Summer is insanity.

Anybody who’s read my articles here on Peliplat would know that as soon as the “Movies that Feel Like Summer” challenge was announced, it was my moment. My undying love of Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again would finally have a purpose, because truly, what movie feels more like summer than that?

But I hate to be predictable.

I tried to think of any other film I could write about. Maybe The Surfer with its sweltering Australian heat, or Aquamarine’s ode to silly girlhood. Hell, maybe I could expand my horizons. I might not be a fan of horror movies, but everybody else seems to feel like slashers are the perfect match for humid, lazy evenings. Or maybe I could finally get over whatever made me feel so weird about Call Me By Your Name to see what made so many people insist that it’s a summer classic.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I started to see a bigger picture. These movies crossed so many genres: musicals, chick flicks, horrors, thrillers, coming-of-age… How could all of those feel like summer? But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that they shared the same core, the same undeniably summer feeling.

They were all insane.

I’m in Italy right now, Naples to be specific, and there’s a heatwave. I normally wake up sweating somewhere between 3-4am each morning as the heat begins its slow creep back up the walls of the city. I turn on my AC to get the few minutes of relief I need before I can sleep again. When I finally force myself up a couple of hours later, I try to do a short yoga routine before the heat gets any more intense. Still, I find myself slipping and sliding in my own sweat for about 20 minutes before I collapse in my bedroom and allow myself another few minutes of AC relief. Breakfast is a battle between the queasy heat and my empty stomach, followed by a retreat back to the bedroom, windows open this time, to write or to work or to while away the heavy hours until I just can’t take it anymore.

Every day, inevitably at the hottest time of day, I need to do something.

So I slather on the sunscreen and spend an hour or so slogging about the city (I’m lucky that it’s beautiful – please don’t see this as an indictment of Naples). Relief comes in the form of gelato this time. By the time I’m home, I’m on the brink of heat exhaustion. I stumble my way to the shower, shock myself in the cold, and consign myself to the bed for the rest of the day, only moving if my hunger becomes less bearable than the heavy air.

Energy builds. There’s no outlet, just the unforgiving sun and its lazy trek across the sky.

For me, it’s that building pressure that defines summer – and the real fun comes when it releases. Think about the movies I listed at the start. The Surfer is the most literal version of summer insanity, as Nic Cage’s psyche crumbles under the Australian sun. In Aquamarine, the insanity takes a lighter, more child-friendly form: two young girls meet a mermaid, and somehow their biggest worry is whether or not they can get the local himbo to fall in love with her. In Call Me By Your Name, I assume the insanity manifests as the all-too-common psychosis that is one’s first, obsessive, soul-wrenching love – though feel free to correct me in the comments if I’m wrong. And horror movies, of course, offer a darker kind of insanity, one that can only ever end in a bloodbath.

As for Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, my pride and joy, that movie is a straight-up mental break. There is no logic to its plot, only wobbly support beams made of ABBA songs. Even when things are terrible, they’re honestly pretty fine. Cher is there. Everyone seems drunk, but it might just be the early stages of heatstroke or dehydration. May that kind of summer find me in this sweltering heat. Amen.

In summary, you know the word lunacy? It was originally used to denote the way people’s insanity seemed to wax and wane along with the moon, aka the “luna”. Well, I’d like to propose another word to reflect that way that summer makes us go just as if not more crazy than the moon. Granted, given that the latin root for summer is “aestas”, it might not sound quite as good, but then again, “aestas-cy” sounds a lot like “ecstacy”, and that feels somehow even more appropriate for the specific brand of insanity summer brings us.

P.S. – If you want to save me from losing my mind here in Naples, please shoot me your favourite movies that capture summer’s unhinged energy.