Only slightly more than a decade has passed since sex, lies, and videotape hit theaters, so it’s necessary to regard the cinema of Generation X as a work in progress. Even though certain Gen-X filmmakers have earned grown-up accolades—including Soderbergh’s 2001 Oscar for directing Traffic, following his historic twin nominations for Traffic and Erin Brockovich—the generation as a whole is far from reaching artistic maturity.
For that reason, this book is structured to reflect the different stages of Generation X’s maturation. Beginning with the next chapter, this book will trace how Gen-X directors have documented their collective growth process: Chapter 4 deals with issues such as education and family; Chapter 5 examines topics related to work; and so on until the penultimate chapter, which deals in part with how Gen-X directors envision the future. Yet before any such issues can be explored, it’s necessary to learn the language in which they are discussed.
As noted earlier, the idiom of Generation X is deeply informed by popular culture. While not every filmmaker born between 1961 and 1971 was raised in the same environment, pervasive social patterns during and after that period allow for some generalizations that will accurately characterize the upbringing of a large segment, if not a majority, of such filmmakers. The most important of these generalizations involves television. For the adolescents and preadolescents of the 1970s, television was a ubiquitous presence: part baby-sitter, part surrogate community, part entertainment. (The Internet appears to serve a similar role for Generation Y, which comprises youths born in the 1980s and 1990s.)
The role of television in American life changed dramatically during the period when Gen Xers were growing up. The Vietnam conflict, for instance, was called “the living-room war” because haunting combat stories were broadcast into American homes every day. And the explosion of cable vastly increased the number of channels that reached American homes. Previously, daytime and late-night television were ghettos for niche programming such as soap operas and rerun movies, respectively. But cable paved the way for competitive broadcasting around the clock. And while not every Gen-X filmmaker was raised with television as a constant companion, enough were—and enough have celebrated their relationship with television in their work—that it’s informative to note the symbiotic relationship between 1970s youths and the boob tube.
As mentioned earlier, one important corollary of Gen Xers’ bond with television is the emergence of infotainment. Movie fans have always enjoyed hearing about Hollywood’s behind-the-scenes machinations, but the public’s access to such information increased dramatically during the period of Gen Xers’ youth and adolescence. In 1980, for instance, the nightly “news” program Entertainment Tonight emerged to satiate the public thirst for Hollywood gossip and trade secrets. The infotainment explosion is a crucial parallel to Gen Xers’ television addiction, because in addition to being exposed to nonstop junk culture, Gen Xers were given countless opportunities to peer behind the curtain of said junk culture.
These opportunities helped produce unprecedented media-related savviness, which often manifests as cynicism (a been-there, done-that attitude toward entertainment) and/or fascination (an endless appetite for behind-the-scenes information). In fact, an ambivalent mixture of cynicism and fascination probably is the most prevalent attitude toward pop culture reflected in Gen-X cinema.
Hollywood was not the only subject area dissected in the mass media during the youth of Generation X, of course; the rise of entertainment-as-news dovetailed the rise of news-as-entertainment. Previously, news reports appeared on radio and television only in measured doses, or in rare wall-to-wall coverage of breaking stories. But with the emergence of Cable News Network (CNN), broadcast news became a nonstop enterprise. Suddenly, anyone interested in world events could tune into them at will and explore them in (comparative) depth, instead of waiting for a carefully doled-out soundbite on the evening news. CNN and the news-gathering organizations it influenced changed public discourse about world events, because the public went from receiving daily updates of important stories to receiving hourly updates of important—and not-so-important—stories. Just as the national conversation about entertainment was accelerated and deepened by the rise of entertainment-as-news, the national conversation about world events was changed by the rise of news-as-entertainment.
The relationship between Gen Xers and television grew even more symbiotic with the emergence of videocassette recorders, the importance of which to Gen-X filmmakers is monumental. Previous generations of would-be directors learned about movies by seeing them in theaters, catching them on television, or viewing them in film schools. Gen Xers grew up with the ability to study movies with the assistance of fast-forward, rewind, and pause buttons. Combined with their access to behind-the-scenes information, courtesy of outlets such as Entertainment Tonight, Gen Xers’ VCR usage made them more knowledgeable about the elements of film than any previous generation. Christopher Nolan, director of the video-age mystery Memento, noted some after-effects of viewers’ ability to take unprecedented control of the movie-watching experience.
As soon as you can stop [a film] and control the timeline, then it becomes like a book on some level. People are more accepting of the idea of jumping around and putting the story together in a fresh way. The supreme example of that is the trailer: You take different scenes, chop them up, stick them together, and allow the audience to reassemble the linear narrative.1
The downside, of course, was that people other than would-be filmmakers became just as knowledgeable: Heightened audience awareness of how films are made led to heightened expectations on the part of general audiences. With everybody peering behind Hollywood’s curtain, cinematic illusions had to become more and more elaborate.
A final noteworthy aspect of this generation’s relationship with television involves a specific channel: Music Television, the music-video outlet launched in 1981.
During the many years in which its programming was dominated by music videos, MTV offered a huge exhibition venue for short films, similar to the venue offered by commercials but with greater opportunities for creative freedom. Just as commercials bred important directors in the previous generation—Brits Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) and Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction), among myriad others, cut their teeth filming TV spots—videos made for MTV comprise the apprenticeship of several important Gen-X directors. David Fincher helmed memorable, award-winning clips for artists including Madonna and Aerosmith prior to making feature films; Spike Jonze, the wizard behind Being John Malkovich, first made his mark with irreverent clips for the Beastie Boys and other artists.
However, the MTV aesthetic of quick cuts, flashy lighting, and sped-up narrative became a cliché so quickly that by the late 1980s, it was an insult to refer to a film’s “MTV-style editing”—shorthand for style over substance. Nonetheless, Fincher, Jonze, and others have proven that directors can use MTV, commercials, and other nontheatrical venues as an extension of, or an alternative to, film school.
Yet the employment opportunities created by MTV’s existence are of secondary importance to the channel’s stylistic influence. The aforementioned MTV-style editing had a noticeable effect on audiences when it appeared in mainstream films of the 1980s, such as Flashdance and Top Gun. Filmmakers discovered that viewers were able to digest visual information more quickly than ever before. This paralleled a resurgence in the popularity of action films, so by the late 1980s, the ideal studio film was a fast-moving, violent thrill ride, preferably modeled on the hugely successful Die Hard.
All of these factors—Gen Xers’ relationship with television; the emergence of VCRs, infotainment, CNN, and MTV; the speeding-up of cinematic storytelling—defined what Gen Xers brought to the table when they arrived in Hollywood. Baby-boom directors came to Tinseltown eager to update classical cinematic style. Gen Xers headed to Hollywood eager to replace classical cinematic style with something faster and fresher. That something, by and large, was cinematic postmodernism.
Postmodernism itself, of course, is nothing new. Coined to define an architectural movement in the 1970s, and later appropriated as a catchall term for movements in other creative fields, postmodernism is loosely defined as the attempt to meld classicism with modernism; modernism, in turn, is the catchall term for expressionism, cubism, and other bracing art movements of the early twentieth century. Because cinematic postmodernism is such an abstract concept, however, it’s difficult to pinpoint just when it began to manifest. Certainly the movies of David Lynch, particularly Eraserhead (1977) and Blue Velvet (1986), match the definition of postmodernism: Their stories are classical in structure, but their style is contemporary. Yet the fact that Lynch gained his greatest notoriety in 1986—just three years before Soderbergh entered the scene—is an indication of how closely the manifestation of cinematic postmodernism coincided with the arrival of Gen-X cinema.
The sticking point here, of course, is that postmodernism existed before it actually had a name. Since the expressionist movies of such 1920s German auteurs as F. W. Murnau (Nosferatu) are clearly modernist, aren’t the avant-garde movies of 1960s French filmmakers including François Truffaut (Breathless) clearly postmodern? The answer is “yes,” but that doesn’t lessen the important connection between postmodernism and
Gen-X cinema. The American filmmakers of the baby-boom generation appropriated some of the French New Wave’s postmodern style—as seen, especially, in the most vital work of Scorsese and Coppola—but they also were deeply influenced by the Hollywood studio system. Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, for instance, can rightly be described as having myriad postmodern elements, but its narrative structure is too classic for the film to be rightly described as pure postmodernism.
So if cinematic postmodernism in its purest form only entered the mainstream consciousness with the arrival of films such as Lynch’s Blue Velvet—admittedly, an arguable assertion—then the crop of postmodern films that flourished in Blue Velvet’s wake could be described as the first mainstream American postmodernist films. These are fine, and perhaps even nitpicking, distinctions, but there’s a reason for them. Blue Velvet was embraced by the public as a novelty. sex, lies, and videotape was embraced not as a novelty, but as a popular entertainment. It took Lynch, Scorsese, and others to prepare the public for serious cinematic postmodernism, so when Soderbergh, Tarantino and other Gen Xers began to employ postmodern techniques on a regular basis, audiences were receptive to such narrative experimentation. The important connection between Gen Xers and postmodernism, then, is that they took the stylistic movement out of the arthouse and into the multiplex.
That said, sex, lies, and videotape features only the most accessible kind of cinematic postmodernism: a fragmented narrative. The story begins in spurts, with active shots of handsome drifter Graham (James Spader) woven in with static images of housewife Ann (Andie MacDowell). Soderbergh, who edited the picture in addition to writing and directing it, weaves the lives of his four principal characters together so that audiences see connections of which the characters might not be aware. While at first glance his intercutting may seem nothing more than simple parallel action—the idea, developed by cinematic pioneer Edwin S. Porter (1869–1941), of shifting back and forth between related actions—Soderbergh’s intercutting actually is more sublime.
He layers Ann’s narration over shots of Graham driving in his car, so our curiosity about Graham is increased when we learn that Ann is anxious about his arrival. She’s nervous because the current endeavors of Graham, a college chum of her husband’s, are shrouded in mystery. Instead of simply defining the relationship between disparate images, Soderbergh defines the relationship and also provides its subtext. That he additionally takes us inside each of the characters—by showing that Ann’s narration is part of a therapy session, and by showing the simplicity of Graham’s rootless lifestyle—accelerates the speed of his storytelling.
Such intricate juggling certainly had been done in previous films, but the significant aspect of Soderbergh’s nonlinear approach is his presumption that viewers can and will play along with his narrative game. He backs off a bit from his aggressive editing during certain extended dialogue scenes, but the concepts of layered narration and complex intercutting are crucial to the film’s climax, during which Soderbergh also brings in the thorny issue of reality being witnessed through the remove of artifice.
Seeing is believing: The narrative trickery of Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape, with Andie MacDowell as a woman who discovers her husband’s adultery, exemplifies the use of postmodern concepts in Gen-X storytelling (Miramax Films).
The climax involves Ann’s philandering husband, John (Peter Gallagher), viewing a videotape that Graham made of Ann. On it, she explains the void in her marriage, then prepares to consummate her flirtation with Graham. Soderbergh begins Ann’s confessional by showing it as a grainy image on the video screen in front of John, then cuts to a clear film image, as if the scene is happening in the present. Then, to exit the confessional, Soderbergh cuts back to the grainy image on the video screen, allowing him to bring us back into the true present, so we can see John’s reaction to the videotape. Combined with the narrative game he began in the first scene, the temporal shifts involved in the confession scene reveal that the idiom of the film is inherently, not superficially, postmodern.
sex, lies, and videotape did exceptionally well for an unheralded art film, but it never achieved blockbuster status, and scored only a token Academy Award nomination, for Best Original Screenplay. Yet just eleven years later, Soderbergh released a film as layered as sex, lies, and videotape: Traffic, his epic about America’s war on drugs. The latter picture enjoyed tremendous box-office success and received a slew of Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture. Soderbergh certainly evolved in the intervening period (so much so that his other 2000 film, Erin Brockovich, was as conventional as Traffic was unconventional), yet his evolution is an insufficient explanation for why Traffic enjoyed greater public acceptance than sex, lies. Perhaps the real reason behind the shift is that American audiences matured in step with Soderbergh: Viewers became acclimated to techniques that seemed bold or even off-putting in 1989, largely because of how those techniques were employed in successful films directed by Gen Xers.
Tom Tykwer, the young German director whose 1999 arthouse hit Run Lola Run exuded a vivacious energy that put some of his American contemporaries to shame, commented on the maturation of audience sensibilities.
Everybody knows that we’re hitting the limits of traditional filmmaking because it’s becoming so perfectionistic. You are seeing films that are so perfect you don’t even connect to them anymore. A film like [Being John] Malkovich is an invitation to do something different. Even The Matrix, because it serves all of our traditional desires in the cinema, but it plays with your mind in a very strange way. Ten years ago, I don’t think people would have even been ready for it.2
Probably the most crucial juncture during the process of familiarizing American audiences with postmodernism was the release of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in 1994. Just five years after Soderbergh’s challenging narrative techniques paved the way, Tarantino arrived with a picture even more disjointed than Soderbergh’s—yet Pulp Fiction became the blockbuster that sex, lies, and videotape did not, earning over $100 million at the box office and scoring an Oscar nod for Best Picture.
The unlikely success of Pulp Fiction made Tarantino the central figure of Gen-X cinema for much of the 1990s. While Soderbergh’s prominence became clear once he had achieved numerous successes, Tarantino’s became evident immediately, because a slew of copycat movies followed in Pulp Fiction’s wake—ironic, too-cool-for-school crime films such as Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead and Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag. With his wiseass erudition, funny pop-culture references, playful narrative splintering, and exploitation-movie sensationalism, Tarantino defined an idiom that was revisited by many of his peers, to say nothing of many shallow imitators.
Tarantino’s personal history adds to his significance as a Gen-X exemplar, for he was raised by his mother following his parents’ divorce. This connects him to the shifting family dynamics that had such an unsettling effect on Tarantino’s generation. Filmmakers from previous generations had come from broken homes, but the issues of abandonment and gender identity sparked by familial schisms such as that which affected Tarantino’s household recur in myriad Gen-X films, notably Fight Club.
Tarantino and his mother relocated from his native Knoxville, Tennessee, to Los Angeles when he was a child, and after the burgeoning filmmaker dropped out of high school, he got a job working at a video store. The importance of videocassettes to Gen-X filmmakers already has been noted, and the way that Tarantino reportedly immersed himself in movies while working at the store amplifies this point. During this ad hoc apprenticeship, Tarantino made connections with customers who were involved in the film business, leading to his discovery by enterprising producers. His plucked-from-nowhere ascension became Generation X’s equivalent to the story about starlet Lana Turner getting discovered in a Hollywood drug store: After Tarantino hit, it became a cliché to say that tomorrow’s great filmmakers aren’t studying at film schools, but helping customers at video stores.
Tarantino’s intimate familiarity with a variety of film styles—and, to a degree, the undisciplined manner in which he explored favorite genres, as opposed to studying a well-rounded curriculum, as he might have in film school—put him in a unique position to blaze a postmodern trail. He knew film inside and out, so it was no big deal for him to turn film inside-out.
He first did so with his remarkable debut film, 1992’s Reservoir Dogs. Depicting the violent and fractious events occurring before and after a heist, the picture is as good an example of postmodern storytelling as Soderbergh’s sex, lies. In both pictures, stories are told elliptically: Moments are plucked out of time and place, then reordered not to represent their chronological occurrence, but to accentuate connections that would not be clear were the moments presented chronologically.
In some bold cases, Tarantino even blends the present and the past in a single frame. The picture contains a bravura scene during which a robber code-named Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) describes encountering cops and a police dog in a bathroom while carrying drugs on his person. As the camera makes a 360-degree circle around Orange, who is telling the tale, the background shifts from the present to the past, so suddenly we’re in the bathroom with Orange and the cops. Orange describes how he wriggled free of the situation, then the scene shifts back to the “present.” Tarantino creates this illusion with blocking and lighting, not special effects, so the scene is postmodern in realization as well as intent: He uses classic techniques in the service of a fresh storytelling idea.
Were this the only temporal game that Tarantino played in Reservoir Dogs, it might be insignificant, because myriad stage and film dramatists used similar techniques previously. But because the bathroom scene is part of a fabric of temporal gamesmanship—a fabric so cleverly woven that the film’s central event, the heist, is never shown—the bathroom scene identifies the mischief inherent in Tarantino’s storytelling.
Honor among thieves: In Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, with Harvey Keitel (standing) and Steve Buscemi, an offbeat story structure is used to dramatize the tale of a heist gone wrong (Miramax Films).
Pulp Fiction is even more brazen than Tarantino’s debut film. The picture doesn’t contain a traditional narrative, per se, but rather three interconnected narratives. An ambitious blend of gutter-level violence, witty romance, salacious humor, aching pathos, and macho posturing, the film thrives on the same confidence that powered sex, lies, and videotape. Tarantino doesn’t spoon-feed his offbeat tale to viewers, but instead presumes that viewers have been exposed to enough of the same narrative as him that they can digest information in the disjointed way that he delivers it. It helps, of course, that he’s an exquisite writer capable of making long stretches of dialogue as entertaining as fast-moving screen action, and it helps that he’s a fine director with an eye for pleasing compositions and great taste in actors. Yet no matter how easily Tarantino’s film goes down, it’s still a bracing dose of experimentalism.
In a typically confrontational directorial choice, Tarantino puts a distracting postmodern touch into an important taxicab scene involving past-his-prime boxer Butch (Bruce Willis). Echoing the way he didn’t show the heist in Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino shows us a prelude to Butch’s big match, in which the boxer is told to throw the fight, but doesn’t show the match. Instead, Tarantino cuts straight to the taxicab, in which Butch is driven by Esmeralda (Angela Jones). During their conversation, we learn that Butch not only reneged on his promise to throw the fight, but killed his opponent.
While viewers receive this startling information, however, some notice that the background of the scene seems odd. Although the scene is filmed in color, the rear projection illustrating the street behind the taxi is filmed in black-and-white. Is Tarantino winkingly reminding viewers that the story they’re hearing is at least as old as the black-and-white boxing pictures of the 1930s? Or is he making a blunt, expressionistic statement about Butch’s world not being “black and white” in moral terms? In a sense, this ambiguous imagery is one of Tarantino’s most postmodern touches, for while he ties up most of his narrative threads in classical style, he allows viewers to interpret details such as the black-and-white background as they will. His style puts modernism and classicism side-by-side, pulling liberally from each school.
Violence is as important to Tarantino’s movies as postmodernism, and there’s a peculiar tension in the audience during a Tarantino movie. As an onscreen character slowly pulls out a knife—or a sword, or a syringe—viewers don’t want to see the bloodshed that’s coming, but they don’t want to look away from the screen. Even when he’s grossing viewers out, Tarantino provides surprising, magnetic drama that feels like nothing ever seen before.
It’s only after one of his movies is over that it becomes clear how familiar the content really is, because Tarantino recycles plots and situations from countless B-movies and crime novels. He’s not merely derivative, however, for he filters this second-hand narrative material through a distinct worldview. Lance (Eric Stoltz), the drug dealer in Pulp Fiction, is yet another onscreen dope-peddler, but Tarantino portrays him as an amiable slacker watching cartoons in his bathrobe, thereby humanizing an over-familiar archetype and adding gravity and credibility to Lance’s scenes.
Another example of Tarantino grounding an audacious scene with real-life details involves Jules, the Bible-quoting hit man played by Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. After surviving a near-death experience, Jules announces that he’s having “what alcoholics refer to as ‘a moment of clarity’,” then vaults into a remarkable speech analyzing the pros and cons of his violent existence. In Tarantino’s perspective, real life and reel life are so entwined that it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins, which is why he often is called the director who most epitomizes his generation.
Once they achieved prominence, Tarantino and Soderbergh drew from the postmodern well again and again. Tarantino’s charming crime film Jackie Brown employed the same kind of temporal patchwork he used in his first two features, and Soderbergh played games with time and place in The Underneath, Out of Sight, The Limey, and Traffic. Yet these two are hardly the only Gen-X directors who use narrative trickery to amplify narrative content. David Fincher’s Fight Club features not only a disjointed timeline, but also scenes that subversively blend reality, fantasy, and delusion; and Doug Liman’s Go is the most entertaining of countless Tarantino homages.
Liman’s breakthrough film, Swingers, contains overt references to Tarantino and his influence. In one scene, a Reservoir Dogs poster is visible; in another, dialogue about how Tarantino’s style is ripped off from Martin Scorsese’s is followed by a coy rip-off of a famous slow-motion shot from Reservoir Dogs, accompanied by the 1970s pop hit “Pick Up the Pieces”—a musical counterpoint that underlines how self-conscious an act pop-culture recycling has become. Swingers, while highly enjoyable and occasionally affecting, straddles the line separating pop-culture send-ups from pop-culture artifacts, because even while the film’s young men on the prowl for sexual partners steep themselves in borrowed style—Rat Pack-style suits and decades-old swing music—they issue freshly minted catch phrases like the oft-quoted “You’re money, baby.” What’s more, it’s possible to see echoes of Swingers’ pop-culture recycling in other Gen-X movies. When one Swingers character compliments another’s suaveness by saying “That was like the Jedi mind shit!,” it recalls similar Star Wars references in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats. And when a Swingers scene of a man charming a woman is underscored by the 1970s song “Magic Man,” it resembles the use of the same song, for an almost identical effect, in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides.
Poker faces: Nineties attitude and sixties style intersect in Doug Liman’s Swingers, which features (from left) Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, and Patrick Van Horn as buddies on the prowl for “beautiful babies” (Miramax Films).
The manner in which the hip postmodernism of Gen-X directors punctures sanctimonious ideas about society and storytelling contributes to the widely held sentiment that members of this generation hold nothing sacred, but author Geoffrey T. Holtz made a good point about the Gen-X predilection for black comedy:
Satire and self-aware irony have replaced slapstick. Rather than using humor to escape the inanity and desperation that runs through so many aspects of late-twentieth-century America, [Gen Xers] often use it to confront these problems. Homelessness, suicide, murder, unemployment, even AIDS—all serious issues, but fodder for humor among a generation so well versed in societal problems large and small.3
Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich is perhaps the most breathlessly postmodern Gen-X film yet. The outrageous story, about a puppeteer who finds a portal leading to the inside of real-life actor John Malkovich’s brain, has as much fantastic invention as The Wizard of Oz, yet it is designed to deliver not a moral homily, but a scathing commentary on contemporary America’s obsession with celebrity.
Gen Xers’ fascination with celebrity culture is an outgrowth of their immersion in pop culture. Their exposure to the infotainment explosion was explored earlier, but certain aspects of that explosion are worth highlighting. During the 1990s, when vast numbers of Gen-X directors began working steadily, the focus of American celebrity culture shifted from such traditional entertainment figures as musicians and actors to everyday people enjoying what Andy Warhol termed their “fifteen minutes” of notoriety. Confessional television and literature, as exemplified by talk shows such as The Jerry Springer Show and an endless parade of books about dysfunctional families, gave average Americans a chance to enjoy the spotlight of celebrity in exchange for sharing their tragedies, peccadilloes, and personal soap operas.
Some of these insta-celebrities were innocuous figures trying to spread socially significant messages, such as young men and women explaining how difficult it is to reveal one’s homosexuality. Yet some insta-celebrities were marginal figures exploited for sensational appeal. In a notorious incident that underlined the lurid appeal of confessional talk shows, a group of white supremacists appearing on Geraldo Rivera’s program got involved in a violent brawl with audience members. Rivera himself was wounded in the fray, and he played up the drama of his injury as if he had been on the front line of a war. Viewers ate up such brawls, which occurred on virtually every episode of Jerry Springer’s program, and Americans’ morbid fascination with the dark aspects of human behavior reached an apex with the so-called “trial of the century.”
In 1994, former football star O. J. Simpson was accused of murdering his wife and a male friend of hers. Prime-time viewers were treated to an aerial shot of Simpson’s Ford Bronco crawling down a California highway, with police in slow pursuit, and the Bronco chase was played for sensational spectacle, because newscasters prepared viewers for several possible outcomes: Simpson might kill himself, they said, or he might be struck by police gunfire. The Simpson drama continued when his case went to trial, and the televised announcement of his not guilty verdict scored ratings that rivaled prime-time programming.
Other trials, such as that of the murderous Menendez brothers, received similar front-page treatment. In the 1990s, notoriety and fame became interchangeable concepts, and this social shift was reflected in films made by Gen Xers.
Being John Malkovich is the wittiest such reflection. Through the fanciful premise of the portal into Malkovich’s head, the filmmakers allow their characters to take celebrity worship to its logical extreme: The characters become celebrities not because of accomplishment, but because they invade an established celebrity’s physical being. Given that Hollywood-related reportage has long lent the private lives of famous people at least as much import as their actual work, the conceit at the heart of Being John Malkovich seems a rational response to the public’s appetite for gossip. If reading about stars’ sex lives is exciting, the movie ponders, wouldn’t it be doubly exciting to participate in such a sex life? The characters in Being John Malkovich are psychic stalkers who would rather have sex as Malkovich than have sex with Malkovich, because Malkovich—or any other celebrity—is interesting for his social stature, not for his identity as an individual.
Director Spike Jonze, writer Charlie Kaufman, and their cohorts take this whimsical vision of vicarious experience to a comical extreme by having characters sell rides through Malkovich’s brain like rides on a roller coaster. Then the filmmakers put a jovially postmodern twist on the material by having the “real” Malkovich enter the portal, thereby penetrating his own mind as a stranger. Once he’s inside himself, Malkovich experiences a nightmare of celebrity narcissism—from his self-as-self perspective, every person he sees has his own face, and the only word they say is his name. Predictably, the visit to the land of unrestrained self-love is maddening.
Almost famous: The whimsical fantasy Being John Malkovich satirizes America’s obsession with celebrity by penetrating the mind of actor John Malkovich, seen receiving instruction from director Spike Jonze before filming a unique point-of-view shot (USA Films/Gramercy Pictures).
The film backs off a bit from its celebrity commentary by revealing that the portal is part of a sci-fi scheme cooked up by folks seeking eternal life. But even relegated to the backseat during the story’s conclusion, the film’s entertainment-industry satire lingers after the movie’s conclusion with a bitter, true resonance. As screenwriter Charlie Kaufman noted:
A lot of it comes from the idea of not wanting to be yourself and being envious of other people. There is for sure the idea of looking out in the world and feeling you don’t deserve to be there. How do you come to feel that you have as much right as anyone else to be on this planet, when you have a barrage of information telling you that you don’t have a right to be here, or that you have to change yourself to be allowed to be here? I took each character and on an instinctive level explored how they would react to that anxiety.4
Other films imagined by Gen Xers deal with the very 1990s idea of achieving celebrity for something other than talent. Natural Born Killers, which controversy-magnet Oliver Stone adapted from a screenplay by Tarantino, shows a pair of serial killers who become popular celebrities; while basically a modernization of ideas seen in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, 1973’s Badlands, and other films, Natural Born Killers features a contemporary element in the figure of a sensationalistic TV broadcaster who exploits the killers’ lives for his own gain. And The Truman Show, a poignant drama written by Gen Xer Andrew Niccol, depicts an innocent who doesn’t realize that his entire life is a fabrication broadcast into millions of homes as a nonstop reality-TV program. In a quintessential bit of Gen-X irony, Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), is the star of his own top-rated show, but he’s the only person who isn’t in on the joke.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling Boogie Nights tracks the rise and fall of Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), an otherwise average young man who achieves fame in the porn-movie industry because of his enormous penis. The film’s sad commentary on exploitation is best summed up by its perfect final image: Dirk stands before a mirror, with his face hidden by the camera angle, then unzips his pants and reveals, for the first time, his mammoth member. “I am a star. I’m a big bright shining star,” he says—ostensibly to himself, but really to his phallus. The idea that audiences have celebrated not whole people but just facets of them says volumes about how fame is achieved America today. Just as patrons line up to be Malkovich, and just as violence-hungry viewers make two natural born killers into media figures, porn fans deify Dirk not for his charm or personality, but for his abnormal appendage. The freak show must go on.
Another layer of Gen Xers’ attitude toward celebrity is seen in Ben Stiller’s underrated satire, The Cable Guy, and Neil LaBute’s overrated fable, Nurse Betty. In Stiller’s film, the titular cable-television installer (Jim Carrey) is such a TV addict that his entire personality is a composite of fictional personalities from sitcoms and other programs; in LaBute’s movie, a waitress (Renée Zellweger) detaches from reality after witnessing her husband’s murder, then ventures from Kansas to California so she can hook up with the fictional soap-opera doctor she adores. Both movies make obvious but poignant statements about the dangers of replacing reality with fiction.
There’s a world of difference between the characters in Being John Malkovich, who risk everything to escape reality, and those in Reality Bites, who merely comment that, well, reality bites. The scene from Ben Stiller’s film in which two characters duel over sitcom trivia said something about the history the characters share. It also reflected a commonplace screenwriting tack, which is to mask the true intentions of a scene by having characters talk around said intentions. So even though the dialogue is about which episode of Good Times featured Gary Coleman, viewers understand that the real meat of the scene is two men sparring over a woman.
Helen Childress’s script for Reality Bites features numerous such pop-culture references, such as when Michael (Ben Stiller) woos Lelaina (Winona Ryder) while they listen to Frampton Comes Alive, a rock album that was popular when the characters were children. These references—as well as those in Tarantino’s films, such as the Madonna-related conversation in Reservoir Dogs—are effective because they ground the cinematic characters in a reality that exists beyond the screen. But sometimes the pop-culture references obscure the weight of a scene, and drag movies into the morass of boob-tube superficiality that colors the shallowest conversations among real-life Gen Xers. Consider this scene from Reality Bites, in which Lelaina tries to comfort her friend Vickie (Janeane Garofalo), who believes she might have contracted AIDS.
VICKIE: You don’t understand—every day, all day, it’s all that I think about. Every time I sneeze, it’s like I’m four sneezes away from the hospice. And it’s like it’s not even happening to me. It’s like I’m watching it on some crappy show like Melrose Place or some shit, right? And I’m like the new character: I’m the HIV/AIDS character and I live in the building and I teach everybody that it’s okay to be near me, it’s okay to talk to me, and then I die. And there’s everybody at my funeral, wearing halter tops or chokers or some shit like that.
LELAINA: …You’re freaking out. And you know what? You’re gonna have to deal with the results whatever they are…. It’s gonna be okay. [Pause.] Melrose Place is a really good show.
Tarantino uses pop-culture references so masterfully that they are virtually his trademark. Viewers watching Pulp Fiction related to the way that hit man Vincent Vega (John Travolta) described his experience of eating a Quarter Pounder sandwich in France, where it is called a “Royale with Cheese”; the McDonald’s product is such a ubiquitous item in American life that when viewers learn Vincent is a Quarter Pounder eater, they accept him as one of their real-life number.
Even films that Tarantino wrote but did not direct are filled with effective pop-culture references. In the crime story True Romance, a shy twentysomething courts a young woman by taking her to a comic-book store and offering to show her a vintage copy of Spider-Man’s first issue; in the submarine thriller Crimson Tide, to which Tarantino made uncredited screenplay contributions, two characters connect by discussing a comic titled The Silver Surfer. The specifics of these references are lost on viewers unfamiliar with comic books, but the thrust of the references—the scenes beneath the scenes—resonate with the credibility created by Tarantino’s allusions to real life.
Again, the danger with excessive pop-culture referencing is that the real content of a scene can get buried beneath the ephemera. Tarantino generally is disciplined enough to avoid this trap, but he fell right into it during a notorious cameo appearance in the 1994 romantic comedy Sleep With Me. Re-creating a bit with which he reportedly entertains friends, Tarantino identifies why he believes the ultra-macho action movie Top Gun is filled with veiled homoerotica. His proof is little more than dialogue such as “Watch my tail, Maverick!” (which sounds provocative when taken out of context), but his enthusiasm and conviction are persuasive. The trouble is that Tarantino’s scene stops the movie dead, setting narrative thrust aside for the cheap thrill of a hipster’s entertaining self-indulgence.
It is possible, however, to be self-indulgent and still propel narrative. Kevin Smith—the verbose, crude, and occasionally brilliant writer-director of Clerks—has declared on many occasions that the Star Wars films were a crucial influence on his creative life. He reveals the depth of his affection for George Lucas’s space opera in a Clerks scene featuring convenience-store cashier Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and video-store clerk Randal (Jeff Anderson).
Killing time between customers, the two debate the relative virtues of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, the second and third Star Wars flicks. At one point, Randal fires off a rant about Jedi, explaining that he dislikes how the film’s heroes destroyed their enemies’ incomplete space station oblivious to the possibility that “contractors” might be aboard the station. While the moment at first sounds like unrestrained geekiness, the sort of talk one might overhear at a Star Wars convention, the conversation actually reveals something about Randal. Despite the cynicism he displays throughout the movie, he has a conscience as well as social consciousness; the fact that these qualities primarily manifest when describing lightweight entertainment tells us, additionally, that Randal lacks the ambition to do much with his admirable qualities. This very funny scene allows Smith to vent his aggression about Jedi through Randal, but also to make insightful observations about the sort of person whom Randal represents.
Just as Tarantino did, however, Smith eventually fell off the high wire of pop-culture referencing. His follow-up to Clerks, the amateurish Mallrats, drowns in cheeky allusions to comic books and Star Wars. While the romantic story lines that ostensibly drive the movie are underdeveloped to the point of anemia, Smith devotes endless screen time to vignettes in which the character Silent Bob (played by Smith himself) attempts to master the “Jedi mind trick” that figures prominently in Star Wars mythology. The closest that Smith comes in Mallrats to balancing narrative concerns with pop-culture self-indulgence is giving a voice-of-reason cameo to comic-book titan Stan Lee. Lee’s presence and some of his lines are inside jokes, but his role at least serves a significant dramatic purpose.
While using cameos such as Lee’s to wink at audiences is nothing new—the technique dates back at least to Alfred Hitchcock’s appearances in his own films—Gen-X directors often cast major roles ironically. Tarantino’s casting of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction is the most successful example. The actor-dancer was in a career slump, having wasted the opportunities won by past successes, but Tarantino felt Travolta had lost none of the charm, swagger, and charisma he brought to such Me Decade hits as Saturday Night Fever. The director has said he wrote the Vincent Vega role as a tribute to the actor’s past accomplishments, and Tarantino included actions, such as dancing, that echoed Travolta’s previous screen appearances. So even though Vincent was a new screen commodity, he felt like an old one. The gimmick worked beautifully, adding a pop-culture echo to Travolta’s performance—and, incidentally, spurring the most lucrative period of Travolta’s career.
Tarantino tried the same trick by casting two other 1970s figures—blaxploitation star Pam Grier and B-movie regular Robert Forster—in Jackie Brown, but this time the gimmick worked half as well. Grier and Forster brought a wealth of experience to the movie, and gave gorgeously fresh performances, but because they never had been as familiar as Travolta, they didn’t bring the same entertaining baggage. Viewers who knew the performers’ histories got the joke; viewers who didn’t merely discovered Grier and Forster as if they were new actors.
Making sure audiences are in on pop-culture jokes is a delicate art at which only a few filmmakers excel. Kevin Williamson showed his mastery in the script for Scream, a 1996 horror satire directed by slasher-flick veteran Wes Craven. Williamson brought a young, snide sensibility to the script, which simultaneously sent up and adhered to conventions of the then-tired serial-killer genre. Characters in Scream talked about having seen so many horror movies—Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and so on—that the narrative devices used in those films were clichés. Yet the characters tolerated the clichés as they might the bad table manners of a favorite uncle. So when a real killer starts stalking the characters, à la the murderers in slasher movies, the movie-savvy characters ironically telegraph their own demises.
Scream and its inferior sequels probably represent the apex of pop-culture referencing, because they are nothing but pop-culture referencing. The first film’s nods to the audience include a cameo by 1970s TV star Henry Winkler as a high school principal, and, for those paying close attention, the behind-the-camera presence of Craven, director of the aforementioned Nightmare on Elm Street. Yet the speed with which the Scream series ran out of steam revealed the dryness of the well from which pop-culture references are drawn.
An interesting offshoot of Scream’s success was that it sparked a new cycle of slasher movies, including the Williamson-scripted I Know What You Did Last Summer. These movies offered exactly the kind of formulaic, insipid escapism that Scream satirized. So if the smothering irony of Scream was a kind of postmodernism, then the irony-free horror movies it inspired were a kind of post-postmodernism. The mere citation of such an unwieldy term reveals why the cycle of pop-culture referencing and re-referencing grew so dizzying during the 1990s.
The success of Scream redoubled Hollywood studios’ efforts to court the youth market, and also revealed that enough new moviegoers had entered the marketplace that even very recent trends could be recycled. Therefore, a new wave of teen comedies appeared in tandem with the revived slasher genre. Inspired by the lascivious coming-of-age comedies (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Porky’s) and teen-empowerment dramedies (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club) that flourished in the early 1980s, the new teen comedies included such Gen-X directed pictures as Can’t Hardly Wait and American Pie. While these pictures possess a certain unpretentious charm, their fixation on breasts and bodily fluids mostly reflects the immaturity of their makers—and offers proof that the desire for friendship and fornication is universal to the adolescents of every generation.
The irreverent manner in which pop culture is used as a kind of shorthand in Gen-X flicks, however, isn’t the most interesting manifestation of this generation’s infatuation with mass media. By casting actors who achieved iconic status in the 1970s, revisiting themes that suffused the cinema of that era, and aping stylistic touches perfected by the movie brats, Gen-X directors built a crucial connection to the previous cinematic generation.
This connection can be seen most clearly in Gen-X films about the 1970s. Sofia Coppola’s dreamlike tale about a group of sisters doomed to die at their own hands, The Virgin Suicides, is set in an affluent Michigan suburb circa the mid–1970s, so the film’s costumes feature polyester pants and hippie-ish dresses. The clothing is complemented by subtler visual signifiers: Coppola’s film is shot in a soft camera style that approximates the feel of natural light, recalling the self-consciously unvarnished photography of the movie brats’ movies. Amplifying these connections is the fact that the Virgin Suicides director is the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, whose Godfather pictures featured scenes so underlit that actors’ eyes were hidden in shadow.
Other Gen-X pictures set in the 1970s include Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s shaggy comedy about drug-addled high schoolers; Waking the Dead, Keith Gordon’s heartfelt exploration of the relationship between activism and politics; and 54, Mark Christopher’s inept attempt to re-create the heyday of New York City’s most infamous discotheque/pleasure palace, Studio 54. The connection Gen-X directors feel to the 1970s is about more than respect for previous filmmakers, of course: For the segment of Generation X under discussion in this book, the 1970s were a time of adolescence and childhood. Their nostalgia for the period, therefore, is both personal and professional.
A handful of Gen-X films echo 1970s style without actually being set in the period. Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich, a rabble-rousing drama about a law-firm secretary trying to expose corporate-sanctioned pollution, has the same scrappy, procedural feel as Norma Rae and The China Syndrome, two earlier films about crusading women. 8mm, a gruesome story about snuff films that was written by Gen Xer Andrew Kevin Walker, is a sister film to Hardcore, the porn-industry drama written and directed by 1970s stalwart Paul Schrader. Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown all feature music and actors from the 1970s, as well as stylistic touches recalling crime films of the period.
Some Gen-X films have a 1970s feel that can’t be traced to a particular influence. The Yards, James Gray’s unoriginal but engrossing drama about corruption among contractors serving New York City’s subway system, has photography as dark and moody as The Godfather’s, features a story line as intimate and oppressive as any that Martin Scorsese ever directed, and includes performances by three 1970s giants: Faye Dunaway, James Caan, and Ellen Burstyn. Burstyn also appears in Darren Aronofsky’s viscerally overwhelming Requiem for a Dream, a painful parable about drug use. Aronofsky, incidentally, is such a child of the 1970s that when he was hired in 2000 to reinvigorate the moribund Batman franchise, he told interviewers that he wanted to set his Bat-flick in the 1970s, and give it the gritty, documentary-style feel of William Friedkin’s 1971 Oscar-winner, The French Connection.
Ultimately, finding connections to The French Connection and other films is just a parlor game unless a deeper reason than nostalgia can be found for links between Gen Xers’ work and the culture of their youth. That deeper reason has to do with what the arrival of baby boomers meant in Hollywood. As noted earlier, the studio system was dying when counterculture hits such as Easy Rider revealed the earning potential of catering to the youth market. Writ large, the studios gave the keys to their kids, and for a handful of glorious years, the kids took their beloved medium for a wild ride.
By the end of the 1970s, the ride was mostly over, because the success of mass-appeal hits such as Jaws and Star Wars gave the studios a new formula to copy. So when Gen Xers began to enter the film industry en masse in the late 1980s and early 1990s, mainstream American cinema had become almost as stagnant as it was when the boomers arrived.
It took them a few years to do it, but by 1999, Gen Xers shook up the industry as greatly as their predecessors had. That year, the irreverent domestic drama American Beauty, the startling no-budget horror movie The Blair Witch Project, the playful freakout Being John Malkovich, the ambitious multi-character story Magnolia, and the masterfully constructed ghost story The Sixth Sense—all directed by Gen Xers—proved that there was room in cineplexes for bold, brash ideas as well as corporate product.
Therefore, the deeper connection between the 1970s and Gen-X directors is that the brash auteurs of the Me Decade blazed the trail that Gen Xers followed. Just as the activists of the earlier generation proved that it was possible to force sweeping social change, the filmmakers of that generation proved that it was possible to force sweeping artistic change.
A final level to this long discussion of Gen Xers’ relationship with pop culture has to do with their most insular storytelling habit: making movies about movies. Because of the reasons cited earlier (television, infotainment, and so on), Generation X grew up with a greater awareness about how entertainment is made than any previous generation. This perhaps explains their interest in subject matter that has marginal appeal to those outside Hollywood.
Paul Thomas Anderson veiled his movie about movies, Boogie Nights, by telling a story not about mainstream filmmaking, but about the porn industry. His picture addresses issues such as the inherent artifice of motion pictures, the dichotomy between screen personas and the actors who create them, and the intoxicating appeal of fame. Yet because he deals with a marginal subdivision of the film industry, his picture doesn’t have the narcissistic feel of a movie that is only about Hollywood. Watching Boogie Nights, viewers learn about cinema while taking an anthropological journey into a subculture.
Phil Joanou, a former Spielberg protégé whose films are flashy to a fault, took a more direct approach in his movie about movies, Entropy. The picture is unwatchable for several reasons, but it’s fascinating to see how a filmmaker who once was handed a career on a silver platter chose to fictionalize his professional life.
After making a slick thesis film at the University of Southern California, Joanou was recruited by Steven Spielberg to direct an episode of the short-lived anthology series Amazing Stories. Joanou graduated to features with Three O’Clock High, a stylish but empty blend of High Noon and high school. He then directed State of Grace, a drama about the Irish mob in New York City. Featuring powerhouse actors Sean Penn and Gary Oldman, plus a violent script in the style of The Godfather, the film was rife with possibilities for memorable drama and visual action. Joanou quickly established a signature style with an MTV feel, so he became the symbol of a new wave of film-school brats—moviemakers whose only frame of reference is movies. The same criticism had been leveled at Lucas and his peers, but at least the movie brats of the 1970s were weaned on classic cinema. The movie brats of the late 1980s and early 1990s, critics crowed, were weaned on junk.
Joanou validated many criticisms of his work with the enervated Entropy, the story of a young director, Jake (Stephen Dorff), given the job of directing a multimillion-dollar period picture. Jake threatens to halt production when his backers strong-arm him into including gratuitous nudity, and while the character’s essential dilemma of balancing art and commerce is a valid topic for discussion, Jake is presented as such a vapid sort that his thoughts on art—and, by extension, Joanou’s—lack credibility. Entropy is the worst kind of self-reflexive filmmaking, because it’s metafiction that talks the talk of introspection, but doesn’t walk the walk.
Kevin Smith had the savvy to wrap his exercise in cinematic self-indulgence, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, in the kind of sexual and scatological humor that guaranteed at least a lucrative opening weekend for comedies early in the twenty-first century. The picture, a silly gaze behind the bright lights of the movie industry, concerns New Jersey marijuana dealers Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith), who appeared in all of the director’s previous films. They discover that a movie is to be made from Bluntman and Chronic, the pot-themed comic book for which they were the inspiration.
The duo set out to derail the production, and amid myriad gross references to bodily functions and oral sex, Smith lets loose several cutting jokes at the expense of notable filmmakers and studios. Gus Van Sant, a director who shifted from independent films to studio projects, plays himself as being too busy counting money to actually direct; a gag about Miramax states that the company known for distributing arthouse movies went downhill after releasing the teen comedy She’s All That; and Jay and Silent Bob beat the tar out of a detractor whose online handle is “Magnolia fan,” a device that allows Smith to spew venom at the Paul Thomas Anderson film of which he is a vocal critic. Jay and Silent Bob suggests that Smith wants it both ways: He wants viewers to accompany him on the ride of his movie, but he wants them to step outside the movie to laugh at the ludicrous aspects of filmmaking. This is Gen-X irony at its most mundane.
Alter egomaniac: Writer-director-actor Kevin Smith’s weakness for lowbrow irony led him to make the farcical Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, featuring Smith (with beard) and Jason Mewes (Dimension Films).
Only slightly more ambitious is Josie and the Pussycats, Harry Elfont’s and Deborah Kaplan’s tedious update of the 1970s cartoon show. The picture fails on nearly every level, but the filmmakers’ apparent lifelong immersion in popular culture led them to create a funny story line about subliminal messages being placed in songs, movies, and television shows. The film’s villains insert the illicit advertising without informing the entertainers they manage, then kill singers and actors who get wise to the scheme. When Elfont and Kaplan concentrate on imagining how peer pressure and salesmanship intersect in hidden slogans, the movie generates pointed laughter, but this choice material is accompanied by paper-thin characters, horrible dialogue, and a laborious narrative. Josie and the Pussycats suffers from the same problem as Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: The people behind both films want to be taken seriously while doing exactly the thing they’re satirizing, but they spend so much time winking at the audience that they often forget to entertain.
While not primarily concerned with filmmaking, Pulp Fiction and Wes Anderson’s wryly satirical Rushmore both offer commentary that puts the weak efforts of Joanou, Smith, and others to shame. In Pulp Fiction, gangster’s moll Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) entertainingly recounts her experience of acting in the pilot for a TV series; in Rushmore, overachieving teenager Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) mounts preposterous stage versions of films such as Serpico. The Tarantino bit is like a casual acknowledgment that entertainment is all around us, and the Anderson bit is a winking jab at excess in entertainment. Yet even while providing amusing, insidery moments, these scenes run dangerously close to the nether world of movies that only make sense in the context of other movies.
At their best, Gen Xers create interesting new artifacts of pop culture. At their worst, they create disposable artifacts about pop culture. Because this is a trap into which so many of their number fall, it’s heartening to note the power of the entertainment that Gen Xers create when they set popular culture aside and tell stories about genuine culture—specifically, the American society that bred them.