Born to be Wilder
The movie Van Wilder tells the story of a charismatic young man named Van Wilder with a desperate urge to stay in college for as long as possible. He loves to slack off, play pranks, romance the ladies, and support the things he cares about. He faces harsh challenges to complete his goals but in the end smiles through it all. Van Wilder is an extremely juvenile character but he has something in common with the former professor of philosophy Joe Feinberg when Van Wilder says, “Don’t take life too seriously, you’ll never make it out alive.”
The irony in Van statement is the same kind Feinberg writes about in his essay titled Absurd Self-Fulfillment when he says, “the appropriate response toward the absurdity and fulfillment of the human condition is irony.” This philosophical irony can be described as, “an attitude of detached awareness of incongruity.”(506) It is a detached awareness of your surroundings so that the harshness of the world we live does not destroy the childlike optimism we are inherently born with.
It is important to differentiate the concept of irony from that of optimism and pessimism. Optimism says all things are good and worthwhile while the reality of a world containing passions, accidents, disease, and war contradicts this concept. (Feinberg 507) This does not mean the idea of pessimism, that nothing is worthwhile and bad, holds any more merit than optimism. The philosophy of irony balances carefully between the two extreme ideas. It is best to view the idea as if you were a soldier in the battlefield on life. The pessimistic attitude is your armor that protects you and leaves you unscathed from attacks from other combatants and the optimism is your sword that gives you the courage to strike down the obstacles that get in your way. The ironic man is going to be strongest on that battlefield because putting too much faith into your sword or shield will leave you unable to handle everything that is thrown at you.
Van Wilder’s story shows a good example of the strength of the ironic point of view. Van Wilder had been coasting for the last seven years of college ensuring that he would not have enough credits to graduate with a degree so he would not have to enter the real world. After his rival sabotaged him, he found himself facing expulsion leaving the last years of his life completely wasted. The blow of this reality strikes him hard, but he musters his strength and convinces the facility to allow him to test out of his courses he requires to graduate and buckled down and studied in order to pass. When he was expelled, he had truly failed but he chose not to accept defeat. If he was a pessimist, he would have given up completely when the bad news came in and an optimist would have become complacent believing everything would work out in the end.
The ironic philosophy considers the great contradictions of the human life as a joke. In one scene, Van Wilder has been tricked to visiting the parents of the girl he is interested in and finds himself confronted by uptight doctors with no respect for the carefree college student. The contradictions between the happiness of getting the attention of the girl he cares for and the unhappiness of meeting the uptight parents creates the irony of the event. Most people would view this event from the inside and see only the disappointment of being tricked and become worried about the situation, but as the master of the ironic philosophy says, “Worrying is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but doesn’t get you anywhere.” The ironic man chooses to view it from the outside like it was a joke being told. Even though the joke is on him, he sees the irony of everything and smiles and keeps the bizarreness of the situation in mind as he decides to handle it in equally bizarre way and manages to win the respect of the parents. He kept the smile through it all, because if he let his failures bring him down he would never been able to handle the situation in a successful way.
The balance between the optimism and pessimism allowed Van Wilder to conquer the challenges he faced with an ironic point of view. He did not allow things to get too serious and became a hero to those lacked the moral strength he gained through his ironic philosophy. Van Wilder puts it best when he tells a scared freshman, “You can’t treat every situation as a life-and-death matter because you’ll die a lot of times.”
Works Cited
Feinberg, Joe. “Absurd Self-Fulfillment: An Essay on the Perversity of the Gods.” Vice
&Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics. 8th ed. Ed.Christina Hoff Sommers and Fred Sommers. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2010. 505-508. Print.
Van Wilder. Dir. Walt Becker. Artisan Home Entertainment, 2002.
