“Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.” How ironically apropos that in a world led by a reality-show president, where facts are subjective and everything from our energy sources to our economic policies to our pop culture are the antiquated vestiges of a previous century, that a lyric by a fictitious rock star from a remake of a remake of a remake of a movie from 1937 should emerge as the perfect, hopeful mantra of an impending (if belated) new millennial era. I propose officially adopting it as such; it might make what comes next a little easier to accept for those of us still clinging nostalgically to the 1950s (Baby boomers) and the 1980s (Gen X).
If you belong to one of those analog generations—I’m an Xer myself—and you’ve ever had the frustrating experience of working with a Millennial, you know their nonlinear minds interpret the world in an entirely different manner than those that came before them. The first wave arrived in the workforce a decade ago, expecting a seat at the table before they’d earned one, demanding their voices be heard before their opinions were informed by practical experience. Their operating philosophy seemed to be: Yeah, but just because we’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try it… this way. In their view, the arduous, incremental, straight-line path of our institutionalized practices and protocols didn’t square with their hyperlinked grasp of our new Digital Age reality. Thusly, conventional (read: linear) thinking was to be openly challenged, not obediently emulated.
Like many of my fellow Xers that came up the hard way—those of us that knew our place, paid our dues (there’s that pesky sense of linearity again), never assumed we had all the answers—that worldview has often left me bewildered at best, infuriated at worst. And the sense of entitlement so endemic to Millennials is only compounded by their corresponding characteristic of impatience:
“They’ve grown up in a world of instant gratification. You want to buy something—you go on Amazon, it arrives the next day. You want to watch a movie? Log on and watch a movie—you don’t check movie times. You want to watch a TV show? Binge! You don’t even have to wait week to week to week. Right? I know people who skip seasons just so they can binge at the end of the season. Right? Instant gratification.”
Simon Sinek, “Simon Sinek,” Inside Quest with Tom Bilyeu, August 7, 2016
Now, to a middle-aged generation still trying (without success) to take the seat at the head of the table from the unyielding occupancy of the Boomers, the Millennials’ impulse—their self-ordained imperative—to grab the wheel and make “meaningful impact” is their most vexing attribute.
And—Christ help me for saying this—it just might change everything for the better.
THE GREEN NEW DEAL
Next month, a host of Millennials will be sworn into Congress, among them Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from my old hometown of the Bronx, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, and Katie Hill of California. Ocasio-Cortez, in particular, has become the face of what’s being called the Green New Deal—a plan that “calls for [a Select Committee], which would be fully funded and empowered to draft legislation, to spend the next year consulting with a range of experts—from scientists to local lawmakers to labor unions to business leaders—to map out a ‘detailed national, industrial, economic mobilization plan’ capable of making the U.S. economy ‘carbon neutral’ while promoting ‘economic and environmental justice and equality.’ By January 2020, the plan would be released, and two months later would come draft legislation designed to turn it into a reality” (Naomi Klein, “The Game-Changing Promise of a Green New Deal,” The Intercept, November 27, 2018).
Make no mistake: The Green New Deal is the radical framework for a paradigm-shifting Sustainability Revolution required to avert the worst consequences of climate change and systemically transform no less than our energy grid, our wealth-hoarding economic order, and our racially imbalanced justice system. And it was introduced by a 29-year-old neophyte legislator congenitally unbeholden to twentieth-century neoliberal ideas and ideologies, undeterred by the prospect of trying and failing in her attempt to challenge the fossilized establishment:
“For her first day on Capitol Hill, and her first public act as a representative-elect, Ocasio-Cortez chose to focus on climate change. The decision is notable all by itself. Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is also the first member of Congress who was born during the George H. W. Bush administration. And the Bush administration is when the modern era of stagnant climate politics began: It’s when Exxon and other oil companies began publicly advocating climate denialism, when the United States blocked a treaty that would have restricted global carbon emissions, when the Senate ratified the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Almost exactly a month after Ocasio-Cortez turned 1, Congress approved the Global Change Research Act, a law requiring regular federal reports on climate science. It hasn’t passed a major climate bill since. Ocasio-Cortez has spent her entire life watching climate change not get fixed. Now she’s getting her shot at addressing it.”
Robinson Meyer, “The Democratic Party Wants to Make Climate Policy Exciting,” The Atlantic, December 5, 2018
While the congresswoman-elect—note she hasn’t even officially gotten started—has been busy laying the groundwork for a new social order (in no less than the vigorously regressive Trump era), any guesses which exigent matter has inspired Gen X to reach for its pitchforks?
Buckle up.
WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT… SOMETHING OR OTHER
When Marvel Comics titan Stan Lee passed away last month at the age of ninety-five, the outpouring of tributes and condolences was fittingly monumental. Lee’s enduring superhero creations, conceived in the sociopolitical cauldron of the 1960s, broke new ground by expressing “unheroic” emotions like anger (the Hulk) and selfishness (Spider-Man), their stories boldly deviating from the moralistic Comics Code guidelines—the kind that left the Caped Crusaders battling giant robots and space invaders throughout much of the fifties—to incorporate such topical themes as drug abuse, discrimination, and the Vietnam War.
As such, Stan Lee inspired the wonder of a generation of Xers through four-color adventures that were as action-packed as they were socially conscientious. Far from the empty exercises in universe-building comics have since become, with no agenda beyond their own self-perpetuation, his superhero stories were endowed with just enough social commentary to stimulate the moral imagination of his impressionable young audience. That, after all, is what the best children’s authors, from E. B. White to Beverly Cleary to Maurice Sendak, have always done.
I speak with firsthand knowledge: Lee’s comics were some of the first reading materials I ever laid eyes on, long before I could even read. A lovely woman by the name of Pearl Hammer, long since passed away, worked as a secretary for Marvel in the 1970s, and happened to live down the hall from us in the Bronx apartment building where I grew up (a quick bus ride away, on the ol’ Bx3, from where Lee himself spent his formative years). Mrs. Hammer brought home an overstuffed manila envelope of Marvel comics for me when I was still in diapers, all of which I read a thousand times in the decade to follow, and that I still own to this day, yellowed and brittle though they’ve become.
My best friend next door and my younger sister and I spent those same years, in those same hallways, play-acting daily as Spider-Man, Iceman, and Firestar, the superheroic troika featured in an early eighties Saturday-morning cartoon Lee narrated with his trademark showmanship: “What would you do if you had all the power in the universe? This is Stan Lee sharing the wonder with you as we watch the world’s most diabolical villain, Dr. Doom, striving to seize that power!” Lee didn’t merely create a disproportionate share of some of the twentieth century’s most memorable characters, he invited us to experience his anything-is-possible enthusiasm for them together. He was as colorful as any of his creations, and like so many my age, I mourn Stan Lee, too.
“Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends” (1981)
In the midst of our national eulogy for the Stan the Man, somebody was going to say something controversial, though, and comedian-provocateur Bill Maher rose to the occasion:
“I have nothing against comic books—I read them now and then when I was a kid and I was all out of Hardy Boys. But the assumption everyone had back then, both the adults and the kids, was that comics were for kids, and when you grew up you moved on to big-boy books without the pictures.
But then twenty years or so ago, something happened—adults decided they didn’t have to give up kid stuff. And so they pretended comic books were actually sophisticated literature. . . .
. . . I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to suggest that Donald Trump could only get elected in a country that thinks comic books are important.”
Bill Maher, “Adulting,” Real Time with Bill Maher Blog, November 17, 2018
Predictably, legions of middle-aged fanboys—in a reluctant respite from wailing about the firing of James Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy—took to Twitter in Stan Lee’s defense:
Relax, guys—Maher wasn’t criticizing Lee. He was castigating you—and calling out your penchant for “delighting in concepts and characters meant to entertain the 12-year-oldboys of the 1950s” (Stuart Kelly, “Alan Moore: ‘Why Shouldn’t You Have a Bit of Fun While Dealing with the Deepest Issues of the Mind?’,” The Guardian, November 22, 2013). Though I suspect deep down you already know that—God knows we Xers hate to be told to put away our toys—which is why you framed it as an attack on Lee himself.
Stan Lee knew perfectly well he was writing children’s stories, hence the reason he consciously integrated challenging vocabulary words into his dialogue as a means of driving his young readers to the dictionary—one of those “books without pictures” Maher cited.
Exhibit B: Lee employed a pen name; born Stanley Lieber, his ambition had been to produce the Great American Novel, an effort he wasn’t looking to prematurely doom by developing a reputation as “that comic-book guy.” Frustrated by the lack of creative control in comics, he finally decided in middle age it was time to trade superhero stories for Serious Literature. At the suggestion of his wife, however—reasoning there was nothing to lose at that point—his superhero “swan song” would be a comic done entirely the way he envisioned it, editorial opposition be damned. Thus, The Fantastic Four (1961) was born, paving the way for the X-Men, the Hulk, Iron Man, and Spider-Man. Unsurprisingly, Lee never got around to that novel.
That’s how it goes sometimes. History has a way of deciding for itself how great minds will serve its cosmic cause, and Lee was smart enough to recognize that. His contributions to superhero comics, one of the few purely American art forms, are unassailably quantum (some unresolved creatorship controversies notwithstanding), second only to his advancement of the greater cultural conversation at a particularly turbulent inflection point for our country. He defied the puritanical restrictions of the Comics Code Authority that had neutered superhero stories of any meaningful subject matter because he wanted the next generation to be aware of institutional tools—like political and social activism (and even pulp storytelling)—as a means of combatting bigotry and injustice. He understood that superheroes were powerful metaphors, simplified ideals for children to aspire to, and their stories could be entertainment mechanisms to gracefully acquaint receptive minds to complex sociocultural problems.
Because one day, he must’ve assumed, we’d put down those goddamn comics and be fully engaged citizens in our world. (He’d served his country in World War II, in the same Army division as Dr. Seuss.) When that time came, we wouldn’t be wearing spandex or empowered with superhuman strength, but we’d have something more practical: a rudimentary intellectual foundation for our pressing social issues, and the emotional empathy to motivate us to care about them, even act on them. The comics themselves would be relegated to the recesses of the attic, or unloaded for pennies on the dollar at a family yard sale while we were away at college, and the part of them we would carry with us forever couldn’t be resold at a specialty shop, but would keep us aspiring toward heroism, if only unconsciously, throughout the different seasons of adulthood, with all its dramas and disillusionments.
But in the ultimate diabolical plot twist, Gen X found a way around exercising their power and meeting their civic responsibilities: We kept on reading comics… and watching Star Wars… and playing ever-more-immersive videogames… and building vast “cinematic universes” in which we preserve and continually relive the halcyon days of the 1980s.
“To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. 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.”
Pádraig ÓMéalóid AKA Slovobooks; “Last Alan Moore Interview?,” blog entry by Pádraig ÓMéalóid, January 9, 2014
And that’s what Bill Maher was censuring (though he could’ve admittedly made a more nuanced case for it, à la Alan Moore): that those of us now in our forties and fifties who refuse to put away childish things are in fact refusing the responsibilities of adulthood itself—the ones for which Lee’s stories were intended to prepare us. Because “now when adults are forced to do grown-up things like buy auto insurance, they call it ‘adulting,’ and act like it’s some giant struggle” (Maher, “Adulting,” Real Time with Bill Maher Blog).
IT TAKES A LOT TO CHANGE A MAN/ HELL, IT TAKES A LOT TO TRY
So, what are we left with, then? Old men in Congress making policy decisions that will affect a world that—quite frankly—they won’t be a part of, applying twentieth-century “solutions” (their panacean free-market ideology) to twenty-first-century problems (first and foremost climate change, Mother Nature’s gale-force “fuck you” to the free market). And one of the reasons the likes of Chuck Grassley and Mitch McConnell have been permitted to overstay their welcome on the political stage—the election of Trump that Maher attributed in part to comics is merely the tip of it all—is because we have a generation of middle-aged men who’ve abdicated their civic obligations in favor of retreating into an orgy of demigod-worshipping superhero fiction “meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s.”
Is it any wonder, then, the twenty-first century has yet to establish an identity of its own? From Ayn Rand to Stan Lee, we’re still reading and recycling the ideas—the often-questionable ethics and narratives—of the last one! This at a time when we are so desperate for new points of view, for innovative solutions to pressing existential problems. And I warned my generation two years ago that if we didn’t grow up and start acting like adults—if we didn’t confront our addiction to analog-age nostalgia that we feed nonstop with superheroes and Skywalkers, that we gleefully celebrate by way of retro-indulgent TV shows like Stranger Things and The Goldbergs—the younger demographic would step into the vacuum of leadership and pick up the slack. That moment is now:
The Millennials and the iGeneration are going to pry political and cultural control from the death grip of the Boomers in the coming decade, and usher in the twenty-first century they’ve been criminally denied by those that preceded them. Gen X can get on board with this—we can be the transitional generation that acquiesced, reluctantly and therefore courageously, to the death of the old ways so new modes of thought and governance might assume their place with the speed and scale required—or we can permanently withdraw into a 1980s time capsule, Ready Player One–style, while the world changes anyway. That’s the choice we face on the eve of this particular new year.
“Decades from now, if we are exquisitely lucky enough to tell a thrilling story about how humanity came together in the nick of time to [mitigate climate change], the pivotal chapter will not be the highly produced cinematic moment when Barack Obama won the Democratic primary and told an adoring throng of supporters that this would be ‘the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.’ No, it will be the far less scripted and markedly more scrappy moment when a group of fed-up young people from the Sunrise Movement occupied the offices of Pelosi after the midterm elections, calling on her to get behind the plan for a Green New Deal—with Ocasio-Cortez dropping by the sit-in to cheer them on.”
Klein, “The Game-Changing Promise of a Green New Deal,” The Intercept
Indeed. And it seems to me that a generation that loves meticulous utopian world-building as much as we clearly do would recognize the Green New Deal as the opportunity of a lifetime. But getting behind it means irrevocably expunging old ideas—the stagnant philosophies and fantasies of a bygone millennium. Gen X must cut that tether to the analog age and try looking ahead for a change, try to envision the possibilities of an uncertain future over reenacting the bedtime stories of a comforting past. I hope to God we’ll choose the frontlines over the sidelines, but, either way: Give ‘em hell, kids. Past time someone did.
I’m gonna have to call baloney on some of what you wrote, if only to correct some misconceptions that have persisted in both our and in the next generation.
For one thing, Millennials only seem to have all the answers because unlike us, they’ve been raised in an age in which all the information they could need is available literally just a click away. Unlike us, they can actually look up the compiled information we’ve stored on the ‘net practically from the time they’re old enough to use an electronic device. We still had to look things up in dictionaries, thesauruses, and encyclopedias. So yes, from early ages they could learn things we didn’t find out until much later. Why is this even a surprise, much less annoying?
For another thing, Maher is completely wrong in his critique of Stan Lee and in his critique of Generation Xers and younger, who have been taught from an early age to indulge in self-loathing. Maher is an elitist snob who hasn’t had to worry about the price of milk for a very long time, if ever. He doesn’t know that beginning in the 1970s, decent-paying jobs began their migration out of the U.S. in favor of cheap foreign slave labor, leaving behind the low-paying, inflation-decimated minimum wage jobs that don’t cover the cost of such “luxuries” as insurance, food, and shelter. Maher’s comments were rightly criticized because he is so out of touch he doesn’t understand or even care that it really is a huge struggle just to pay the bills and have enough left over for even the smallest of indulgences. If any of us dare indulge in, say, a television or a smart phone, a night out at the movies or video games, we’re accused of spending foolishly, as though just because we’re younger or poorer we’re not allowed to enjoy the same things older, more affluent people do (and by “affluent”, I mean the ever-diminishing middle class). Come on! Seriously? What, are we Middle Age Peasants only allowed to sleep on beds of straw, if we get the privilege of having beds at all instead of being content to sleep on cold concrete floors?
So let’s not nod our heads in agreement with clueless boomers like Maher so quickly. We Gen Xers were the first generation to understand just what an illusion the American Dream really is, out of reach of fulfillment for most of us. The Boomers at least got to inherit the world their parents left for them, with the power structures that went with it. We were told to “grow up” (as though what defines ‘grown-up’ means what the Boomers—or, for that matter, we Gen Xers—say it means), abandon our “childish” dreams of pursuing careers doing what we love and instead settle for soul-crushing go-nowhere jobs that accomplish nothing except to line the bosses’ pockets while we stagnate, and stop whining. And despite having been put through this wringer of imposed self-loathing and denial, despite having entered adulthood at the dawn of the Digital Age, we insist on repeating the same soul-killing mantras our own parents instilled in out psyches. Why? The kids are smarter than we give them credit for, generally speaking, and they’re having none of it.
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but my ongoing love for comics, movies, television, anime, and video games stems from my love of literature and my recognition that these new forms of media are simply the next logical extension of what some condescendingly refer to as “books without pictures.” Play the ‘Legacy of Kain’ video game series, for example, and you find surprisingly complex, very adult themes of time travel, paradoxes, alternate realities, the nature of choice and free will, and what makes a hero, among other weighty topics. Likewise, ‘Batman the Animated Series’ wove more adult ideas into its storytelling such as philosophy, and the kids who grew up on stuff like that hold on to it because the lessons taught in the new media remain relevant and can be revisited as needed in order to refresh those lessons in the mind.
THAT is why comic books, especially the ones Stan Lee and Alan Moore and their successors wrote, remain so popular and why we are so vehement in our defense thereof. We got it, and even more so, so did the Millenials.
The troubles plaguing Millenials stem from having to simultaneously deal with the messes preceding generations left for them to clean up, and find and assert their own identities and navigate their own paths through life. But for some weird reason, our generation resents rather than empathizes with them even though ours was the first to have to go through this same shit. Don’t you remember being lectured by so-called adults as to what was realistic career choices, spending habits, being told you think you know it all etc.? Why do that to someone else? Break the cycle, which you seem to be trying to do, but more than that, abandon the assumptions and prejudices hammered into you by the Boomers.
Michael,
First off: Happy New Year! Apologies for the delay in responding to your comment — and all of the wonderful comments here, each and every one of which I appreciate — as I’ve been away from my desk for the holidays.
There’s no denying I have (somewhat unfairly) reduced entire generational demographics to a single unified mindset/ethos apiece in order to make my point within the limited confines of a mere blog post, and the sociological truth of this matter is, admittedly, far more complex than I have represented here or even myself comprehend. (It would take a much longer treatise to give all of this the nuanced consideration it rightfully deserves, hence the reason I view this blog as an intellectual incubator — a place to experiment with ideas and see what grows from them — rather than a Final Word on anything.)
Generally speaking, the Boomers — the first buy-now-pay-later generation — warped the American Dream when they traded sixties activism for eighties materialism: “Social mobility” became a class contest in which the “winners” were deemed those who had amassed the greatest quantity of status symbols.
Gen X, meanwhile, came of age at a historically unique moment: The Eighties marked not only the pinnacle of consumerist decadence — the Reagan-endorsed, Boomer-administered orgy of capitalistic excess — but also the last true analog era, before our linear, one-thing-at-a-time reality splintered off into a hyperlinked continuum in which our telecommunications technologies put us all places at once, 24 hours a day.
As such, we now find ourselves a part of a digital world we’re not entirely comfortable in, in contrast with Millennials raised in the Information Age who are, thusly, more knowledgeable — and, correspondingly, more impatient — than any generation that preceded them. And what I’ve observed in the Xers I’ve consulted on the matter — again, speaking strictly in generalities — is that it isn’t so much we resent Millennials as we do envy them. We envy the complete comfort they feel in a digital world, and the self-confidence with which they’ve asserted their voices into the conversation. Like us, they’re victims of the Boomers’ intemperance, too, but they’re at least trying to move us into the twenty-first century, whereas we would rather remain frozen in the 1980s, that blissful analog-age apogee before all the chickens came home to roost. And I very much believe it’s time we confronted that unflattering truth about ourselves.
To that end, what I’m pleading for is this: that Generation X recognizes, without resentment or envy, that Gens Y and Z have exactly the qualities so desperately needed at this moment in history — ambition and impatience — and that we are in a unique position to guide and assist them, to complement their emotional exuberance with measured pragmatism so together we might git shit done! Rather than being the “oh, them” generation that had no real say over either century we occupied — we came of age in the Boomers’ America and (as evidenced by our nostalgia-driven pop culture) haven’t taken any meaningful actions toward defining/developing the culture and identity of this century, as Alan Moore has so piquantly observed — we can be the ones that swiftly replace the aging Baby boomers currently retarding progress by safeguarding the bankrupt ethos and ideologies of the last century, and give the Millennials and the iGeneration the space and support they need to at long last begin building their own century-defining modes of commerce, culture, politics, and ecological stewardship. It’s an opportunity I hope we’ll seize, and “Maybe It’s Time” is my heartfelt appeal to a generation in danger of missing it entirely while we obsess over the meaningless minutiae of the MCU, etc.
As always, my friend, I thank you for a spirited conversation, and wish you only health and happiness in 2019!
Sean
Outstanding post, Sean!
May you have a Blessed, Happy, and Healthy 2019!
Jason
Likewise, Jason! Thank you for always taking time out of your day for my posts, and for consistently having an upbeat, supportive word to share about them. This blog has put me in touch with so many wonderful people whose names bring a smile to my face every time I see them on one of my social-media platforms; I’m not overstating it when I say you guys bring joy and value to my life. Wishing you and yours only the best of health and prosperity in 2019!
I had decided, if I got a chance to ask Alan Moore a few more questions, that I’d ask him if he thought the 21st century had now started.
That’s an absolutely brilliant, must-read interview with Moore you published, Pádraig — one that I have cited in many a blog post and personal conversation — and I am grateful for this opportunity to tell you that directly. Thank you for stopping by to read and comment on this post.
It surely isn’t a surprise that I think Moore’s critique of our superhero subculture (which has, as he observes, pretty much hijacked the entire culture at this point) is spot-on: “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.”
To my knowledge, Moore was the first to sound the alarm bell on the superhero–industrial complex (and certainly remains its most eloquent and, given his résumé, authoritative critic), expressing solemn concern “about the fact that the superhero film audience was now almost entirely composed of adults, men and women in their thirties, forties and fifties who were eagerly lining up to watch characters and situations that had been expressly created to entertain the twelve year-old boys of fifty years ago.” More people, I think, are coming around to the idea that maybe there are substantial cultural and political consequences when a generation of grown adults coopts (and perverts) characters meant to amuse the children of a bygone century.
I personally hold out little hope that my generation will kick its rather sad addiction to superheroes, but, as I argue in the essay above, I think it’s irrelevant now, anyway: We’re being (rightfully) superannuated by Gens Y and Z, who aren’t handicapped by twentieth-century, analog-age nostalgia like the Boomers and Xers. The transition into the true twenty-first century is happening whether we like it or not, whether we’re ready or not, and all that remains to be seen is whether we let go of the 1980s… or tighten our grip on them. I would, of course, be very curious to get Mr. Moore’s always-fascinating insights on this particular matter, so if you happen to speak with him or publish a follow-up interview, kindly come back and let me know!
In the meantime, Pádraig, I wish you bountiful health and creativity in 2019.
First … hear, hear!
I realized in reading this, Sean, that I can’t think of a single other place anywhere that one could read politics interwoven with thoughts on comics and cinema, all interwoven in a way that makes sense.
Funny you should talk about binge watching, since I have spent this evening binge reading all of your posts I missed since August. And yet, as a lifelong teen mentor, I’ve been largely saved from the syndrome that affects most of our generation. I hear their voices and ideas daily. And I’m hesitant to say too often “back in my day…” Rather, I do a lot of listening, learning, even as I try to impart whatever truly timeless wisdom I can. And in whatever ways I’m able, I support their sense of empowerment and give them tools to follow through in making waves. We need those waves, now more than ever.
You know, Erik, one of the many reasons — though by no means the only reason — I trained to be a Climate Reality Leader last year was to have something else to write about besides fuckin’ movies and superheroes! (Both of which I’m sick of.) I was starting to bore even myself, and thought it high time I met some other people and developed other interests; I figured it would at least give me some alternative topics to blog about!
But what invariably winds up happening inside a writer’s mind (not that I need tell you) is this: The more ingredients you add to the soup of your cerebrum, the more lines you inevitably draw between things. You see patterns. Stephen King once distilled the alchemy of writing as follows: “two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up” (Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, [New York: Scribner, 2000], 37).
So, even though the last thing I wanted to write about (again!) was our cultural preoccupation with superheroes, I couldn’t help but see a correlation between Gen X’s withdrawal from reality through comic books and Gen Y and Z’s antithetical engagement with reality in the face of inaction and/or denial by the generations that preceded them. And thus “Maybe It’s Time” was produced. You can read it and pretty much extract just about everything that’s been on my mind this past year!
As I mentioned in a previous comment, I don’t engage with kids, by and large, not because I’m not interested in them — far from it — but simply because they are largely circumstantially absent from both my personal and professional lives. On the subject of drawing intellectual connections, the next scheduled post, in fact, is on exactly that topic: My curiosity about how the formative experiences of today’s kids differs from my own. (The essay was prompted by something I recently observed at my old childhood playground, on which I’ll elaborate in the forthcoming piece itself.) That’s a post I’ll be very much interested in getting your perspective on, pal, given how in touch you are with the younger generation.
I second everything you say above. Though I’ve been extremely critical of our generation, I also sympathize with our historically unique conundrum of having come of age in an analog world but living our adult lives in a digital one. Sometimes I feel like we’re in this world, but we’re not of it — certainly not the way Y and Z are. And I think that’s at the root of both our nostalgic yearning for the 1980s, and our frustration with the Millennial worldview. But there’s a lot to be learned from them — and even a lot we can teach them about the virtues of the bygone analog age, as I suggested in my reply to Michael above — but it means shelving the
comic books“graphic novels” and listening to them. Mentoring them. Partnering with them on the complicated wave-making project known as the Twenty-first Century.
Happy New Year, my friend. Here’s to many thought-provoking conversations over the next twelve months!
Many of the kids I mentor are having this discussion and often, even with parents. They are much more conscious of waste (even running water while they brush their teeth or flushing the toilet too often) and are adamant about recycling. They march and lend hands for cleanups. Encouraging to see.
Good to hear! That’s a marked improvement from when we were growing up. Jimmy Carter tried to curb our culture’s profligacy (he even installed solar panels atop the White House), but it wasn’t the message we wanted to hear, so we elected Reagan, who avuncularly reassured us it was our God-given right as Americans to have whatever we wanted whenever we wanted it (and he had those solar panels removed, incidentally). That was the 1980s — the era our generation is so desperate to preserve in a cultural time capsule. We’ve fetishized that decade the way the Boomers have the 1950s (the latter of which was only a Happy Days utopia for the white and suburban), and I’m glad today’s kids have no memory of it or nostalgia for it. It’s important to remind them that ’80s propaganda like Stranger Things and The Goldbergs, to borrow a lyric from Pearl Jam, is “not reality, just someone else’s sentimentality / Look what it did to us.”
Yes, my nostalgia from the 80s is decidedly selective. I would never go back (nor to the 90s or 2000s). I don’t rue the past. I recognize how my past has become the now-me. But I wouldn’t want to relive any of it. “If I could save time in a bottle” … I’d break the bottle.
Each era has it’s challenges. One of the many we face, and an important one, is assuring that future generations have a functioning and beautiful planet upon which to figure out their own lives.
I loved that exchange we shared about “then-me” and “now-me”! I cite it all the time in conversation, especially in the last few weeks, as everyone I know has been binge-watching Tidying Up with Marie Kondo and exploring the idea of adopting/practicing minimalism in 2019. (My wife and I have already dropped off several bags/boxes worth of “indefinite storage” at Goodwill since we returned to L.A. from Christmas vacation.)
Perhaps the most complicated relationship any of us have in the course of our lifetimes is the one with “then-me” (seriously: one or both of us needs to write an exclusive post on this subject!), and I’m more convinced than ever it keeps us holding onto all sorts of things we don’t need, be it stuff (mementoes/keepsakes) or habits (consuming antiquated pop culture we’ve long since outgrown), weighing us down in a miasma of nostalgic sentimentality. The people we’ve lost — including (and perhaps especially) our own more innocent selves — can’t be magically summoned via some totemic object they once touched or owned, nor can the meaningful experiences we’ve had be recaptured by some worthless souvenir like a movie stub or even a photo. We tend to think of that stuff as providing a benign tether to the past, but I might argue that’s what memory is for — playing in the background of our conscious awareness like music in a department store; mementoes, on the other hand, are more of a restraint — a ball and chain imprisoning us in the past, refusing to allow our then-mes to imperceptibly, and quite necessarily, decompose into the ether.
Front lines over the sidelines. Brilliant ending to a thought-provoking piece. Thanks, as always, for your posts.
Aw, thank you, Wendy — for being such a supportive friend of the blog all year long. I never take your participation for granted. You work with the very children who are going to be the vanguard of change in the decade to come, and for that I commend and even envy you. They need the kind of mentorship from thoughtful Xers that Erik and I were discussing in the comment above, and I can’t think of anyone better positioned or equipped to provide that than you. Happy New Year — here’s to a prosperous and healthy one for the Weir family!
I’m 53, so I don’t know what that makes me, but I work with a lot of Millenials and I’ve never found it frustrating. They just want what they do to mean something, which is why they just might save us all:-)
You’re near the start of Generation X
***
>those of us now in our forties and fifties who refuse to put away childish things
I’d like to mention that although we adults may read and watch “childish” things we do not read and watch them the same way a child does
We demand a certain depth of character and plot, and we judge the artwork more critically, although some of these demands might perhaps be better served elsewhere, whether in comic book/movie form or not. We can appreciate connections, inside jokes, themes, and the creators’ skills far more than children one-third, -fourth, or fifth our age can
Of course, our view has a minus side
Adults desire a greater degree of sex and violence in a story than would be acceptable for children. Google ANY character from ANY children’s story and add NSFW. Rule 34 applies even, or rather especially, to children’s stories
Naturally, comic book- and movie-makers notice this adult fandom and cater to it. Collectible statues of comic book characters sell for hundreds of dollars. Children are not meant to play w/ them. Both Deadpool movies and “Logan” (Wolverine) were rated R. DC Comics insists that their books are “mature” and “edgy”, by which they mean gratuitous violence, gore, misogyny, and contempt for their audience. When Warner Brothers hired Zach Snyder to helm the DC Cinematic Universe they were not looking for the six- to twelve-year-old market
Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie created the graphic novel “Lost Girls”. It featured children’s story characters Alice (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass), Dorothy (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), and Wendy (Peter Pan). “Lost Girls” was sexually explicit (Moore literally described it as “pornography”) and had a price tag of $75
In other words, we are not still wearing the same clothes we wore when we were children. We are wearing children’s clothing in adult sizes
Couldn’t have said it better, Dave!
The brilliance of the old Batman TV show from the sixties was that it knew how to play to both a juvenile and adult audience, actually capitalizing — to marvelous creative effect — on the very fact that “we do not read and watch [superhero stories] the same way a child does.” As a kid viewing the syndicated afternoon reruns in the late seventies/early eighties, I made no tonal distinction between William Dozier’s Batman and Richard Donner’s Superman — both were simply comics/cartoons writ large to my guileless eyes, completely aesthetically compatible.
It was only in 1989, when the Dozier show atavistically returned to local TV on the wave of Batmania catalyzed by the Tim Burton cultural juggernaut, that I went, “Oh, this is a goof!” I was thirteen at that point, reading some of the more mature Batman books being published at the time (like The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke, The Cult, A Death in the Family), and I was beginning to appreciate deeper thematic/psychological complexity in the stories I was consuming. At that point, I formally rejected Dozier’s psychedelic interpretation for Burton’s Gothic take (which in many respects now seems equally campy), only to more soberly determine many years later that one iteration isn’t more or less meritorious than another, each simply reflects the ethos of its times and aesthetics of its artistic custodian.
Much as I loved in that adolescent period of my life the increasingly darker take on the Dark Knight courtesy Miller and Moore and Burton, that era unquestionably represents a turning point in comics history — one that Moore openly regrets having been a part of, characterizing The Killing Joke as “one of the least personally interesting and most regretted works of his career” — when publishers started catering to a maturing fan base at the expense of cultivating a younger one. This gambit put superhero fiction, unambiguously originally intended to appeal to children, on tricky ground, because a “child can accept all kinds of weird-looking creatures and bizarre occurrences in a story because the child understands that stories have different rules that allow for pretty much anything to happen. Adults, on the other hand, struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it’s not real” (Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human, [New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011], 56).
With the proliferation of superheroic cinema, this disparity only became more starkly apparent. Let’s face it: No matter how dignified the actor (like the incomparable Christopher Reeve) or utilitarian the apparel (the ballistic bodysuit in Batman Begins), there’s an inherent silliness about a flesh-and-blood performer in an oversized Halloween costume. What works in pen-and-ink requires a major suspension of disbelief on the screen that one could in no way muster if one were face-to-face with someone dressed like a superhero. (Ever been to Hollywood Boulevard?) It’s patently ridiculous, no matter how credible the filmmakers try to make it.
When you consider the what-the-fuck incongruity of a grown adult unironically garbed in a mask and cape parading around in a story with levels of sex and violence that make it utterly inappropriate for children, one feels — or one ought to feel — mortified to support such grotesquerie. Dozier’s Batman invited adults to laugh at its intrinsic preposterousness while the kids innocently had a good time with it; Snyder’s, on the other hand, doesn’t even welcome kids at the party — his is an adults-only affair. (And that was true even before the R-rated edition of Batman v Superman! Same goes for Deadpool, which isn’t nearly as subversive or witty or inclusive as Dozier’s Batman; it’s merely an excuse for adults to indulge in more no-kids-allowed superhero worship all the while pretending it’s satirical. And, while we’re at it, would someone kindly explain to Ryan Reynolds the crucial difference between charm and smarm?)
And the superhero comics industry, which has been swirling the drain for years but still pulses along as a “loss leader” for the movies, is no better, having hit a desperate new low last year with the whole “Batman’s penis” episode (in a storyline titled — and let’s pause to appreciate the irony of this — Damned). Are we embarrassed yet?
None of that is to suggest, by the way, that sequential art can’t cater to adult tastes, themes, and narratives. I loved Y: The Last Man, for instance, and I know there are plenty of other examples (I’m just not up to speed on them). As a medium, comic books/graphic novels are capable of representing many different genres intended for many different demographics, but the superhero subgenre should be henceforth returned to children. It was never intended for anyone over the age of thirteen:
The argument I hear from Gen X a lot — including virtually all of my personal friends — is that there’s no reason superheroes can’t evolve to service more emotionally, psychologically, and thematically complex stories. They see what’s become of superheroes as an evolution; I see it as a perversion. History will decide which argument is correct: Let’s see if the Millennials — and particularly the iGeneration — are still reading/watching/collecting/cosplaying the stuff they grew up on, be it superheroes or Harry Potter or Pokémon or what-have-you, when they’re raising children of their own. I’m betting they won’t be. I think they’re far more concerned with issues like gun control and climate change and voter suppression, and will have neither the mental bandwidth nor nostalgic yearning for the bedtime stories of their youth. And that’s going to cast my generation in an abjectly unflattering light, hence the reason I want us to confront — and conquer — this crippling addiction while we still have a chance. It’s not (yet) too late to stop wearing children’s clothes in adult sizes.
Agreed, Suzanne: We shouldn’t admonish the Millennials for wanting to do something meaningful — we should encourage and assist them in their efforts to do it as effectively as possible. That’s where mentorship comes in, and I count you, along with Wendy and Erik above, among the thoughtful, sensitive Xers best suited to imparting a little wisdom and pragmatism to those who dream not of a better past, but a better future.
Congrats on your second novel getting accepted for publication! Be sure to let me know when it’s available! I wish you only the best of success in 2019!
A great post, Sean. I love the thread. Long long ago in a faraway galaxy, I read comic books and loved them. The work of Stan Lee was my summertime staple. I grew out of them into the tie-dye and fringe of the sixties, and honestly I thought that the peace and love generation was going to save the planet once we took over. That ended up being a big fat non-starter. I love the way the instant-gratification Millennials have stepped to the plate and refuse to mosey along, waiting their turn. Finally, I have some real hope for meaningful change. And I want it now! Do we thank Trump for being so intolerably horrible? Part of me thinks so. A fun post.
Lovely reminiscence, Diana! On the subject of the unfulfilled promise of the Boomers, Pete Townshend once said this about the Who’s 1971 hit “Baba O’Riley”: “For me, you know, that notion of ‘teenage wasteland’ — it is about waste. It’s not about getting wasted, it’s about waste. It’s about wasted life, wasted opportunity, wasted years — and I take full responsibility for the fact that my generation complained about the state of the planet and did nothing to change it.”
I empathize with his frustration. Whereas the free-love hippies eventually devolved into free-market yuppies (generally speaking, of course), my generation has squandered its promise by electing to engage with fictitious worlds/realities over the actual one, by way of immersive multiplayer videogames and sprawling multimedia “universes.” It raises my ire in a very personal way that I couldn’t connect to when I first heard that Townshend quote all those years ago, because now I’m looking at it through the lens of a middle-aged adult watching his own generation party while Rome burns. Much like young, tie-died Diana Peach, I suspect, that’s not who I thought my demographic cohorts were going to be when we grew up.
So I am putting my hope into the next generations — and not without justified optimism. They’re certainly angrier and more motivated then X ever was. And I do believe their more “annoying” characteristics — their impatience and longing to do something meaningful with their lives — is going to be the secret cocktail that systemically transforms society for the better. Hell, I’d be impatient, too, if I spent my whole life in a world of warming temperatures and school shootings and saw nothing being done about it!
Do we have Trump to thank for this? Perhaps to some extent. As I mentioned to our old friend Erik in a comment on “Living Here in ‘Allen Town’,” Al Gore often cites the political application of Newton’s Third Law: that for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. I’m not going to suggest Trump’s environmental rollbacks and polices are a good thing — they aren’t — but if there’s something positive to have emerged from his ecological recalcitrance, it’s that it appears to have galvanized a (growing) green movement that isn’t going away this time, as it did on other occasions when we seemed poised to (finally) take meaningful legislative action on the climate crisis, such as when James Hansen sounded the alarm bells to Congress in 1988, or when An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar in 2006 and made the abstract topic part of our mainstream discourse.
The fact remains, whether a Green New Deal or the bipartisan Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (which you can read about here) ever actually come to pass — and I hope they do — any serious candidate seeking the Democratic nomination for president next year is going to have to make climate change the keystone issue of their campaign. And Trump, presuming he’s still president, is going to look mighty silly responding to every debate question on the subject with “Chinese hoax!“
So, I say let him keep lying about climate change, let him continue to dismiss the advice of his own scientists. Even his supporters know at this point he’s a liar, and a moron, and that the more he tries to dismiss something as bogus (“Witch Hunt!“), the more veracity/legitimacy it probably has. Trump may very well be the president that gets us a Green New Deal after all! (Orange Is the New Green?)
Happy New Year, Diana. I wish you health, happiness, and — not that you of all people need more of it! — bountiful creativity.
We are on the same page, my friend. And while we wait for Congress and our next President, we can each do our part. 🙂
By the way, Diana, I have been absent from our blogging community the past month on account of a holiday hiatus (and then post-vacation catch-up), but I’m looking forward to engaging with you again over on Myths of the Mirror in the coming days and weeks!
Be fair. Lots of Gen-Xers, including me, have advocated and voted for climate change. And we’ve got that new law in California that I’m really excited about–with all new construction after 2020 requiring solar. I’ve been wanting that law for 20 years, ever since the “rolling brownouts” of the Davis era.
My perception of our generation is perhaps different from yours. Mostly I read novels, although I go through a fair amount of history, too. I rarely watch TV, although I do play movies, and a few TV shows have slipped through (but only really good ones, like the BBC Musketeers, which I highly recommend even though it’s a remake. They shot it like a western, which brought a fresh sensibility to the whole thing).
Anyway, the Silents are fading, with their cold war mentality, and I hope we survive the Boomers–they’re one of the most intolerant cohort groups we’ve ever had–both sides. If you’ve ever read Generations by Strauss and Howe, this pattern is cyclical, and the job of our cohort group is to moderate, to make practical and functional in practice the ideas of the Boomers. Practical, workable solutions are one of our cohort group’s great strengths, as well as the ability to weather adversity.
For instance, George Washington belonged to what would have been the Gen-X analog back at the time of the Revolutionary War. Without him, all the fine ideas Ben Franklin had (Ben belonged to the analog-Boomer generation) would have been for naught. And Thomas Jefferson belonged to the analog-Millenials. Leadership can and should span different cohort groups. We have different strengths and weaknesses.
Anyway, it’s a slow start, but it’s a fascinating read, and since you write so much on the various generations, it might give a little more wealth to that type of perspective.
Hey, Cathleen! Your distillation of Generations is a fascinating read unto itself; I appreciate the unique perspective, rooted in your scholarly interest in history, you often bring to these discussions. My wife majored in history in college — she’d planned to teach high school before life pulled her in another direction — and she brings a similar point of view to my ideas when I informally workshop them with her over coffee or dinner or what have you.
So, let me respond to a couple of your points: California — and Californians — have so much to be proud of with respect to addressing climate change. It’s worth acknowledging that (the eighty-year-old) Jerry Brown took a real leadership role on the issue — SB 100 is a great example of this — and our brand-new governor Gavin Newson seems poised to build on Governor Brown’s accomplishments. We are still the second-largest oil-producing state behind Texas, though, and that’s something we need to reconcile with and remedy posthaste, but we’re leading the way environmentally — and history has proven that where California (the world’s fifth-largest economy all by itself) goes, others follow.
As for my generational generalizations: To echo what I said in my reply to Michael up top, some of my loose statements could reasonably be labeled facile and/or simplistic, a criticism I acknowledge as fair. On the issue of climate change alone, many Boomers (like Al Gore) and Xers (like Naomi Klein, teenage mallrat–turned–social activist) have been some of our most tireless and effective leaders. Frankly, I wish more of their demographic cohorts would take inspiration from them…
Because what I observe happening — generally speaking, of course — amongst Generation X is something new and troubling. There’s nothing wrong with hobbies, or escapist fantasy; on the contrary, “mindless” pastimes — be it TV or jigsaw puzzles or baseball — are necessary reprievers from what Alan Moore rightly identifies as the overwhelming complexities of modern existence. But what a significant segment of us are doing — not everyone, I should stipulate — is refusing to even engage with those complexities, opting instead to pour our time and attention into the mythopoeic worship of the stories and characters that were created to entertain us when we were eight years old: Star Wars, Transformers, the superheroes of Marvel and DC Comics, etc. (Let the billion-dollar grosses of these movies serve as testament to that.) As I wrote about in “The Great Escape,” no previous generation reached adulthood only to still find themselves reading comics and collecting toys and scouring “shared fictional universes” for meaning, as if they contain any. It’s weird, and embarrassing, and a hedonistic denial of both our civic responsibilities and our own mortality.
Leadership should indeed span multiple generations: Boomers have wisdom, and Gens Y and Z have energy and passion. Gen X, at this moment in time, has the best of both worlds: We have the wisdom that comes from practical experience as well as the vigor of relative youth. But, generally speaking, I don’t see us applying it as forcefully or effectively as we could. I see us expending a hell of a lot of time and energy lobbying to see Zack Snyder’s cut of Justice League, or bitching about a range of infantile “injustices”: from how Kathleen Kennedy has mishandled the Star Wars franchise, or Disney’s firing of James Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy, or Bill Maher’s comments on Stan Lee. Those are the kinds of subjects that should, to my mind, begin and end at the junior high school lunch table.
So, what I’m asking of Generation X is this: Let’s not blame the Boomers for the world we inherited; what’s done is done. And let’s not dismiss the Millennials (and now Gen Z, too) as overeager and/or entitled. Let’s instead look in the mirror, admit we’re a bit traumatized by the overwhelming complexities of life in the Digital Age, and come to terms with our coping mechanism of choice: 1980s nostalgia. Let’s not make the mistake the Boomers did: fetishizing the 1950s the way they do, and working to construct a future in that (false) image.
How ’bout this: Let’s instead finally let go of the 1980s, and turn our resources and attention to the 2020s. I am personally so hopeful and excited for the opportunity to develop “a strategy for American national security, national resilience, natural security and economic leadership in the 21st century,” to quote Thomas L. Friedman, by way of a Green New Deal. And it’s something I’ll be discussing with regularity throughout the year to come. And, hell, if nothing else, it beats spilling any more ink about superheroes!
Happy New Year, Cathleen! Wishing you healthy and productivity in 2019!
This made me sad but also relieved that I’m not the only Gen Xer who feels left behind. Maybe every generation shakes a fist at the next and says, “Damn kids, wait your turn!” but in our case, its true.
I remember being young, told by Boomers to put in my time and pay my dues and my reward would come. Well, I just turned 40 and there’s no reward in sight. The boomers are holding on and on and on…Trump, Hillary, Nancy, Chuck, Bernie, all 70 plus and not one of them wants to chill out and relax and let their kids’ generation take over.
Meanwhile, the millennials pretty much just leap frogged right over us. Can you blame them? Especially when it comes to the content creation fields – writing, video, art, music etc. Had the tech existed when I was 20 to go to Best Buy and buy, for a reasonable price, everything you need to broadcast your own show, or write and self publish your own book, or make your own podcast, I would have been all over it. Today, I’m trying, but it kind of feels like being the old man at the club that no one wants to tell to just go home.
I’m not sure I share the sentiment that it will make things better. The good side of the Internet is that it has given a voice to many who would have otherwise gone voiceless. The bad side is it leads to a lot of partisan sniping. It is unfortunately too easy to take a person’s words, twist them around, try to portray them as evil when you don’t actually have to look at them in the eye.
Oh well. If only my parents had waited a few years to have had kids. I could have been a millenial.
Hey, BQB! Happy New Year!
For reasons I’ve written about extensively (here and here and elsewhere), Gen X finds itself in a historically unique position: We’re sandwiched between two appreciably larger demographics (the Boomers and the Millennials), with the former refusing to cede the stage, and the latter demanding their turn in the spotlight now. So it does in many ways feel like we’re being prematurely put out to pasture — even passed over by history entirely! This is compounded by the fact that we have a foot in two eras — the analog age of the twentieth century and the Digital Age of the twenty-first — neither of which really belongs to us. We are a generation devoid of a temporal identity.
The trouble is, we’re coping with our feelings of displacement by retreating into the fictions and fantasies of our youth — we’ve withdrawn from the infinite complexities of twenty-first-century reality in favor of the finite simplicities of 1980s sentimentality — which is only pushing us further out of touch. And I wrote “Maybe It’s Time” as a hopeful appeal to my cohorts to let go of the last century and join this one — to choose to be a part of this era, unfolding before our eyes, over the previous one, receding from view.
Remember in Ready Player One how Gen Xer James Halliday (one of the most evil characters in all of fiction, by the way) included a kill switch — what he called the Big Red Button — that would delete all the OASIS source code and shut it down forever? It’s time for Gen X to hit the Big Red Button on the pop-cultural tabernacle to 1980s ephemera we’ve so painstakingly engineered — all the fuckin’ Star Wars and Transformers and superhero movies we produce and consume — and join the twenty-first century. We’ve put it off long enough.
To earnestly address your closing remark — which I realize was intended as a joke — don’t lament not being a Millennial. Just be an engaged citizen of the world who tries, in whatever way he can, to contribute to the here and now. Indulging in nostalgia and pessimism is easy; it’s progress and optimism that require sustained effort. But they’re worth it. Yes, arbitrary historical circumstance has positioned Generation X to feel left behind, a sentiment I share as an Xer myself. But if we choose to stay behind — if we opt to partake in the pleasures of the previous century over the possibilities of the present one — that’s on us. History awaits our decision.
The Space Jam 2 movie trailer has a Game of Thrones planet pass by, and the “droogs” from Clockwork Orange are in the audience
Seriously
Someone called it the Ready Player One of basketball movies, and I don’t think they’re very wrong
About a decade ago, I took a general meeting with a development exec at one of the prodcos here in Hollywood (it was so many years ago, I honestly can’t recall which one) who had spent most of his career as an executive at Paramount in the eighties and nineties. He had a lot of great “war stories” from those days, and I recall we talked for nearly two hours about all sorts of things: how the budget for each successive Star Trek sequel was actually smaller than the previous movie’s (because in those days, it was understood a sequel — even to a hit — would only retain about two-thirds of the audience); what was going on behind the scenes on The Godfather, Part III, and how we both felt it was an unfairly maligned movie — we talked about a ton of stuff. Great meeting (few of them are).
Anyway, I remember him saying that he started to notice a trend in the 1990s amongst up-and-coming filmmakers (all Xers, incidentally): that they had this creative predilection to reference pop culture in their scripts to an unusually heavy extent. Basically, he was talking about all the screenwriters I mentioned in “Here Lies Buffy the Vampire Slayer”: Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Kevin Williamson, Joss Whedon, etc. And this I remember: He said it concerned him at the time, because he worried the forthcoming wave of filmmakers (the video-store generation) was going to wind up making movies that only existed to comment on other movies — not to be about anything in their own right.
I think he was more or less right, and I would even argue what actually happened was far worse: On the one hand, you have scribes whose work is not much more than a basket of pop-cultural Easter eggs (Ernest Cline, Kevin Williamson, Adam F. Goldberg) — nostalgic paeans to the ephemera of the 1980s — but then you also have movies and TV shows that exist for no other reason than to comment on themselves. I’m talking the View Askewniverse, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Solo: A Star Wars Story (or any of the Disney Star Wars stuff, really), Kurtzman’s Star Trek, Terminator: Genisys, Game of Thrones — hell, maybe even Harry Potter, too (I haven’t studied it closely enough to say for certain). None of those stories, such as they are, aspire to be about anything that relates to the human condition — they are only interested in their own internal worldbuilding and in-universe crosspollination. They’re not about anything. The first six Star Trek movies admittedly vary in quality, but even the lesser ones aspired to be about something other than merely themselves. Godfather III is far from perfect (I haven’t yet had a chance to see Coppola’s recent recut), but doesn’t lack for thematic meat — FFC had a legitimate narrative reason to make that belated sequel, unlike The Force Awakens.
Hell, Indiana Jones was never meant to be anything but a Saturday-matinée serial writ large, and, in retrospect, all of those films are predicated on an unchallenged assumption of Western cultural superiority, yet they still offer some provocative food for thought on the matters of “Reckoning with the legacy of colonialism and undoing the damage caused by the theft of sacred objects” (James Charisma, “‘Indiana Jones’ Has Aged Terribly,” Vice, June 20, 2019). There aren’t a hell of a lot of in-universe “callbacks” in those movies, save a passing (and inconsequential) reference to the Ark of the Covenant from Raiders in the catacombs of Venice in Last Crusade. With each of those films — and just like Star Trek, we can certainly debate the merits of one entry over another — Lucas and Spielberg were at least trying to tell an honest story, not stuff a basket with pop-cultural Easter eggs. (And in the ’90s, Lucas did an entire prequel series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, that never once attempted to “fill in” the backstory alluded to in the movies: We never met Abner Ravenwood, and other than Henry Senior, Indy never encountered younger versions of characters from the movies: Belloq, Sallah, Brody, etc. Lucas wasn’t interested in Easter-egging; instead, Young Indy was its own thing — a period drama about the geopolitical conditions of World War I that wound up setting the stage for the rest of the 20th century. It wasn’t always a perfect show, but I don’t know that Lucas has ever produced something with quite as much moral imagination as Young Indiana Jones. Disney will never do something so experimental and, for lack of a better term, “off-brand” with Indiana Jones when they finally get around to rekindling it.)
I haven’t seen the trailer for Space Jam 2, so I can’t comment on it specifically. I’m a Space Jam agnostic; that one is strictly a Millennial favorite. The year that movie came out, my wife and I had just started dating, and we were seeing movies like Fargo and Welcome to the Dollhouse and Flirting with Disaster. Space Jam used to play in heavy rotation at the mom-and-pop video shop where I was working at the time, but it’s just not one of those films that inspires any nostalgic yearning in me, so I doubt I’ll be seeing the sequel.
Later this month, however, I’ll be posting a very long piece (I’ve got a draft at over — yeesh — 6,000 words!) about mega-franchises: specifically, the engagement strategies they use to keep us watching them year after year after year after year. And one of those tactics is that they get us addicted to correlating Easter eggs — finding all of those cross-references and making meaning out of them. The quantity and quality of those Easter eggs has become the standard by which we judge a movie’s worth nowadays.
These days, alas, a piece of popular entertainment is only as valuable as the number of references and callbacks it contains, because it isn’t merely nostalgia that sells; movies like Ready Player One and Space Jam 2 reward us merely for having faithfully consumed so many other movies. We watch multimedia franchise offerings not to be morally challenged or ethically instructed, but for the dopamine hit of pattern recognition. Look — the droogs! (So fuckin what?) That’s what I’ll be talking about later this month, Dell. Eager to have your input on that…
SPC