I had no context to recognize this at the time, but I came of age in a golden era of fantasy cinema. Some of my earliest theatrical experiences included Superman II (1981), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), Ghostbusters (1984), and Back to the Future (1985). Movies like those were made, by and large, by a generation of filmmakers—notably but not exclusively Steven Spielberg and George Lucas—that had been raised on the sci-fi and fantasy offerings of 1950s B-movies and comics, and later became the first students to major in cinema studies and filmmaking; when that formal training was fused with their pulp passions, the contemporary blockbuster was born: first with Jaws (1975), then Star Wars (1977), and then Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Superman: The Movie (1978) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and The Goonies (1985). That cornucopia of imaginative fantasy—hardly an all-encompassing list, by the way—was my first exposure to the movies. Is it any wonder I was hooked for life?
A LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY…
The heyday of Lucas and Spielberg coincided with the advent of home video, which made those filmic wonders, like only comic books had been up till that point, available to relive on demand. We watched them with our friends, over and over again, and thrilled to the exploits of Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, Marty McFly. Then we’d head out into the street and pretend to be Ghostbusters or Jedi or time travelers until the sunlight dimmed, at which point we did the only thing we had the gas left to do: return home and load the VCR once again. We grew up with those characters; we learned our values from them: Luke Skywalker taught us idealism; Indiana Jones, determination; Axel Foley, self-confidence; the Ghostbusters gave us a model for teamwork. Their musical cues, often courtesy the great John Williams, became our musical cues—the “soundtrack of our youth,” to borrow a clichéd and sentimental turn of phrase. They are the cinematic heroes of my generation.
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas indulge their inner eight-year-olds on location for “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”
It should be noted that, with the exceptions of Jaws (which began as Peter Benchley’s bestselling novel, though Universal acquired the film rights before the manuscript was published) and Richard Donner’s Superman (which was groundbreaking in its own right in that it was the first big-budget comic-book adaptation, and it treated its subject matter like a myth, not a goof), all of those movies were based on original screenplays. Sure, Lucas was famously inspired by the old Saturday-matinée serials, and Spielberg the Amazing Stories magazines of his youth, but that’s where the creative debt ended and new, previously “undiscovered” fictional worlds were conceived.
RETURN OF THE JEDI (AMONG OTHERS)
My generation, it turns out, doesn’t know from inspiration. We’re the ones more or less running Hollywood now, and all we’ve done so far is recycle. (Well, “all” might be overstating it a bit, but we definitely haven’t ushered a silver age of original fantasy.) News broke last week that Melissa McCarthy has been cast in the Ghostbusters reboot, and Chris Pratt, with his apt scruffy charm, is under consideration to assume the role of Indiana Jones. And chew over this sampling of titles either on their way to theaters or in active development: Jurassic World; Mad Max: Fury Road; Terminator Genisys; Jem and the Holograms; Escape from New York; Masters of the Universe; a belated Blade Runner follow-up; a third Tron; a fifth Transformers; yet another iteration of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; one more excellent adventure for Bill & Ted; a Rocky spin-off; Rambo: Last Blood; Top Gun 2; Beverly Hills Cop IV…
“There’s something very familiar about all this…”—Old Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) struggles to put his finger on why Marty McFly’s (Michael J. Fox) hoverboard escape evokes youthful memories in Back to the Future, Part II (1989)
Now, some of those are remakes and others direct sequels; some are pure fantasy while others, like Rocky and Jem, are more of the “wish-fulfillment” variety. But, they all have origins in the same era. And it makes me wonder: Why are we selling today’s kids yesterday’s dreams?
I’m not naïve, mind you—I fully understand the corporate impetus to do so. And this isn’t a proprietary thing: I love sharing the fictional heroes of my upbringing with my nieces and nephews. But, what kind of cultural contributions are we making when all we can seem to do is trade in the very fantasies that were given to us?
Take J.J. Abrams. Supremely talented filmmaker. Considers Spielberg a personal hero. I get that—so do I. Now consider Abrams’ directorial résumé: Mission: Impossible III. Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness. Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens. Those aren’t his visions; they’re Bruce Geller’s, Gene Roddenberry’s, and George Lucas’, respectively. I thought Spielberg was Abrams’ role model? Because it seems to me that Spielberg went out and forged new cinematic territory: He gave us these incredible cultural treasures we all share, like Jaws and Indy and E.T. What are we giving the next generation, exactly, except warmed-over second helpings?
Full disclosure: I will be first in line for The Force Awakens this December, so I acknowledge that studios and filmmakers are very much meeting a public demand for “more of the same.” Hell, I’m looking forward to a number of the aforementioned offerings—Mad Max and Terminator and Creed among them—but that is exactly my point: The forthcoming Star Wars, with its eagerly anticipated Hamill-Ford-Fisher reunion, is a love letter both made by and for fans of my age, and not an all-new creative enterprise designed to inspire the receptive imaginations of a new generation—to gift them, as we were gifted, with their own playgrounds to nurture their own dreams.
True, we’ve given them Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, which are arguably as “big” as the ‘70s and ‘80s blockbusters, but don’t pat yourself on the back just yet, Hollywood: Those are literary adaptations, not pure cinematic creations; they were proven entities in one medium with a preexisting fan base at the time they were commissioned as big-budget films, whereas movies like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark and Back to the Future were, hard as it may be to believe now, risky undertakings, both creatively and financially. It took vision to produce those projects, whereas any half-assed executive could’ve seen the enormous earning potential in movies based on sure-thing literary properties like Harry Potter and Hunger Games. See, that was part of the pleasure of Star Wars and Raiders and Back to the Future: We couldn’t have anticipated what we never saw coming; we discovered those films together.
A NEW HOPE
The custodians of pop culture have a responsibility to do better—to dream bigger. To facilitate the evolution of our collective cultural fantasies to their next innovative permutation (which does not include so-called “reboots” of aging intellectual properties, a term I can only imagine was adopted to allay the artistic affront implied by “remake”?). That’s not to say that inspired new interpretations aren’t possible in the right creative hands—I’ve written at length about characters that have managed to transcend their fictive origins to achieve immortality in the form of perennial folkloric reinterpretation—but, really, content creators ought to spend more time creating content, not recycling it.
That’s not going to be so easily done in corporate Hollywood, I realize, but there are emerging technologies—self-distribution platforms like CreateSpace—that offer opportunities for forward-thinking filmmakers to utilize them responsibly (meaning, you’ve got to know your craft). It won’t be easy—the act of creation never is, and doing so in the shadow of corporately funded mega-franchises is daunting—but it is worth trying. Every generation deserves its own particular set of fantastical heroes to inspire its imagination; mine was blessed with an embarrassment of riches, but the best we’ve managed to do thus far is reinvest the wealth rather than create new product. Sound familiar? So should this: Our children deserve better.
Though this article from The Guardian was published over a year before my “Attack of the Clones” post, I only just recently discovered it, and thought it worth sharing here. In it, Alan Moore, the mad-genius comic-book writer of Watchmen, Batman: The Killing Joke, and V for Vendetta (among many others) distills the issues I attempted to address above with a poetic eloquence and philosophical heft to which I can only hope to aspire: “It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite ‘universes’ presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.”
Amen to that, sir.
No, thank you. Abrams is anything but talented except for one thing: being able to con people into thinking he’s any good at storytelling. But his movie record shows uninspired, unimagintive movie-making that far more often than not displays utter contempt for the source material he’s adapting. Look at the poor treatment he gave both Star Trek and Star Wars, for example. Can it honestly be said that he has any respect or admiration for the works of Roddenberry or Lucas? No. He only dumbed them down for audiences whose intelligence he doesn’t even believe exists, or is too low to care.
Hey, Michael! Boy, I haven’t looked at this post in a while!
When I first wrote this particular essay four years ago, I was a recently “retired” (read: blackballed) screenwriter still very much working through a process of trying to intellectually understand how Hollywood had become so IP-dependent, so averse to new ideas and materials, a phenomenon I viewed at the time as merely an industry problem. In the intervening years, though, I came to see it instead as something much more insidious: a cultural pathology — a symptom of a generation that copes with its Digital Age trauma through analog-age nostalgia. This remains a strongly felt (if admittedly controversial) belief of mine.
The ideas initially explored in “Attack of the Clones” were later revisited and refined in essays such as “The Great Escape,” “Collapse of the Tentpole,” “This Counts, That Does Not,” “Counter Culture,” and “Maybe It’s Time”, to name a few offhand; “Attack of the Clones” can now be considered a “first draft” of those later pieces. As such — and given that this was written and posted nearly a year before the release of The Force Awakens — I was politely (if undeservedly) giving J. J. Abrams the benefit of the doubt.
I have since gone on record in subsequent posts, however, as stating that I contemptuously regard Abrams as the poster boy for a generation of talent-deprived, creatively bankrupt filmmakers who’ve chosen imitation over inspiration as their governing artistic philosophy, and who have, consequently, 1) retarded the culture by trapping us in a 1980s time warp, and 2) diminished the very discipline of storytelling itself by producing self-perpetuating, “empty-promise” narratives with no prescriptive agenda, no point.
To that claim, consider Abrams’ current batch of projects: From the delphic puzzling of Westworld, to the literary Easter-egg hunt of Castle Rock, to the expansive franchising of Star Wars, none of them aspire to say anything meaningful about the human condition, merely to challenge the viewer to catch all their too-clever internal cross-references. It’s all a big fat exercise in fan service masquerading as deep storytelling. As you and I discussed on the Star Trek post (exactly a year ago, in fact), Shatner’s The Final Frontier may not have been an entirely creatively successful enterprise (pardon the pun), but at least it tried to be about something, which is way more than can be said for the recent Abrams trilogy, which was nothing more than big-budget cosplay, and terribly written and acted, at that.
For me, it comes down to accepting two truths: Abrams is both a lousy filmmaker and a Hollywood golden boy — they’re going to continue to court him to recycle stale franchises because he’s been very successful at it (financially speaking). This is the business model Hollywood has gone all-in on, and Abrams is the go-to technician who can reliably deliver on it — it’s a match made in heaven, in that sense. I don’t particularly like any of it, but I take comfort in knowing that even though Abrams’ career will (continue to) be lucrative, his legacy will be nugatory: Successive generations of artists won’t revere him the way we do Lucas, Spielberg, Carpenter, Coppola, and Scorsese. It’s the same way no one venerates any of the people who directed The Brady Bunch or The Dukes of Hazzard; Abrams is just a glorified hack-TV director, except the “episodes” he helms just happen to be major blockbuster movies. Rather than an artist who contributed to the culture, à la Lucas and Spielberg, he’ll be remembered as a filmmaker who attenuated it.
So for someone who never gives a moment’s consideration to the outcome of the narratives he conceives, maybe Abrams would be wise to give some thought to the conclusion of his own story, because something tells me he won’t find it in any way satisfying.
It seems to me that the seemingly endless glut of reboots has more to do with cynical marketing ploys than with revisiting any nostalgia. Hollywood execs are unwilling to take risks on new or independent projects (certainly none that might make the audiences for whom they’re made actually *GASP* think for themselves), so they drag out stuff from the pasts that was popular and hand them off to hack writers and directors who have little or no regard for the material they’re adapting, to be churned out through the corporate factory.
(Sadly, I have to include Tim Burton for making Planet of the Apes and Dark Shadows reboots that were far less than their original versions in both nature and stature. He sold out a long time ago, and it’s quite sad because unlike most of the hacks presently out there, he had actual talent. His interpretation of the Batman mythos made some real innovations that, for better or worse, are still with us today.)
Now, this is not to say that the glut of reboots and re-imaginings is anything new. How many versions were made of The Maltese Falcon before John Huston cast Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lore, and Sydney Greenstreet in his seminal adaptation? At least two of which I’m aware, one of which was a slapstick comedy. But today’s reboots are far more corporatized, sanitized, and uninspired than in earlier decades.
Still, there is some hope for optimism, however tenuous. Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, for all its flaws, nevertheless had some real meat to the story and how it pits Western pseudo-liberalism and civilization against its victims, and forces the system to reevaluate itself (at least on the screen, if not in reality—you can read my review of it on my Wilk Report blog). Granted, this may be the exception rather than the rule, but that it was allowed to hit the big screen at all gives one hope however small.
Thanks, as always, Michael, for such an engaged, thoughtful comment. Let me see if I can’t respond to as much of it as comprehensively as possible!
Devil’s advocate: From Hollywood’s perspective — and I say this as a former screenwriter who worked closely for years with managers, agents, producers, and development execs — film franchising simply makes good business sense. IPs have built-in audiences. Producing one also means not having to start from scratch from a conceptual or marketing standpoint; everyone — the studio, the talent, the PR department, the audience — more or less knows what they’re getting from a new Star Wars or Star Trek or Transformers or Terminator movie. There’s a reason, after all, they call it franchising: When you go to McDonald’s, you know you’ll have a limited number of options to choose from, the meal will be unspectacular and dubiously nutritious but at least predictable, and the experience is repeatable — identical, even — for everyone, at every McDonald’s everywhere, each and every time. That’s what the box office has become, too; Hollywood has simply adopted a reliable corporate model. Is that cynicism… or just good business? I don’t know — that’s a debate for another day!
But regardless of whether one views it as sensible or cynical, Hollywood can’t/won’t sell what an audience isn’t buying. And that’s where we come in. Because we are hoovering up old franchises at the box office regardless of whether or not we enjoy them (sometimes it even seems like we simply enjoy hating them), and we’re opining about them endlessly on social media and blogs and podcasts. (Everyone who hated Force Awakens still went to see The Last Jedi, and everyone who hated that will nonetheless line up for Episode IX, so can you blame Hollywood for cashing in on a sure thing?) Whether The Last Jedi is a disgraceful piece of storytelling or a subversive masterpiece (and you already know I’m in the camp that thinks the former), the more salient question is this: Why do we even give a shit? Why are we still so invested in Star Wars? We don’t still follow what’s happening on Sesame Street — nor should we — so why haven’t we let go of the other pieces of entertainment that were unambiguously meant to cater to our eight-year-old imaginations?
Because, I have come to believe, we’re addicts, and our drug of choice is 1980s nostalgia. For our generation, the ’80s represent the swan song of an analog world we long for desperately, so we have fetishized and preserved the era by way of a pop-cultural time warp, no different than the OASIS in Ready Player One. As much as I hate that novel for its utter moral bankruptcy (you can read my review of it here), it should be required reading, because it is the epic poem of a generation performing autoerotic asphyxiation through nostalgic intemperance — legions of middle-aged men (mostly men) who’ve withdrawn from the infinite complexities of twenty-first-century reality in favor of the finite simplicities of 1980s sentimentality. And it’s gotten completely out of control.
Case in point: The Masters of the Universe “Classics” toy line just announced the impending release of a series of action figures based on the 1987 Dolph Lundgren He-Man movie, with a price tag of $199, at that. Now, disregarding for a moment the fact that toys are now produced exclusively for grown adults (I guess we call them “collectables”), I was an eleven-year-old boy (and He-Man fanatic) when the Masters of the Universe live-action movie came out, and I can testify that it was universally hated by even the most indiscriminate kid-fans for its wild departures from the source material. In short: We didn’t like the damn movie! No one did! And yet thirty years later, fevered with nostalgic yearning for that bygone era, we’ve produced little totemic effigies to it! That, to my mind, is indicative of an insatiable and pathological fixation with an era that’s been over-fetishized and over-mythologized.
So, it isn’t just Hollywood execs that aren’t willing to take risks on new ideas, it’s us. Hollywood has simply identified our addiction and supplied a steady stream of the narcotic we crave. And Gen X filmmakers like J. J. Abrams, Rian Johnson, and Colin Trevorrow (among others) share our lack of imagination — they are part of the same backward-gazing generation, after all, that dreams not of a better future, but a better past — so it’s no wonder all they’re serving up are stale retreads of old franchises that are creatively depleted and irrelevant to their times. Hollywood isn’t the problem (and keep in mind I say that as someone who hates Hollywood); we are. Until we decide we’re no longer going to support old franchises, Hollywood is going to stay all-in on producing them. We need to agree, as a generation, that we’re simply not going to go see anymore Star Wars or Star Trek movies, we’re not going to blog or podcast about them, and we’re not going to buy throwback
toyscollectables in a desperate big to feel eight years old again.As the custodians of pop culture — because Gen X runs the show right now — what we need to start doing, and what the essay above argues in favor of, is giving the kids of 2019 their own stories, their own heroes, their own dreams, as we were given by those that preceded us: Lucas, Spielberg, Aykroyd, Carpenter, etc. That isn’t something that’s going to happen if we keep producing/consuming Star Wars and Ghostbusters and Halloween “legacy sequels”; it’s time to let those aging franchises go, and dream some new dreams.
Black Panther in many respects represents a step in the right direction. Even though it’s based on a character Stan Lee created in the sixties, it’s an obscure-enough superhero that few outside the most devoted comic-book culture enthusiasts have ever heard of it, so it doesn’t provide a nostalgia fix the way cultural mainstays Batman or Superman might. Second, the character is really resonating with a generation of young children who are overwhelmingly responding to its positive portrayal of an ethnicity and culture too-seldom seen in superhero fiction. That’s what superheroes are meant to do: inspire the imagination of their nine- to thirteen-year-old audience. I have no problem at all with that; I’m only troubled when it becomes an exercise in demigod-worshipping for adults. In my view, Black Panther embodies at least an attempt to return superheroes to children — and to be relevant and sufficient to its times — in stark contrast with the adults-only affairs of Logan and Deadpool and the DCEU.
To switch gears to Tim Burton for a moment: His is one of the most frustrating oeuvres among contemporary blockbuster filmmakers, on account of its maddening inconsistency; for every Edward Scissorhands or Ed Wood, you get a Planet of the Apes or Alice in Wonderland. My assessment of Burton — and keep in mind that I’m a fan — is that he’s in the same league with Guillermo del Toro: He’s a remarkably gifted visualist without any real sense of how to tell a story. As such, he’s very screenplay-dependent: If he’s working off a strong script that’s in line with his fairy-tale aesthetic, you get Sleepy Hollow and Big Fish; but if the screenplay is inadequate, he himself doesn’t have the story sense to identify its narrative deficiencies. I don’t view him as a hack or sellout; rather, he’s trying — within the limitations of his own creative skillset — to make the best movies he can in a corporate filmmaking environment that’s become inhospitable to his style of idiosyncratic artistry.
Just like passing legislation in Washington is a process that’s designed to be difficult — nigh impossible — so too is making a (good) movie in Hollywood. You’ve got so many opinions in the mix, and so much money on the line, and a director doesn’t have carte blanche do just go off and do what he wants, so it’s not always his fault when the project falls short creatively. Nowadays, though, the nostalgic agenda has made Hollywood even more creatively inhospitable, more risk averse than ever. I certainly don’t applaud filmmakers like J. J. Abrams for enabling that — for making the kind of bland, predictable entertainment both movie studios and aging audiences want — but it’s also impossible to blame any one culprit: They make it; we buy it; repeat as necessary. If we the audience choke off the revenue stream, though, that could force a change. But we need to decide, once and for all, that we’re done with Star Wars and its 1980s ilk: Terminator, Ghostbusters, Halloween, Predator — all of it. Ball’s in our court.
Personally, I’m Gen Z, so my perspective is of the “youth of today”, and I think I can give an alternative answer to your question, but you may not like it. We’re happy to take the 20th century’s warmed over second helpings because we as a generation are humanity’s warmed over second helpings. We don’t want to be here. We don’t want to deal with this shit anymore and our generation’s first adults only began in 2014. Want to know what the dreams of a Gen Z person are? We dream of owning our own house and living a happy, quiet and comfortable life. That’s literally it. The more woke members can phrase it in a much darker but even more honest way: we dream of being able to live like you guys lived at our age and beyond. We don’t have grand aspirations, unless not dying of preventable disease or going bankrupt to do so and being able to both have enough money to survive and enough time to enjoy it is a grand aspiration. We see the writing on the wall that the Boomers put there and it says “this is the end”. Gen X saw it too back in the 90s, but when the voice of your generation blows his fucking brains out, well, that kinda says all that needs to be said about why Gen X chose to ignore it. The despair of seeing it was too much. We don’t even have the benefit of being allowed to ignore it. It’s too imminent, too soon, too fast and too unpreventable now. If somehow humanity survives the coming ecological collapse, it’ll be not only the most absurd luck since Indy’s fridge, but the most plausible method of humanity surviving is via cyberpunk dystopia where we all belong to our corporate overlords anyways. Gen Z gets the leftovers because we are the leftovers. When the Boomers and Gen X die, even the obliteration that comes with the “there is no afterlife” outcome is something preferable to the living hell we’ll be left with. There’s not really any demand for new dreams, because what’s to dream about? For you, the future was the undiscovered country. The possibilities were endless. Now the only possibility is the end.
Zoey,
Thanks so much for finding the blog and taking the time to share feedback; I’m grateful to have your voice in the mix.
You’ve posted a thorough and thought-provoking comment that deserves a commensurate reply. Fortunately, you’ve come to the right place! (I am not, as any post on this blog will stand as testimony, a man of few words.) Let me start, though, with this: Gen Z is no one’s warmed-over second helpings. On the contrary, you’re the generation — for reasons I wrote about here — that’s going to drag the rest of us (kicking and screaming if need be) into the twenty-first century, and catalyze the (imperative and overdue) transition to a fairer, more equitable, more sustainable world. You’re the generation that’s going to get us gun control… and universal health care… and a Green New Deal. That’s the unique challenge history has handed you, and I fully expect you will rise to the occasion.
Every generation — take my word for this, as someone probably twice your age — grapples with a set of sociocultural circumstances (and challenges) exclusive to its times, and that makes the members of that demographic feel as though no one who’s come before truly understands what they’re going through. Take Generation X, for example: X is the last generation in human history — pause a moment to really consider this — to retain memory of life in an analog world. We came of age in an era before telecommunications technologies created this always-on existence of constant updates — endless disruptive notifications that force us to react to every ping of our phones, and refuse to allow us to focus on one thing at a time. Your generation’s brain is wired for this type of nonlinear reality, but ours is not (read about my analog-age childhood here) — and it’s making us incrementally insane. Make no mistake: We are profoundly traumatized by the loss of the bygone analog world.
When I wrote this particular post five years ago, though, I hadn’t worked that out yet. I was still trying to crack the code — trying to understand why the only movies we were making were paeans to the fantasies of the 1980s. And that’s when I realized that the 1980s were the swan song of the analog age — the last moment in the historical continuum before everything went digital. Such is why Gen X has turned the culture into a museum exhibit of 1980s ephemera: We long for the linear, one-thing-at-a-time simplicity of that Internet-free decade. That we keep making Star Wars and Ghostbusters and Rambo movies is about us — about our need for comforting old bedtime stories in these unsettling newfangled times. It’s a completely selfish and puerile act that has nothing to do with Gen Z.
And to be certain, I’ve been extremely critical of my generation for that, but, as an Xer myself, I’m also provisionally empathetic. We never got — and never will get — our seat at the sociopolitical table. We were supposed to get our (brief) shot at “running the world,” same as every demographic before us, but, as you already know, the aging boomers refuse to go quietly into that good night, so where does that leave us? The forgotten generation. I’m 43 years old: I’ve never owned a home; I’ve lived in rental apartments my entire life, same as just about every Xer I know, all of whom are just trying to stay ahead of the wheel, one paycheck at a time, with no expectations of ever climbing out of that hole. Trust me when I tell you, Zoey, that none of us live a simple life in a home of our own; saddled with school debt and deprived of the opportunities for upward mobility our parents enjoyed, Xers have the same unrealized aspirations as Gen Z — and far less time to realize them. We’re all victims of an economic model — neoliberal disaster capitalism — that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts. This is by no means a generational issue, but rather a socioeconomic one.
And let me be clear: Kurt Cobain is in no way representative of the whole of Generation X. (Besides which, I don’t think his suicide was intended as a dramatic social statement; Cobain suffered from a cruel affliction — depression — that was likely exacerbated by the pressures of celebrity, an unnatural condition he never seemed comfortable with.) Speaking for myself, I won’t surrender to despair, or to pessimism; I do not believe we are hurtling toward the inevitabilities of dystopian reality or ecological collapse. I say as much as a climate-change activist, trained by former Vice President Al Gore (a boomer, incidentally, proving that they’re not all bad), and I work with young people your age on a daily basis who are actively, passionately, optimistically, and wholeheartedly engaged in the sociopolitical-betterment campaigns of the twenty-first century. They see a bright future of compassionate coexistence within reach — and so worth fighting for — and they’re going to pry political and cultural control from the death grip of the boomers in the coming decade and realize that vision at long last. It’s happening as I type this. You kids give me hope.
On the subject of hope, I’d like to say one more thing, if I might, about our dystopian fantasies. We’ve seen a lot of them since the turn of the millennium, from The Matrix to The Hunger Games to Mad Max: Fury Road to The Handmaid’s Tale to The Walking Dead to Black Mirror. (And that’s just a small sampling.) And don’t think for a minute that having spent the last two decades orgiastically indulging apocalyptic scenarios in our popular entertainments hasn’t colored our response the coronavirus crisis — hasn’t conditioned us to think The End Is Nigh! But bear in mind that adopting such a hopeless mindset is no different from what the Xers do when they retreat into Star Wars and superhero movies: It’s a denial, in its way, of the existential predicaments we face. It’s tantamount to saying, “Well, our problems have gotten so big, so intractable — life has become such a living hell — that the only way out is for civilization to just collapse, and at least those of us fortunate enough to survive will never have to respond to another text message, and we’ll be able to help ourselves to any home we like and set up camp there without every seeing a mortgage notice in the mail.” You know what I mean? Dystopian fiction isn’t a vision of the future at all — it’s a dispiriting manifestation of an utter dearth of vision.
In times like these, what we need is not to indulge our comforting fictions (of a happier past or apocalyptic future), but rather to challenge our moral imaginations — to envision a world worth living in and then go out there and fight like hell for it, “a world which, having lived through the terrors of the Fifties through the early Nineties with overhanging terror of a nuclear Armageddon that seemed inevitable at the time, has found itself faced with the equally inconceivable and terrifying notion that there might not be an apocalypse. That mankind might actually have a future, and might thus be faced with the terrifying prospect of having to deal with it rather than allowing himself the indulgence of getting rid of that responsibility with a convenient mushroom cloud or nine hundred” (Alan Moore, Twilight of the Superheroes, circa 1987). In other words: Now more than ever, we need to dream new dreams.
My point, Zoey, is this: Don’t be content to take anyone’s leftovers. This is your world, too, and you own a greater share of the future than Gen X or the Baby boomers, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Yes, the old white men of the world (Trump, McConnell) are going to do anything and everything to keep their grip on the levers of power, but your generation has two major assets they lack: time and vision. But… we forfeit those assets when we give into doomism and despair. And I won’t do that — I won’t let those fossilized old farts deny us the future we deserve. So, here’s a deal for you: You keep your chin up, and I promise you this old man ain’t ever gonna stop fighting for the future alongside the Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and all who come after so long as I draw breath. Okay?
And in those times when the fight feels long and fruitless — and it will — it never hurts to keep in mind something my mentor Mr. Gore is so fond of saying: “Things take longer to happen than you think they will, but then they happen faster than you thought they could.” Don’t lose faith now. And I hope you’ll come back to visit the blog again, Zoey…
Sean