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.