“When we were young, we had momentum. We were winning. We were best friends. Everybody seemed to care more. Everything seemed to matter more back then.”
~ Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
On April 16, 2025, the New York Post tweeted that former child actor Haley Joel Osment was arrested for public intoxication and possession of a controlled substance at a California ski resort. @HeidiBriones: “Dude looks like he does Coke.” @HDRetrovision: “90% of the ski resort is publicly intoxicated.” @Politicallyawol: “He was just prepping to audition for a reboot of Hot Tub Time Machine. @Scary_Scarah: “This is what you do at a ski resort. Let the man go.” @Arttavana: “Now imagine if he had a hot tub that was also a time machine.” I quickly deleted the tweet when I discovered that Haley Joel Osment had lost his home in the Eaton Fire, 500 vinyl records, and a piano his parents had given him when he turned 18. He was arrested just days from his 37th birthday. According to the Mammoth Lakes Police Department, Osment was an “unruly skier.” @Meme_Behavior: “If I were Haley Joel Osment, I would be trying to create a hot tub time machine, too.”
Like Haley Joel, I know what it’s like to lose a piece of yourself at an age when you can no longer put the pieces back together. I’ve been Haley Joel (is that what his friends call him?) at a gas station in rural Ohio after a one-armed prostitute mugged me and forced me to buy her drugs; zombified in the middle of a San Fernando Valley suburb with the mind virus nibbling away at my brain, checking account, male friendships, hairline, and the flopped attempts at swapping virginities when I was 16. Time turns Baywatch-coded sex fantasies into lonely walks across the sand with floppy “dad hats,” eyeballs glimmering wet, back aching because you didn’t wear the right shoes—an hour of traffic just to hear the fucking ocean gurgle with toxic shit; never this, however, at a ski resort. Ski resorts, for me, are Cheeverian deathtraps where effusive white children go to die—dragged home in horse-drawn hearses (“The Hartleys,” 1949, The New Yorker). There are numerous ski resorts within a reasonable driving distance of Los Angeles: Mammoth Mountain, Snow Summit, Bear Mountain, and Mount Baldy; I’ve never been to any of them, but I think about them, a lot, especially when they snowball into the news cycle, as I doomscroll to disconnect—clicking rapidly until I find something to zombify my brain, briefly pausing to think about the “one who got away”—the first crush, the dream job, the apartment, romance—a melancholic, uniquely male regret explored in a recent episode of Black Mirror, where the past is revisited to reduce the suffering of the present. I keep clicking until I find something to watch that satiates my retrograde-male nostalgia. I click play on a film that’s about a hot tub that’s also a time machine—pointless and absurd, right?
Absurd, yes, pointless, no. Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) is a bizarrely deep and existential film about regret that’s camouflaged with dicks, pussies, beer, mountains of cocaine, and a “dick flick” premise: “Three embittered former high-school buddies get a chance to relive the past when a magical hot tub at a ski resort sends them back to 1986.” HTTM’s ski resort is located in the fictional Kodiak Valley, where “everybody gets laid.” As a lonely guitar strums in the background, we discover that the Kodiak Valley ski resort is abandoned, boarded up (two decades past its prime), and infested by feral cats: symbols of femininity, horror, and “mancession,” a term coined by economist Mark Perry, who believed that men were disproportionately affected by job losses during the last recession (2007-2009). One of the “former buddies,” Nick (played by Craig Robinson), works at a humiliatingly gaudy doggy daycare called “Sup Dawg,” a symbol of the economically disenfranchised and cucked male (“black and out of shape”). One of the film’s characters (Jacob, the only millennial in the film) describes the resort as if it’s the haunted hotel in The Shining (1980), a temporal deathtrap: “One of us is gonna start writing a novel, and then we all get snowed in, and Lou’s gonna axe-murder all of us.” The decrepit ski resort acts as a metaphor for economic decline and the depressing fact that, as men grow older, they often bond over mourning the things they’ve lost, e.g., dads, moms, girls (the ones that got away), music venues on the Sunset Strip, hair bands, abdominal muscles, hairlines, testosterone, and boners in hot tubs.
I hate that this film forced me to write (and think) about all that.
Watching this film in 2025 fucks me up. Era-defining films like HTTM (and yes, it’s that) transport me back to people or the places that defined those eras, e.g., the bedroom of an ex, the place I took them to (that sounded weirder than it was meant to be), like the video store, the local bar, the soundtracks that scored those moments, their faces, and the parasocial relationships I’ve had with celebrities who’ve died. HTTM is giving Sonny Bono on a death drive; Sonny Bono (of Sony & Cher), the singer (let’s be nice, he’s dead), songwriter, actor, and politician best known for what happened to him on January 5th, 1998, when he was skiing in a wooded area of the Heavenly Mountain Resort in Lake Tahoe, rocketing down a slope at uncontrollable speeds before colliding with the trunk of a 40-foot pine tree—dead at 62.
Sometimes I regret never having gone to a ski resort; other times, I thank God I never did. Ski resorts make me think about shit I cannot control: avalanches, ski nazis with reflective snow goggles, white women in yeti boots, the Russian war machine, boxes of mysteriously-flavored chocolate, and hot tubs: those whirling vortexes that appear in middle-aged ski comedies like HTTM and homes across the Pacific Palisades—the ones that survived the wildfires (my deepest condolences, Haley Joel)—where on October 22, 2023, former Friends star Matthew Perry was floating around in a hot tub and Instagraming his nine million simps: “Oh, so warm water swirling around makes you feel good?” What a weird guy to be friends with. A few days later, Perry injected himself with ketamine and drowned in his hot tub—the water swirling around his limp dad bod. Someone on Twitter said it felt like losing a friend. Sonny Bono is why I never go skiing; Matthew Perry’s death reminds me of how hot tubs are at once relaxing and deadly. (According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, over 300 people die every year from hot tub-related accidents.) Matthew Perry’s death felt like losing a friend I never had who was on a show called Friends who partied so hard that he alienated his real friends, which is what HTTM is also about: friends, the ones you party with; the ones who watched you masturbate; the ones who force you to replay your past like a video game you can never master—the ones you lose, man, for real. This movie is a sad trip.
HTTM is on pause because my ADD doesn’t allow me to watch a film like a normal adult. I grab my phone and tweet something about how HTTM is deeper than most “dick flicks,” hoping someone engages with my nostalgia. A #FilmTwitter incel “likes” my post. We DM. Ione Skye in Say Anything (1989) comes up. “She has a new memoir coming out.” “What’s it called?” “Say Everything.” Ione Skye is tangentially related to HTTM, but hang on, a realization: my parasocial relationships have replaced my real ones. I think I’m an incel lol you too? I know; I’m not alone, but I feel alone in our collective loneliness epidemic (and yeah, it’s mostly fucking up men). Matthew Perry’s death forced me to think about all the male friends I’ve ghosted or been ghosted by or ghosted, like my former best friend, “Steve,” who had the keys to a swimming pool with a hot tub. We’d go there at night. Steve brought beer. He brought drugs. I was 14. He was 16. Steve had shoulder-length hair and diamond earrings that glimmered under the sun. Steve had a Mustang that growled and spat fire as he hugged tight corners like he wanted to fuck them. Steve was the drummer in a band. Steve, at 16, was dating a hot white girl in a school full of foreign kids (like us). Steve was white-washed and cool; he went to raves in San Francisco and dropped ecstasy and said we were “fresh off the boat.” Steve went skiing, snowboarding, surfing, and raving—shit rich white kids did (Steve wasn’t white, but his name was white-sounding). Steve drove us to parties and introduced us to hot white girls. Steve rolled his eyes and said, “bros before hoes.” I remember one of those girls. Her name was “Diane.” She looked like Watts from Some Kind of Wonderful (1987): short blonde hair that smelled like warm vanilla mist (just go with it), boyish features, probably a lesbian (my type), crooked smile, like Watts (she wore jeans when everyone else wore skirts). She had pimples on her chin when she told me she wanted to swap virginities. I panicked, not knowing how to use my dick or a condom—not knowing how to say the things I was feeling (again, this is a uniquely male problem). I ghosted Diane and told her friends to tell her that I was “busy” with the “guys.” Very gay. “Why did you break up?” “I don’t know.” “What did you do?” “I didn’t do anything.” I never had my Lloyd Dobler moment: boombox over my head, tears rolling down my cheeks, and serenading Diane (Ione Skye in Say Anything—the source code for “Diane”) with my taste in music. I was a sexually confused 14-year-old boy who was bi, straight, bi, and an involuntarily celibate wannabe gangster-ass bitch until I turned 18 and met someone whose face I can no longer make out. HTTM makes me wonder how it would feel to go back, for just one second, and say everything. This is not something you should be thinking about when you’re alone. It fucks you up. Loneliness is time plus the time to ponder the time you’ve lost, FML.
I swapped Diane for Steve, who became the Lou Dorchen aka “Violator” of my life (my asshole): the washed-up, bald, comically vulnerable manchild in HTTM who demands his friends to “do something fun” like “break into a school, steal a cop car, or some shit.” Once at the ski resort, Lou reenacts his role as the trainwreck “party animal,” the person he was when his friends still stuck by him. This is the beginning of his regression arc from a washed adult in a suit and tie, singing a Motley Crüe power ballad to himself, to a popular teenager (with hair) who was the king of the jungle—the Axl Rose of suburbia. Another realization: I have no idea what happened to Diane. We’re not Facebook friends (no mutual friends, either). I do know, however, what happened to Ione Skye: she just published her memoir, she’s still hot, she has a podcast, she has salacious stories to tell about the guys she fucked or fucked over or got fucked over by. I hate this fucking film so much (hate is also, apparently, my love language).
One of our mutual friends says that Steve had “peaked early.” When you’re 16 and foreign, and you’re in a band, and you’re dating a hot white girl, the passage of time will fuck you-the-fuck up. That’s what it means to “peak early.” I think about Steve when I unpause HTTM and remember that we all have a Lou Dorchen in our lives: the cartoonish manifestation of the misguided male libido, the sun setting on his dreams, alone and trapped in a cocoon of nostalgia and suicidal ideations, like Johnny Lawrence in Cobra Kai wondering if he could have made better choices, kept the popular girl, and won the karate tournament. It’s a thing—the classic male wish-unfulfillment vehicle depicted in forgotten VHS films like Mr. Destiny (1990), a film that wonders how much better a 35-year-old man’s dissatisfied life would have been had he hit a home run in his last at-bat in high school. Destiny. I think about it a lot. HTTM makes me gorge on it, and frankly, it sucks to gorge on the bitterness of “what ifs” like, for example, what if I had kept going to karate class and learned how to defend myself instead of being such a pussy ass bitch?
William Zabka, the actor who plays the profanity-laced Johnny Lawrence in Cobra Kai, makes a cameo in HTTM as a coked-up villain at the ski resort (one of the film’s many references to ‘80s films). HTTM’s references aren’t pure nostalgia porn—they offer meta-commentary on male loneliness and regret in a film which synopsizes itself as being about “four friends who share a crazy night of drinking in a ski resort hot tub, only to wake up with nasty hangovers in 1986! Now, nice-guy Adam (John Cusack), party animal Lou (Rob Corddry), married man Nick (Craig Robinson), and mega-nerd Jacob (Clark Duke) must relive the wild night of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll!” Jacob is also Adam’s nephew, a gamer who lives in his uncle Adam’s basement and plays open-world video games, what Adam describes as “second-life bullshit.” The millennial, remember? Jacob’s mother is Kelly, Adam’s sister (a “free spirt” in the ‘80s who banged more ski instructors than Shannon Tweed on Cinemax). Just keep that in mind, but that’s the general pitch—firmly grounding HTTM in the libidinous tradition of phallocentric male comedies like Old School (2003) and The Hangover (2009), except HTTM bends genre conventions, along with time, and dips its toes into existential physics and the gravitation pull of regret and other deep shit that traumatizes men. It’s also a film that uses words like “faggot” and “retarded” without pretense or desire for “woke” corrective. I hate this fucking film so much, and yet, I admire its balls.
“Like most guy-centric films these days, this film is ragingly homophobic and misogynistic, and you know what? These are some of the best parts,” wrote Adam Rose for The Aristocrat. The crudely problematic jokes in HTTM offer cultural commentary on both the Reagan-era and the 2010s and the pixelated dots that connect them. For example, when the friends begin to suspect they’ve been transported back to Winterfest ’86, Nick (Craig Robinson) jumps in front of a white woman and asks, “Excuse me, miss, but what color’s Michael Jackson?” She looks at him like duh, “black.” The black or whiteness of Michael Jackson is Nick’s temporal map between the Reagan and Obama eras. He’s black, so it must be 1986 (I hate this film for making me laugh about Michael Jackson’s skin color). The “potent emotional fuel powering Hot Tub Time Machine,” wrote Dan Kois in The Village Voice, is the "wincing nostalgia" we feel when forced to reconsider our "Reagan-era selves.” The Hangover lacks this kind of self-awareness; it never acknowledges the audience’s critical voice, while HTTM foregrounds, negotiates, and fractures it along the space-time continuum of a middle-aged “stoner comedy” or “dick flick” that balances its critique of the retrograde past with a joyfully juvenile desire to relive it—in other words, it’s not “woke.”
HTTM is directed by Steve Pink and written by Josh Heald (who created Cobra Kai) and pays direct homage to a genre of cinema that no longer exists: the “ski comedy” or “ski-sex comedy” that included films like Hot Dog…The Movie (1984): a “head in a hot tub comedy” highlighted by a scene with Playmate of the Year-era Shannon Tweed, in a hot tub, like hot-but-crazy MILF congresswoman and transphobic bigot dumpster fire, Nancy Mace, who turned herself into a meme when she posed in a hot tub, wet, in a black bikini, holding a half-empathy (I mean, empty) glass filled with melted cubes of ice @baltic_dan: “POV: you’re about to lose your virginity to your best friend’s mom on a family ski trips.” Memes are today’s ski sex comedies. The genre began to decline with 1990’s Ski Patrol, with its caricatured film poster of a bug-eyed skier wrapped around a tree (pre-Sonny Bono). HTTM star John Cusack contributed to the genre with the teen masterpiece, Better Off Dead (1985), a film about a teenager trying to move on from the fact that his girlfriend dumped him for the captain of the ski team. HTTM is much more relatable.
“I wanted to just lean into all of the tropes and craziness of what those s embraced, which was just silly, exploitative," HTTM writer Josh Heald told SYFY WIRE. “So, we [Heald and producer Matt Moore] were banging around things and said, ‘It would just be great to write a contemporary take on an ‘80s ski movie. I’d like to have characters from now be able to acknowledge how ridiculous this world is.’”
HTTM accepts and then proceeds to bend the temporal paradox of time machine films: the “butterfly effect” philosophy that undergirds Back to the Future II (1989), which argues that any change to the past will irreparably alter the present. HTTM does not imprison its characters in the space-time continuum—it allows them to rejigger and conquer the past, like a video game (if you’re good at them—I am not). “You’re bound to think about the life you've led and the mistakes you've made,” Heald told SYFY WIRE, “the choices you didn't make, any opportunities you passed up, and think, ‘What if I had done that a little differently? What if I had been bolder?’”
Bolder and less bald, HTTM pays tribute to one of America’s last truly original genres of music, a true Reagan-era invention: hair metal aka “cock rock,” which scores Lou’s suicide attempt in the driver’s seat of his Firebird in his suit and tie, chugging booze and pumping exhaust fumes into the garage, pantomiming Motley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home” (a song I hate myself for loving so much). As Lou passes out from the gas, we realize that Lou’s mimed pyrotechnics hide the fact that he “peaked early.” At the hospital following his suicide attempt, or accidental suicide attempt (the film leaves this vague, at first), the two friends who ghosted him for years (Adam and Nick) are at his bedside as Lou denies trying to poison himself with carbon monoxide—insisting that if he did kill himself, he would be “awesome at it…a shotgun to the dick.” This line always makes me howl, and then, five minutes later, I hate myself for it.
Concerned that the loneliness is killing Lou, his friends (Adam and Nick) come up with a plan: a male bonding ritual in the Kodiak Valley, which is, like Lou, a place that “peaked early” and ended up washed and abandoned. Led by Lou’s “party animal” energy, the friends book the same cabin they raged in during Winterfest ’86, which is verified by a carving Lou made in a cabinet drawer in 1986: “Adam sux cox n dix.” I hate this film so, so much. Led to their room by a one-armed bellhop played by Crispin Glover (George McFly in Back to the Future), the friends discover the room has a hot tub, with a dead animal carcass entombed inside it—a symbol of declining male “party animal” of the ’80s (John Belushi chugging Jack Daniel’s in Animal House). Lou puffs up his chest and suggests they do cocaine, chug booze, and down some “illegal” Chernobly (an energy drink as potent as plutonium). After the hot tub is cleaned, the friends find themselves in a Reagan-era fever dream, warm water swirling under their sloshed buttholes as the nuked Chernobly is tipped over into the tub’s circuit board, creating a fusion that zaps the friends back to Winterfest ’86. They wake up hungover in their teenage bodies, except we see them as middle-aged men—very Quantum Leap.
“Adam sux cox n dix” hasn’t been carved yet. Lou has hair. Jacob, who isn’t even born yet, is glitching like an overloaded graphics card. Chevy Chase appears as the hot tub repairman and voice of God: “The whole system can go haywire if you change one little thing,” he warns them. Chevy Chase is God. Why does this film even exist? The film’s drama is linear and dumb: “What did we do 20 years ago? We gotta do the exact same thing.” Steven Zeitchik at the L.A. Times wrote that HTTM is “pretty much on every level” the “gross-out you’d expect.” Roger Ebert, who gave the film three stars out of four, wrote that “Hot Tub Time Machine, which wants nothing more than to be a screwball farce, succeeds beyond any expectations suggested by the title.” This is a film I hate because of how much I need it (and because of where it takes me).
To Lou, aka “Violator” (played by Rob Corddry), who offers the film’s wryest commentary on the hedonism of the ‘80s, as he oscillates between hyper-masculine cartoon and horny teenager who stands atop a snow-capped mountain and shouts, “I just want to fuck something!” Hell yeah, dawg. In the third act of the film, Lou finally fucks something: the teenage version of Jacob’s mom and Adam’s sister, Kelly (the “free spirit” aka “whore”), which leads to the revelation that Lou is Jacob’s father. The sex act ensures that Jacob is born and not just a glitch in the matrix of ‘86. “Nobody fucks my mother in the past!” screams Jacob in an obvious reference to Back to the Future (1985), the first film to pose the question of “what would happen if you went back in time and ran into your mom, and she wanted to fuck you?” After having sex with Lou, Kelly says, “I feel pregnant,” which recalls the countless former Valley Girls I’ve met who were teenagers in the ‘80s who chose, for whatever reason, to have unprotected sex with a guy in a hair metal band on the Sunset Strip (someone like Lou), got themselves pregnant, and to this day do not know who the father is. Steve?
The Sunset Strip is the Kodiak Valley of Los Angeles: a cobwebbed graveyard buried with regret and the dying falsetto of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and AIDS (which oddly never comes up in this film). In the end credits of HTTM, Lou (who remains in 1986) is the lead singer of Motley Crüe—rewinding himself into ultimate male fantasy and violating the butterfly effect with reckless abandon. HTTM mutilates the space-time continuum. In one scene, Nick—the cucked wife-guy and struggling musician trying to come to terms with the fact that his wife is cheating on him—does a bunch of coke, locks himself in the bathroom, and calls the nine-year-old version of his wife and verbally abuses her: “You’re probably somewhere sucking a motherfucker’s dick!” The nine-year-old girl, his wife (whose last name he’s taken to be more “progressive”), hands the phone over to her dad: “Hang up the phone, Jerry, this shit don’t concern you. Hang up the phone motherfucker—this is between me and my wife!” Nick’s interrogation of his nine-year-old “wife” edits his life in the 2010s, once her returns to the current timeline, as his wife later recalls a “crazy wrong number” she got when she was nine and why she would “never screw around,” turning HTTM is something empowering, like a magic wand shaped like a dick (Cartesian mindfuck, in the case of Adam). I hate what this film does to my writing.
Adam—the lonely control freak played by John Cusack—is transported back to a Poison concert at Winterfest ’86, with Jenny, but he’s not just Adam—the middle-aged Adam or the teenage Adam—he’s John Cusack in Better Off Dead and Say Anything (serenading Ione Skye with a boombox), trapped in a time warp with his ex-girlfriend, Jenny, the girl he swapped virginities with before breaking up with her—his “great white buffalo,” the one that got away. Adam has a chance to win her back (if only Johnny Lawrence had a time machine). We all (maybe just me) live with this kind of temporal burden and mindfuckery—the kinds of “what ifs” that can stop time. HTTM disrupts the normie expectations by refusing to untangle regret in the way most rom-coms or teen comedies would. The suffering lingers until the very end when we get a kind of cosmic intervention, as Adam, attempting to prevent himself from breaking up with Jenny, the popular girl, falls in love with a rebellious “tomboy” named April—an amalgamation of the gender-defying “weird girl” in every ‘80s teen film, e.g., Watts in Some Kind of Wonderful, who’s been sent by Spin magazine to review Poison. April (played by Lizzie Caplan) isn’t simply a distraction for Adam; she teaches him how to let go, embrace the chaos, and to say everything—to accept that life is in fact like a box of chocolates (Forrest Gump, 1994). I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore, but here me out: Adam is all of us.
As Adam begins to untangle his past, he continues to struggle with regret, like the time he and his sister (Kelly) convinced his father to deviate from their steak sandwich dinner plans to get pizza, which led to 33 people dying of E. coli poisoning, including Adam’s father (a subtle reference to how much Adam dislikes Poison, the band). Repeat: Adam is all of us. The guilt associated with the poisoned pizza leads to Kelly becoming a drug-addicted agent of chaos while Adam tries to “master the chaos.” He becomes a control freak. He distances himself from Lou, the wild and out-of-control trainwreck. Adam is in the final phase of what John Hughes prophesied in The Breakfast Club (1985): “When you grow up, your heart dies.” He represents the viewer who watches HTTM and feels like time is fucking them up (me, you, anyone with a pulse).
April demands that Adam move past the guilt and “embrace the chaos; that way, life might just astonish you.” Box of Chocolates Theory. Adam leans forward to kiss her in what turns out to be the film’s most moving tribute to John Hughes; more specifically, the birthday cake scene from Sixteen Candles (1984), as Spandau Ballet’s “True” strums in the background and Adam releases his grip on past regrets. HTTM is in constant dialogue with John Hughes, who died in 2009 of a heart attack (a year before HTTM was released). The film is a tribute to both Hughes and Cusack, who was nearly cast in the role of Bender in The Breakfast Club (the meta-ness of this film is pornographic). Cusack’s Adam responds to Hughes’s prophecy of doom from The Breakfast Club: “I’m not making plans…I’m gonna sort of let the universe surprise me.” Adam’s redemption arc ends with saying goodbye to April, as she whispers in his ear, “Maybe the universe will bring us together.” Adam eventually discovers that Jenny was always planning to break up with him at Winterfest (a lifetime of regret for nothing). In the end, Adams ends up with April, just like in an ‘80s teen film (a reference to the finale of Some Kind of Wonderful, when Keith loses the popular girl and ends up with the rocker chick, Watts). The master of this universe is and will forever be John Hughes, not Chevy Chase.
HTTM is also noteworthy as it remains John Cusack’s last ‘80s teen comedy (or a film about ‘80s teen comedies). It also explores the nostalgic bliss (or disquieting melancholia, depending on your mental health) of being able to go back to that feeling, re-experience it, re-negotiate it, and beat off to it until it turns into a screaming eagle-of-a-guitar solo that echoes back to a world that only exists in MTV music videos and Johnny Lawrence’s wettest dreams. HTTM is empowering, funny, joyfully juvenile, absurd, and thirsty for the beer commercial version of masculinity. We need to admit that we’re nostalgic for this on some level (because we are). This is why Lou chooses to remain in 1986, completing his regression arc into the ultimate male fantasy of going back to youth’s beer-soaked “glory days,” in his idealized, pre-modern state, with hair, at a party that never stops, in a place where his friends stick by him, through thick and thinning hair. OK! Magazine on April 26, 2025: “Forrest Gump star Haley Joel Osment’s plummet from fame due to numerous scandals indeed proves that life, is a box of chocolates.” I hate this film as much as I hate the past.
