their recollection of them as teenagers.1 We might see it, with a nod to Victor Turner, as a liminal ritual in which present-day socioeconomic positions are partly suspended and the roles of teenagers temporarily partly re-adopted, the vestiges of the past revived, fostering a sense of generationally-based communitas.2 At the same time, however, that ritual brings with it the ghosts of old hierarchies and cliques, mingling and interacting uneasily with, unable to more than temporarily upend, contemporary social and economic ones.
Peggy Sue, having married her high school sweetheart, is assumed by her old classmates to have fulfilled their expectations of whom she would become, and has to repeatedly disrupt those assumptions by telling people who ask after Charlie that they are getting divorced, with a mixture of embarrassment and dismay. Richard, meanwhile, is of a recognised higher socioeconomic status than his fellow alumni, and yet is also compelled to engage in the pretence of camaraderie with those insincerely respectful former peers who once bullied him for the very qualities that brought about his adulthood success – an illusion momentarily disrupted by one former classmate berating him for inventing the machine that put him out of business. Their elections as homecoming queen and king encapsulate their paradoxical positions.
For Peggy Sue, and for Charlie, the reunion comes at a point of heavily gendered midlife crisis. The former has built a life around a relationship that has now seemingly fallen apart. The disappointment in her life is presented less as with the institution of marriage itself, or indeed anything beyond it, so much as with whom she married, and inasmuch has Peggy Sue has additional regrets it would appear to be not pursuing alternative romantic opportunities. For Charlie, he has had to give up his ambition of a music career to provide for his wife and children, instead settling for inheriting his father’s business, and with it his womanising. He seeks solace from the loss of his adolescence, and his adolescent dreams, by pursuing younger women.
Replaying the past, reliving adolescence
Peggy Sue’s return to 1960, experienced in 1985 perhaps symbolically as arrhythmia – a disruption of ordinary temporal patterns – is a fuller realisation of the school reunion’s ritual re-enactments, a genuine displacement of the present for immersion in the past, to engage her fully adult mind in a role-playing activity only she is conscious of. Trying to make sense of her situation, Richard explains to her his ‘burrito’ theory of time: that time may indeed form a wrap, the present reaching around to touch the past, and that people choose what is contained within.
Peggy Sue’s time burrito does indeed contain a combination of ingredients. In a manner she had been unable to at the reunion, too weighed down by the intrusive realities of life-as-is, back in 1960 she relishes playing at life-as-was, engaging nostalgically in teenage activities, socialising with her old girlfriends, spending time with her family as they were, affectionately and knowingly. She pursues opportunities she had not previously taken, most notably her sexual encounter with Michael.
She also seeks, though not wholeheartedly, to avoid remaking the mistakes she believes herself to have had made, to not fall for and marry Charlie again. And yet as Peggy Sue relives her adolescence, so she sees a side to him she previously had not, or had at least forgotten. She finds herself semi-reluctantly falling back into the very course of action she had forsworn, triggering her return to the present, but now having re-evaluated her husband and their life together, and likely to reconcile with him.
Underpinning this combination of circularity and fatalism is an absence of genuine intergenerational conflict. The dizzy spell Peggy Sue is believed by the school nurse and her friends to have suffered when she wakes up in 1960 is an apt metaphor for the uncertain world of teenage life she finds herself back in, with its precocious but enormous emotions, the weight and drama attached to its various rites and routines. Yet the adults in her life respond to this with a combination of gentle concern and sympathetic indulgence. Generation connects rather than divides people across time in Peggy Sue Got Married, most fully realised as Peggy Sue both basks in the company of her long-departed grandparents, while also looking forward to being reunited with her daughter, whom she had named after her grandmother.
Reimagining 1960
The world Peggy Sue revisits is largely one of contented conformity, a suburban America of the 1950s, even if the choice of 1960 as a year hints at its significance as a hinge point in both her and American life. It is an almost entirely white, middle-class world, marked by conventional gender roles and relationships, depicted humorously. Evelyn Kelcher contemplates voting Democrat but does not disclose this to her husband, and has to be encouraged by Peggy Sue to sit and eat breakfast with the rest of the family instead of standing around waiting on them. Barney Alvorg tells his granddaughter, ‘It’s your grandma’s strudel that’s kept this family together’. The film’s adolescent characters mostly aspire to a version of this, Maddy revealing at one point that she envisions Peggy Sue, Carol, and herself married to their high school boyfriends, living in close proximity to one another, having regular barbecues.
The teenage popular culture they engage within is likewise period- and age-specific but hardly distinctive nor challenging in character and ethos. The music of the era is ubiquitous, including in the Buddy Holly song which gave the film its title and plays over the opening credits, and in Charlie’s doo-wop affectations, styling himself after Dion DeMucci (and his vocal group with his friends after the Belmonts). Yet it is also music that, while pregnant with adolescent emotion, lacks any air of danger or rebellion; the only hint otherwise being Charlie’s subsequent performing on stage with a Black backing group, which helps stimulate Peggy Sue’s reappraisal of him.
Michael Fitzsimmons is the only exception to this. Whereas Charlie and his friends watch sitcom The Honeymooners, drink beer, and drive cars, Michael reads Jack Kerouac, smokes marijuana, and rides a motorcycle – earning his denunciation by Peggy Sue’s nemesis, Terry (Glenn Withrow), as a ‘beatnik commie’. This transgressive quality is partly what attracts Peggy Sue to him, and yet his vision of a life different from that of their parents – living with Peggy Sue and another wife, their working on a farm to support him while he writes – is nonetheless strikingly conventional in its underpinning expectations of male sexual gratification and unseen female labour.
This conventional nostalgia for a decidedly pre-sixties America, one that existed before the Kennedy presidency, hippiedom, sexual revolution, civil rights movement and protest, was a common feature of representations in popular culture and politics by the time Reagan was in the White House, and increasingly recognised as right-coded.3 In Peggy Sue Got Married, it is a world that seems comfortingly close at hand from the perspective of the 1980s, in keeping with the time-as-burrito theory, and the intergenerational ties that bind characters together across overlapping lifespans.
Peggy Sue’s impending divorce from Charlie seems a likely rupture from this, at a point when the divorce rate in America had reached a new peak, in contrast with the post-war low of a quarter-century earlier. Yet back in 1985, she is able to reapply, in the film’s very last line, the wisdom of companionate domesticity embodied by her grandmother: ‘Charlie, I would like to invite you to dinner at home, on Sunday, with your kids. I will make a strudel.’
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On this, see Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Robert Zussman, ‘High School Reunions and the Management of Identity’, Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 19, No. 3 (1996), pp. 225–239.
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure (Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969), pp. 96–97.
See Tobias Becker, ‘Politics: The Use of Nostalgia in Political and Pop Cultural Criticism’, in Tobias Becker and Dion Georgiou (eds.), The Uses of the Past in Contemporary Western Popular Culture: Nostalgia, Politics, Lifecycles, Mediations, and Materialities (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), pp. 25–38.