My look at nostalgia-themed movies continues! This time around, Amanda joins me to sit down and talk about a formative movie for the two of us: Dazed and Confused, the 1993 Richard Linklater film that takes place during one night in 1976. We look at the movie, its soundtrack, and the book published alongside it as well as share our memories about watching it many times.
“We had no timeouts. It was a belt and you better not cry for long.”
“Most of us drank or smoked by the time we were 14.”
“There were no safe spaces. There were no trigger warnings.”
“We were the latch key generation.”
I’ve been seeing a lot of this on TikTok over the past couple of years regarding Generation X, especially when it comes to pushing back against the current generations of twentysomethings and teenagers. With all of us being middle-aged, it seems like thumping our chests about our childhoods as a response to getting dragged (or Gen Z TikTokers wondering why we aren’t getting dragged) is a favorite sport. And why not? It shows our inherent strength and our ability to be resilient as well as get things done, especially when nobody is looking. And for a generation who spent its formative years either being ignored or dismissed as “slackers”, it’s as good a response as any to our parents and their generation, who decided that we were a vast disappointment and our younger Millennial siblings were worth more attention.
An image from Reality Bites. I chose this because it is literally the image that accompanies the “Generation X” entry on Encyclopedia Britannica Online.
There is something that really bugs me about this, though. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have as much of a hardscrabble, feral, latch-key kid life as some of my friends and peers, but Gen Xers posting videos where they say these things makes them sound like the Baby Boomers we have all grown to loathe. Isn’t “We were feral” just a different version of telling the kids that you walked uphill both ways through a foot of snow in order to get to school? I could have sworn that at some point, we told ourselves we weren’t got to pull that sort of toxic shit when we got to be our parents’ age. But here I am, seeing it on TikTok, in memes, and in copy/pasted Facebook ramblings from former classmates. Why are these people acting like they survived The Great Depression when they were simply a bunch of middle-class suburban white kids who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s?
Well, to answer this question, I’m going to break down what I quoted at the top of this post, starting with …
“We were the fuck around and find out generation.”
This is one I actually like, although credit where credit is due, we weren’t the original “fuck around and find out” generation. Our Greatest Generation grandparents, after all, fought a war against Fascism; equally important to our society were their older siblings, the Silent Generation. That generation–which actually makes up a good portion of the older set of Generation X’s parents–started or led the Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1950s and 1960s. We learned from their example that risks were worth taking. Now, some of our risks were mundane shit like flying over concrete on a skateboard without wearing a helmet or any other protection, but many other risks we took were significant. My peers and the older members of my generation have been vocal for environmentalism, LGBTQIA+ rights, and a number of liberal and progressive causes and reforms since we came of age during and at the end of the Reagan era. We’re not without our problems, of course, but being shoved aside by Boomers who sold out and were fucking around without a care of what would happen to future generations led to us calling upon other past examples and taking a stand,. We are passing that on to our Generation Z children.
But then there’s …
“We were the latch key generation.”
“We raised ourselves.”
“We were the last generation of feral children.”
Did we forget that “latch key kids” was literally a “concern topic” for talk shows like Donahue back in the 1980s? Now, I didn’t “raise myself” and in fact could have done with more independence because I have a major permission complex, but these statements aren’t always the flexes people think they are. The lack of parental supervision for many of us contributed to our resourcefulness as a generation, but forced maturity was not entirely beneficial. Some of my friends in junior high and high school spent a lot of time “raising” their younger siblings and keeping their households running smoothly. In most cases, that was out of economic necessity and I can’t faulty their parents for working as hard as they did to keep everyone’s head above water, but let’s recognize that this made childhood tougher and shorter. I wonder if some of my friends wish they had some of that time back or if they have even fully processed it as they raise their own kids. Which brings me to …
“We had no time outs. It was the belt and you better not cry for long.”
In defense of the TikTokers, a number of videos acknowledged how fucked up this was. In one video, a woman addressed how a lot of us have never fully come to terms with this because we suppressed our feelings and solved it by “moving on”. This led to us having pretty dark views on the world as well as very dark senses of humor (which I think is a slightly positive side effect). But I’ve also seen this expressed a number of times on social media as a point of pride and each time I see it that way, I’m puzzled because in my view, it’s not. My generation was one of the last where spanking and other forms of physical punishment were considered acceptable. I’m not saying that Millennial and Gen Z-ers didn’t get hit, but during my formative years there was a massive debate over spanking that led to it falling out of favor and largely out of practice.
As it should have. Hitting your kids is horrible and I’m not going to debate it. I have memories of getting yelled at and smacked with a wooden spoon as a kid. The hitting stopped early on, but getting yelled stuck around for a while. I don’t think I have fully processed all of it and I can’t tell you if I am ready to do a deep dive into it with my therapist either. I don’t classify is as abuse even though it was traumatic, because some people I grew up with were actually abused by their parents in an “I’ve seen this on an After-School Special” sort of way. These are the types of things that leave scars that never fully heal because when it came to our mental health as a generation, nothing ever got addressed. We were taught “not to talk about these things.” And therapy? Well, that might reflect poorly on our parents, so it never entered the conversation. Even if we wanted to get help, we didn’t know how. This led to …
“Many of us drank or smoked by the time we were 14.”
I will come out and say that this was never me. I didn’t have my first beer until I was 17 and aside from a couple of cigars in college, never smoked anything. Okay, I tried pot once and didn’t like it, but my dad did me a solid by quitting smoking back in 1987. However, my teetotaling as a teenager was because of a combination of not being popular enough to drink and being deathly afraid of the consequences of getting caught drinking. There’s more to that sentence that I’m not going to get into; instead, I’m going to address the statement above because while it is a bit of a brag, it has a very sharp other edge.
Drinking has been hugely glorified in television and movies for decades, with the party scene being a teen movie staple. With this glorification came a lot of destructive behavior and the amplification of toxic masculinity and rape culture, especially in the Eighties. As the Eighties became the Nineties, we learned more about rape and more women began to speak up about their experiences, but my generation still has a horrible track record when it comes to sexual violence. In fact, the current generation of youth appears to be learning from our mistakes; there’s certainly work to be done, but what I see on a regular basis has me optimistic.
But if we weren’t chasing the Platonic ideal of Animal House’s toga party, many in my generation were drinking and smoking by the time they were 14 because they were self-medicating. Like I said, nobody landed in therapy, and when they did it was for substance abuse because they had turned to alcohol and drugs to cope with their mental health issues. Some of my classmates went through rehab before they graduated, some eventually got help as adults, others wound up dying way too young, and a number of them continue to struggle. While I am sure the majority of my peers have a healthy relationship with alcohol, bragging about getting drunk at 14 simplifies this to the point where it ignores the very serious issues. But I think that for some of these TikTokers, it’s kind of the point because of one more line I want to discuss …
“There were no safe spaces. There were no trigger warnings.”
Now I know why my Spidey Sense tingled when watching these videos. I’m not sure what the political leanings are of every TikToker I watched, so I can’t lump them all under one umbrella …
… BUT …
… complaining about trigger warnings and safe spaces has become a favorite pastime of right-wing trolls for the better part of a decade. The image they like to conjure up is a kaleidoscope-haired, multi-pierced, multi-gendered, pride-flag-bedecked student at Berkeley or Oberlin frothing at the mouth about a professor assigning a short story where the main character gets a hangnail without warning them about said hangnail because reading about the hangnail made them curl up in the fetal position as they flashed back to the time they got a hangnail in the third grade.
I’m kidding.
Sort of.
Right-wingers are fucking insane when it comes perpetuating fallacies about the fragility of young people who refuse to go along with their ideals, and a number of these Fox News-viewing, QAnon-following choads are Gen Xers. This should surprise absolutely nobody; despite MTV’s efforts in the early 1990s to frame Generation X as largely liberal, we’re not a monolith because no generation is. But I can still be disappointed by the number of people my age or slightly older who agree with Tucker Carlson or Alex jones and were led that way by social media algorithms. I’m not being ridiculous; it’s not hard to go down the rabbit hole that begins with “Kids these days …” and ends with a membership in a Moms for Liberty Facebook group.
To quote one of our generation’s heroes: It’s a trap.
I mean, all of it really is. Generational discord is a construct that exists for media hits. I have fond memories of the decades in which I grew up and I love reveling in nostalgia for the simplicity of my childhood, especially on the days where the problems of the world are overwhelming. We should all be able to do that. But as a generation, it’s our duty to avoid the trap it presents. We’ve done a good job at starting to break cycles of toxic behavior and culture; let’s be the generation to break the cycle of losing perspective in favor of mythology and ego.
Talk Hard! Steal the air! In 1990, the cult film Pump Up the Volume was released and it proved to be a formative movie experience for many teenagers of the time. So, 31 years after it came out, I sat down with Michael Bailey to take apart the film and see if Hard Harry’s words of rebellion still hold up.
Thirty years ago, Douglas Coupland published Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, a novel that would name the generation that came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s. It told of disaffected, misanthropic, self-absorbed twentysomethings who didn’t seem to care about anything that was going on in the world. But was that really the case?
In this episode, I take a look at Coupland’s novel as well as Richard Linklater’s film Slacker; plus, I examine articles and books that attempted to define and explain Generation X and make some attempt to come to a conclusion about this group of people who are now middle aged.
1994: The Most Important Year of the Nineties continues with one of the most Nineties of Nineties movies, Reality Bites. I take a look at the Winona Ryder/Ben Stiller/Ethan Hawke classic and also talk about its place in popular culture as well as talk about why it failed at the box office as did so many other attempts ot market to “Generation X.”
This post, actually my first column from my high school newspaper in the fall of 1994, is my seventeen-year-old self trying to make sense of my generation, especially after I watched Reality Bites on video.
In this post, I take a look at Reality Bites nearly two decades later and discover how much I identify with Ben Stiller’s character, Michael Grates, the yuppie In Your Face TV executive who competes with Troy Dyer’s (Ethan Hawke) for Lelaina’s (Winona Ryder) affection.
This time around in the podcast I take a look at the 1992 Cameron Crowe-directed film Singles, a romantic comedy whose soundtrack became one of the definitive albums from the 1990s. Starring Campbell Scott, Kyra Sedgwick, Bridget Fonda, and Matt Dillon and set in 1991 Seattle, Singles follows several characters in their twenties as they go through the complexities of trying to date and find love.
But of course, many people remember it for its music: Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Smashing Pumpkins, and other bands important to the era make appearances on the soundtrack and even in the film, which is a great snapshot of a particular moment in our cultural history.
I spend the episode discussing the movie as well as my opinion of it and then spend a little bit of time on the soundtrack as well as a bit on its lasting legacy.
About a week or two ago, I came across a few articles filled with emotional hand-wringing on the part of the generation often referred to as Millenials. I read about how there is a generational conflict between this younger generation, which seems to be dismayed that the world doesn’t think they are entitled to anything; and older generations, who wish these kids would get over themselves. It’s accompanied by talk about the uphill battle this generation faces as it enters a very touchy employment situation–the job market, after all, is terrible–and will have an enormous amount of student loan debt. There is also the sentiment of “You created this mess and we inherited it.”
I found myself thinking about how Millennials need to get over themselves and how they’re all entitled brats, but then I couldn’t help but be reminded of two decades ago when Generation X seemed to be facing the same problems. I am sure that your average Millennial will tell me otherwise, but it seems that there is something universal here: the up-and-coming generation takes crap from the older generation. And I also couldn’t help but watch Reality Bites, the 1994 Winona Ryder-Ethan Hawke film that attempted to capture the struggle that particular group of twentysomethings was going through at the time. Watching it again–and I watch it every once in a while–I knew that I would have a slightly different perspective and perhaps even view at least one of the characters a different way. Not surprisingly, the character I seemed to sympathize with more than I did when I first saw the movie as a teenager was Michael Grates. (more…)
Before I get to the meat of this, I should provide some preamble. The post that will go up later in the week is titled “Being Michael Grates,” wherein I take a look at Ben Stiller’s character from Reality Bites from the perspective of someone who is in his mid-thirties and see, much like Mr. Vernon in The Breakfast Club and Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything … how much that perspective has changed. As I was writing that piece, I thought of a piece I wrote in my high school newspaper where I referenced the movie in some screed about then-current stereotypes about teenagers and twenty-somethings of the day, who were labeled collectively as “Generation X” (taken from the Douglas Coupland novel of the same name). I thought of quoting an excerpt from it in the post and then I decided, why don’t I just reprint it?
So, this is from the November 1994 (Volume 4, Issue 1) issue of Voices Inside, the then-student newspaper for Sayville High School. I was seventeen years old, and it was the first in a regular “column” I had (read: gave to myself since I was made editor-in-chief) called “@#$&!”, which is an early precursor to this blog. Perhaps one day I’ll write about that and “From the Nosebleeds,” the column I had in college. But until then, enjoy this and come back later in the week for another all-new post as well as next week’s episode of the podcast, which also touches on Reality Bites. Until then, here is the original column in its entirety (with a few punctuation errors fixed). (more…)
Pop Culture Affidavit 