"oh god i'm ashamed that the movie my generation has to offer is Ten things i hate about you and harold and Kumar.......go to white castle....please tell me there is something a bit more noble and consequential. I was 11 in the mid 90's so i don't think that constitutes me as a gen Xer but it was by far my most favorite time period everything seemed alot more critical and dramatic...i don't think Donnie Darko is a movie that sums up a generation...i think to qualify its gotta kinda lack the wierd theories that Donnie Darko has and kind of just stick with a social theme...The 80's had things like The breakfast club, pretty in pink, St. Elmo's fire, the 90's had Reality Bites, Clerks, Kids, Empire records, and hell i'll even say Clueless. They were all kind of slices of the trivial things that were going on during the 90's. It sucks being 21 and the only movies we have going for us are Harold and Kumar and Mean girls....But i would say Garden State is a strong one, other than that...i'd have to go digging my brain for some movies."
Yeah, but dude, half those movie you reference sucked and didn't represent anything remotely realistic at all. Those that did represented only a small segment of the population, typically upper-middle class kids, which, by the way is essentially where I'd place Garden State. (The funny thing is that I'm not so fond of Garden State, but I really enjoy Harold & Kumar, despite the fact that I find both pretty accurate - Harold & Kumar is pretty much my year at NYU, while Garden State represents my peers at Skidmore pretty well. Of course, the kids at Skidmore annoy the hell out of me.) The only 80s one you mentioned that remotely had a social theme going for it was Breakfast Club, but as much as I like that film, it all ends up a little too easy in a lot of ways. Heathers, Repo Man, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Class of 1984 to me had the most to say about youth and society in the 80s, but I think in some cases it wasn't anything anybody wanted to hear (and for Class of 1984, it was more premonitory than anything). Fast Times is an interesting case, because it's mainly on the level, but it forces a few of its events to prove its point (unplanned pregnancy, anyone?); luckily its characters are given enough chance to breathe.
The 90s movies you mentioned are interesting to me in a different way, because I tend to think of the 90s as a transitional period in America between two major, major events, the end of the Cold War and 9/11. To quote the Adolescents, I always imagine the generation that came of age in the 90s as "kids of the black hole," because there's just not much there that seems relevant or vital. It shows in a lot of art - many of the films you cited are, as you said, "slices of the trivial things that were going on in the 90s." Most of what I find the best art explores more extentialist questions, which I think shows a lot in the second wave of emotive hardcore during the mid-90s (Texas is the Reason, Sunny Day Real Estate, etc.) as well as the grunge stuff. A great deal of indie rock in the age shows a dependence on irony, too, as if they had rejected existentialism as pointless. Perhaps they just hadn't felt the urgency of the grunge and emo bands of the time toward finding something meaningful, even without the fear of world destruction imposed on you. It's interesting that a lot of the 80s post-punk and alt-rock that inspired grunge bands broke up in the early 90s too; perhaps without the tension of the Cold War there was just nothing more to say. I think Fight Club represents this period best; take Durden's quote "God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy *beep* we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
Donnie Darko, I think, at least gets the outsider view of adolescence right, and I also think it's a reaction to a lot of 80s teen movies anyway, just through a more personal, rather than social perspective. And truth be told, weird ideas and concepts are a huge part of the mindset of teen outsiders. How do you think the movie got so popular in the first place? Hell, I was checking out books on time travel myself a few years before Darko came out, and we're talking around 9th grade here. In that respect, I once read a compelling essay suggesting that the film is just an adolescent martyrdom fantasy on the part of Donnie, and honestly, that's a really great interpretation of it. Not that I think it's the truth Richard Kelly had in mind, but it's a definite possibility.
And show some faith in Harold & Kumar - stoner humor it may be, but it creates a social thesis by not attempting to create one. It shows things like they are, rather than making its racial content the focus of the movie like class/clique politics were the focus of the Breakfast Club. Breakfast I'll give a pass because it did something interesting in starting out with stereotypes and filling in the blanks to turn them into real people, so when the characters find their expectations of each other wrong, the audience reacts along with it. However, Hugues's own preconceptions sometimes get the better of him in his own films, particularly Pretty in Pink, which is incredibly binary in terms of class distinction. The whole movie is a haves/have nots division.
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OsterBrandBlenders
19 years ago
i agree with alot of the points you bring up...especially the whole donnie darko thing, i had to write a paper on it for my highschool film class and the whole martyr thing was what i touched on. But i think in terms of defining a generating i would say movies that you can gather what the times were like at face value, without having to read between all the lines...for example your spiderman suggestion...if i wanted to see what life was like in the early 2000's i wouldn't suggest spiderman because at face value its a comic movie, sure there may be a more important message that can be unearthed but for a majority of people its just a comic book on a silver screen. Alot of people disagree with Reality bites, but i think it does an excellent job. Sure it may not touch on important issues but like you said, 90's was a blackhole, nothing of importance was really going on, its not like the 60's were teens and people in their twenties were rising up against the war. Young People in the 90's seem very self involved only. But if you look at all the things the movie does it sums things up pretty well...I mean the whole gang of characters are all slackers, they have that sarcastic sinister sense of humor which in a time of grunge is pretty typical, they were slackers, whose lives always seemed to be in such great turmoil when really nothing all that unusual was going on. And then it picked up on all the little details of pop culture that were in there...The Gap, coffee shops and grunge bands, Mtv. to be honest the whole movie was like an extended episode of My-so-Called-Life only about people in their 20's and not highschool. I mean look at the last scene of the movie when they show Ben stillers version of REALITY BITES "im a person who is deep, and feels, and feels deeply...oh god don't let him get drunk and drive.." i thought that was so clever how they have this whole movie thats all emotional and dramatic and then they poke fun at it and go...this what were like". The reason i say movies like Kids or Clueless is because you can't just clump up every type of person into one mold and say EVERYONE in the 90's was about dock martins, joey lawerence pants, and nirvana. I also think the whole Generation thing gets completely mashed up because age distinction between people is spread out so is class. If i were living in 2050 and i wanted to see how people dressed, what thier pop culture was like, what music they listened to, how they talked, thier humor, thier trends etc. etc. I would have to say that Reality Bites, clueless, empire records and kids could sum that up...however inaccurate or accurate they may be.
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