Headscratchers / Adventureland

• Brennan apparently finds Em within minutes of landing in New York. You ever played hide-and-seek in New York?
  • Chances are he had already found out where she was living before he arrived.
    • He probably called her Dad to find out. We never found out what he thought of Brennan, he may have liked him.
• Amusement parks stay open late. Kennywood for example, Adventureland's stand-in in the film, closes at 11pm. So where do Brennan and Lisa P. find a fancy restaurant open that late and is that crowded in Pittsburgh?
  • It was probably their day off.
  • Just because the park closes at eleven doesn't mean every single ride and attraction stays open that late, and certainly doesn't mean every employee has to stay that long.
• Em calls out Sue for anti-semitism, asking her if she hates gay people and supports apartheid also. Good for Em, but the film was set in 1987 and homophobia was, sadly, quite common, even among people who might otherwise consider themselves progressive-minded and in any event would be in no way considered comparable to apartheid.
  • Actually, that's false. It would be the same. Apartheid was a racist institution. It would not be unfathomable to see otherwise progressive-minded people support racist institutions like apartheid because it's common. It's passive acceptance. One may not say or do racist things; however, if they stand by and do nothing, they accept it.
  • And there's no reason why Em couldn't personally be ok with gay people. It was '87, not the 50s.
    • Homophobia,at the time, served as an acceptable form of discrimination still, unlike racism, which lingered as well.
      • It isn't so much that homophobia was or wasn't considered okay in 1987, it's that the acceptance of LGBT people into the general culture was not a go-to political wedge issue that was talked about every day, the way it is now, or the way Apartheid would have been then. Now, AIDS, on the other hand...
  • Homophobia may have been more common but that hardly means that everyone was homophobic. And it's not like homophobia isn't still widespread today, but here we are agreeing that it's bad.

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