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Friday Night Movie Debate – The Quintessential Gen X Movie
My wife and I were trying to explain to our daughters what made Generation X what it is, and why we’re thoroughly irked by the whole Boomer/ Millennial fighting. Face it – GenX is a squeeze generation – outnumbered by both our parents and the Millennial baby boom kids of the last of the true Boomers. Our parents and grandparents blamed us for not having some unifying theme like Vietnam or WWII (at least we also didn’t have disco!), and accused us of being cynical slackers so often that we readily imbibed the latter while putting paid to the former by working our keesters off. We’re not “woke”, we can’t afford to be because somebody has to clean up the messes everyone else keeps making. Whatever. The one president we can claim as roughly ours was Obama, but hell he was just another glorified preppy class president who went right back to looking down his snooty nose at us the moment he got the votes. Again, whatever, and screw this. We know the next prez will be either another Boomer or a woke transsexual pansexual Millennial wiccan. Whatever! I got bills to pay.
So my fellow cynics, if you had to pick one movie that you could show to the Zoomers (and trust me, we’ve got allies in those kids – they’re sharp, and have BS detectors to rival ours), what would that movie be?
I know, 20 years ago, my sister would have demanded a double feature (cheating, but whatever) of St. Elmos Fire and Reality Bites. I’m not sure, now that she’s married and has kids, that she’d vote the same, but they’re not bad snapshots of what we thought we had to look forward to when we were the Zoomers’ age.
My wife is more upbeat. Coming to America gets a nod just for its time-capsule 1980s quality, upbeat and cynical, mocking but loving all at once. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is her other choice. Yes it’s about a Boomer parent trying to have a nostalgic Christmas that hearkens to his WWII parents’ home movies, but man, that’s the world we saw our parents working in every day, and it’s what we feared we’d become.
Me? My heart wants to donate a kidney and save Ferris Buehler, the prototype computer nerd and cool guy who could play his parents and work the system. But that was just a happy halcyon snapshot – a beautiful lie. I don’t think it captures the spirit of how things really worked out. Honestly? My vote goes to Mystery Men, a film about perpetually overlooked underdogs – just everyday folks who worked their keesters off by day, and got to do a bit of cosplay and crime fighting at night, even if it annoyed the hell out of everyone right up until it saved everyone. Because that’s us to the core – overlooked, but hard working, and we’ll be eventually called on to bail out the city from the glamorous insane imposters and lying would-be super heroes who have screwed up one time too many. And then we’ll go right back to our jobs and bickering and be overlooked again.
Published in Entertainment
I recently watched Slacker 1991.
I really recommend the experience, it seems to presage all the weird 1990s movies including being the direct inspiration for Clerks.
Empire Records
Being as I was born in ’79, I’m too young to enjoy Xer nostalgia yet shake my cane at Millennial shenanigans with the best of them.
As a time-capsule of bittersweetness incarnate, you could go with The Neverending Story as the cinematic avatar for people my age; Back to the Future of course for Huey Lewis and Lea Thompson. But probably the biggest movie I remember coming out as a kid? Tim Burton’s Batman. Special mention goes to The Hunt for Red October which holds up as one of my favorite 80’s and cold war movies of all time.
Kick-Ass is Mystery Men all grown up.
For the record, I asked my 20-year-old what he thought about movies that defined/influenced his generation. Here was his response:
“Gen Z is too retarded to properly love, quote, or appreciate anything. I don’t remember the last time I saw a movie befitting the requirements. Another reason this generation has problems.”
Interesting insight I thought. You’re right though, a lot of these kids are sharp, like you said.
Don’t forget, none of this was supposed to happen. If you stood on the commanding heights of the culture in 1970 and made some predictions about life in the Seventies, based on current trends you’d have predicted that corporations and private companies would no longer exist. Families would be replaced by modular love units, parents by interchangeable unisex communal babysitters. Everyone would drive a VW bus and live in a geodesic dome.
Instead we got Rocky, Star Wars, and Smokey and the Bandit. Followed by 10, Charlie’s Angels, and Where the Boys Are ’84.
Like Henry Ford II says in Ford v. Ferrari, we’ve been to war here before.
And won.
Cheating because it’s not the movie, but The X-Files captures an awful lot of the era.
Wait, I’ve got it… Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man.
I don’t think I would have predicted any of that.
Love the image at the top of the post, Skip.
Repo Man
everything else that might, even in the slightest, be accused of representing my generation is pop crap.
Another vote for Clerks here. It’s the least romanticized and most direct depiction of gen Xers I can think of.
Sorcerer and its source movie The Wages of Fear are excellent, I highly recommend both. Both come from the 1950 French novel Le Salaire de la peur, which I think reflects the general attitudes your average French/German was feeling at the time (post WWII). I was born in 1955, so I’m in the middle of the boomers (1946-1966). However, I’ve never understood them, so it’s hard for me to pick a film to reflect the generation. But the films that sticks in my mind during the period is The Searchers (one of the few movies my grandparents took us to, and both cried at the end – I had never seen them cry), Jason and the Argonauts (it both thrilled and scared the poop out of me, and I begged to be taken back and see it again), and Goldfinger (first Bond film I ever saw, to cool for words).
Watch Slacker. Its similar but not as good.
Will there never be a hair metal President?
P.J. O’Rourke wrote an insightful book on the Baby Boom generation, and he divides it into four classes, from freshman to seniors. The older Boomers, like the ones in the “Big Chill” were the social revolutionaries of the Sixties. The youngest ones (like me, born in 1963), weren’t revolutionaries but were living in the new freedom opened up by the older Boomers. We “freshman Boomers” have a lot in common with Gen X but aren’t quite Gen X.
The difference – and this is one of O’Rourke’s great insights – is that what defines the Boomer Generation is that “we got away with it.” And I got away with it. I was sneaking into bars on my older brother’s non-picture driver’s license when I was 16. My high school had “free periods” for juniors and seniors instead of study halls, where you could do whatever you wanted, including leaving campus. My senior year I had free period-lunch-free period and I’d go to the mall and play video games (Missile Command!) for a couple of hours.
But my year was literally the last year for this. They ended the free periods after my senior year, and when I turned 19 New York State raised the drinking age to 19, and when I turned 21, they raised it to 21. That, for me, is the dividing line between Boomers and Gen-X. If you couldn’t get away with it anymore, you are in Gen-X.
This is one of those not-great movies that captures the spirit of a certain cultural moment. And James Spader by himself makes the movie worth watching.
Well, you could, but the I.D. was a little harder to come by, and the stakes were probably a little higher. We just had to be creative, and Ferris Beuler provided some inspiration.
Dee Snider?
Paul Stanley?
Jim Gillette?
Nikki Sixx?
could we do worse or better: discuss.
Red Dawn
The boomers were going to fail us and throw it all away. They have managed to do so.
Blame it on me. See if I care.
@randywebster You haven’t seen a movie post 1975 so quit commenting here! lol
Yea, St Elmo was the most promoted movie of the year… MTV really pumped up the soundtrack.
Weirdly looking at the box office of 1985, St Elmo didnt even come close to cracking the top 10 movies…
Back to the future, Rambo 2, Rocky 4, (Big year for Stallone, having 2 movies in the top 10 box office)
Looking back at it… 1985 was a really strong year for movies.
I don’t know movies well enough to participate in this conversation, but I have a definite opinion about what makes a Boomer. If you don’t remember when Kennedy was shot, you can’t be a Boomer. End of discussion.
I think music better defines generations than movies. Movies are occasions (until recently, anyhow) music is the everyday soundtrack of your life.
The biggest single year of the baby boom was 1960. Schools were reconfigured in my time to allow for my class. You’re excising the roar of the boom.
I was in 7th grade science class. Fifth period, I think. Mr. King was my teacher.
Or is this a case of “I didn’t say it was your fault; I said I was going to blame you.”