Youth isn’t always wasted on the young.
Beginning in the late 1980s and continuing through to the present day, a wave of youthful filmmakers—working in modalities ranging from the brazen to the austere—has infused both mainstream and independent American films with the vigor, the promise, the possibility, and even the foolhardiness of youth. And while it sometimes seems there is little order and unity among these wildly diverse artists, one essential fact joins them: They all are members of Generation X.
The tones wrought by Gen-X filmmakers are as varied as the directors themselves: Steven Soderbergh’s provocative postmodernism, Quentin Tarantino’s swaggering violence, Kevin Smith’s philosophical ribaldry, David Fincher’s seductive nihilism. And even individual directors from this unpredictable group have surprises up their sleeve: Soderbergh followed the straightforward drama Erin Brockovich with an experimental examination of America’s war on drugs, Traffic, and a glossy caper film populated by several of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Ocean’s Eleven. Just as no one description captures the entirety of the cinema of Generation X, no one description captures the entirety of an important Gen-X filmmaker’s body of work.
The reasons why directors born in the 1960s and 1970s are so hard to nail down are many and fascinating, but the enigma of the cinema of Generation X revolves around a few key facts: Gen Xers grew up during one of the most tumultuous periods of American history, were inundated with popular culture to an unprecedented degree, suffered through social changes such as a rash of divorces, and then created a youth culture anchored in irony, apathy, and disenfranchisement. Is it any wonder that the filmmakers who belong to this group send mixed messages?
This book explores how a difficult transition from childhood to maturity colored the sensibilities of Gen Xers who became filmmakers, andfurther details how those sensibilities inform such intriguing Gen-X commonalties as the obsession with pop-culture references, the willingness to embrace postmodern narrative techniques, and the telling aversion to moral absolutes. It says everything about the cinema of Generation X to note that this generation has produced such unconventional movies as sex, lies, and videotape, Pi, Fight Club, and Memento.
Yet Gen Xers also create unthreatening escapism, whether it’s the superheroic action of X-Men or the supernatural adventure of The Mummy Returns. These pictures, and others like them, are as reflective of the character of Generation X as any others, however, for it follows that a generation raised on shallow popular culture would create their own disposable entertainment given the chance.
The disparities between the serious artists of this generation and their crowd-pleasing counterparts are important, but so too are the instances in which many facets of this peculiar generation’s identity converge: Consider Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix, a testosterone-laden action movie that’s also a mind-bending exploration of whether the concept of reality still holds its meaning in an age defined by technology.
The hero of The Matrix is a definitive Gen-X figure, because like countless members of the generation to which the Wachowksi brothers belong, the hero is overwhelmed by the onslaught of sensation and information and misinformation that is life in the modern world. He is lost, and only others like him can help him find his way. Not all Gen Xers are lost, of course, but nearly all Gen-X filmmakers are on a quest not unlike that pursued by the hero of The Matrix. They want to make sense of a senseless world.
To understand how these directors use their work to further this quest is to gain insight into the collective soul of a generation, and to more deeply understand why the cinematic creations of that generation are far more than just movies. Taken together, they provide an illuminating interpretation of the culture in which we live.