Although the word slacker was around long before the first members of Generation X were born—it was used primarily to describe soldiers who put forth the minimum acceptable effort or conspired to do even less than that, like classic comic-strip character Beetle Bailey—the emergence of a generation inclined toward epic sloth provided a new application for an old word.
At some point in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when people first began identifying and studying Generation X, the popular stereotype of the contemporary slacker emerged. As depicted in entertainment and news, slackers were educated youths weaned on popular culture and disenfranchised from mainstream American because of social, familial, and economic reasons. These pseudo-existentialists were different from commonplace layabouts, the stereotype established, because they extracted themselves from mainstream society not out of laziness but to stay true to a philosophical idea. That idea went something like this: Contemporary American society had become so dehumanized, corporatized, and homogenized that to participate in it was to contribute to dehumanization, corporatization, and homogenization. Or something like that. The forces against which slackers rebelled were so numerous and nebulous that to list just a few of them does a disservice to the vastness of the ennui that prompted the emergence of slackerdom.
Gen Xers were not the first filmmakers to put slackers, or slacker-like characters, onscreen. As far back as the early 1980s, well before slacker entered common parlance, Cameron Crowe devoted himself to understanding the issues of confused modern youths. (Born in 1957, Crowe is either a very young boomer or a very old Gen Xer, depending on which parameters are used.) The 1982 comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which Crowe wrote but did not direct, gave viewers a beloved “stoner” icon named Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn), whose fun-before-responsibility attitude can be read as a precursor to slackerdom. Crowe’s directorial debut, the 1989 romantic comedy Say Anything…, introduced a quintessential Gen-X character named Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), who tries to decide what path to take after graduating from high school. This young man’s singular attitude is captured in this monologue, prompted when the father of his girlfriend asks Lloyd about his plans for the future:
LLOYD: I’ve thought about this quite a bit, sir, and considering what’s waiting out there for me, I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t sell anything bought or processed or buy anything sold or processed or process anything sold, bought or processed or … My father’s in the Army. He wants me to join, but I can’t work for that corporation. Um, so what I’ve been doing lately is kickboxing…. I don’t know. I can’t figure it all out tonight, sir. I’m just kinda hangin’ with your daughter.
Crowe’s films are the most articulate of many pictures made by non-Gen Xers that address important Gen-X issues, and the dreams and desires of this generation also have been addressed on television, particularly on the popular sitcom Friends. Yet in most Hollywood stories about Gen Xers but not by Gen Xers, a happy glow is cast upon young characters that isn’t present in real life: The titular characters of Friends, for instance, get through all their travails by relying on humor and the bond created by their unshakable surrogate family. Notwithstanding Crowe’s sensitive portrayals, the bogus nature of Hollywood’s take on Generation X—and particularly the most misunderstood segment of that generation, slackers— underscores why it’s crucial to look at stories of these people, by these people, and for these people. As Edward Norton, star of the Gen-X film Fight Club and a promising director in his own right, said:
So much of what’s been represented about my generation has been done by the baby boomers. They dismiss us: the word slacker, the oversimplification of the Gen-X mentality as one of hesitancy or negativity. It isn’t just aimlessness we feel; it’s deep skepticism. It’s not slackerdom; it’s profound cynicism, even despair, even paralysis, in the face of an onslaught of information and technology.1
Three years before slackers received the glossy Hollywood treatment in Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites, Richard Linklater presented a movie that was pure Generation X in style as well as content. For while Stiller effectively employed conventional narrative devices and appealing actors to make Gen-X issues accessible to both youthful and older audiences, it could be argued that using slick storytelling to discuss slackers was as crass as, say, making an expensive movie about hippies. Stiller’s best defenses to such criticisms probably are that he belongs to the generation that Reality Bites is about, and that even within the confines of a slick story, Reality Bites has plenty of loose, seemingly off-the-cuff interaction. Nonetheless, Linklater has to be considered the pioneer in this cinematic territory, not only because he got there first, but because his slacker movie is fully infused with slacker spirit.
Set in Austin, Texas, Linklater’s Slacker is a simple idea dragged out to feature length: Characters are introduced, shown moving from one place to the next and/or interracting with other characters, and after a moment or a few moments, the film drifts away to follow a character or characters who have wandered into the scene. It’s like a narrative relay race, only without any semblance of a goal or of dramatic tension. While the film is in many ways affected and dull, it also is filled with provocative ideas that rise and fall based on the strength of their execution: Linklater’s best vignettes feature truthful acting and spot-on dialogue, and the worst suffer from amateurism on every level. The personal quality of the film is visible from the first frame, because the character who begins the succession of vignettes is a laconic drifter played by Linklater himself.
The people of Slacker are layabouts, conspiracy theorists, media junkies, paranoids, eccentrics, lost souls, and so on. The only ones who seem the least bit fulfilled are those who have replaced conventional goals with their own strange pursuits, such as a cheerful anarchist and a demented fellow whose cramped apartment is filled with stolen televisions. Most of the characters are given opportunities to explain themselves, and most of the explanations say something about the generation to which their intellectually curious creator belongs. Consider, for instance, these words spoken by a philosopher (Brecht Andersch) in a coffee shop: “Who’s ever written a great work about the immense effort required not to create? … The obsessiveness of the utterly passive. And could it be that in this passivity, I shall find my freedom?”
Even more telling is a presumably autobiographical essay written by a fellow named Paul on a series of postcards, then discovered by his roommates after Paul inexplicably disappears from his apartment:
All his days are about the same. He wakes up at 11 or 12, eats cereal or toast, reads the newspaper or looks out the front door, takes a walk, goes to a movie matinee, listens to the radio, watches sitcom reruns till 1, and usually falls asleep around 2. He likes to sleep. Sometimes he has good dreams.
That this monologue is read aloud at a snail’s pace, with only the images on successive postcards providing visual interest, indicates why Slacker is a tough sell for viewers indoctrinated into the cult of narrative momentum: Literary and languid and self-indulgent, the movie doesn’t have a point, per se, and therefore doesn’t make haste to get there. In a word, the movie slacks. Linklater casually introduces such peculiar characters as a young woman trying to sell a pap smear containing biological residue from pop star Madonna, and as an “anti-artist” whose creative expression is destroying and belittling things created by others, before the film trudges to a halt with final vignettes including a scene of an old man (Joseph Jones) walking down the street and speaking his thoughts into a tape recorder. His words echo the vibrant spirit burning within the seemingly disenchanted soul of Generation X: “The more the pain grows, the more the instinct for life somehow asserts itself.”
The most fundamental disparity between Slacker and Reality Bites grows out of their stylistic differences. The vignettes in Linklater’s picture accumulate into a statement from which viewers can choose to extract meaning if they so desire. Conversely, the very nature of Stiller’s film is about putting across a point, in the moralistic sense of the word: While not an outright homily, the movie uses a conventional Hollywood narrative storytelling model, in which experiences hammer at a protagonist until he or she is forced to undergo a change or make a difficult choice.
The choice in this instance is made by Lelaina, who has to decide whether to pursue careerism, as represented by ambitious suitor Michael (Stiller), or individualism, as represented by unabashed slacker Troy (Ethan Hawke). In the muddy logic of Hollywood films created for mass consumption, Lelaina elects a compromise—she accepts Troy as her lover, thereby embracing slackerdom, but remains devoted to her career, thereby embracing traditional goals. The point is that Lelaina finds a way to grow up without totally betraying her generational identity.
Yet the presence of a moral lesson weakens Reality Bites’s credibility as a slacker film. One truth that binds vast segments of Generation X is the idea that youths who don’t trust institutions lack the spiritual security that previous generations drew from their belief in God, country, or whatever. Furthermore, the idea of Gen Xers drawing strength from generational identity is laughable: People who don’t believe in societal movements or institutions don’t necessarily believe in each other. So saying in 1994 that different segments of Generation X can learn from and love each other, as Reality Bites did, is as wide-eyed as suggesting in 1969 that the hawks and doves of the Vietnam era could live in peace. It wasn’t accidental that the finale of Easy Rider, in which rednecks cheerfully assassinated hippies, caught the zeitgeist of the day. During times of generational upheaval, the tectonic plates of society clash before they merge.
Junk food and junk culture: A trip to a convenience store turns into a frivolous adventure in Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites, with (from left) Ethan Hawke, Winona Ryder, Janeane Garofalo, and Steve Zahn (Universal Pictures).
Another factor worth considering is that Reality Bites was an attempt to document a generation that had yet to mature. In that light, it makes sense that some conjecture was required, and that some wishful thinking manifested onscreen. Just as Linklater walked on virgin terrain in 1991 when he made Slacker, Stiller and his collaborators had to think ahead of societal curves in order to give their story closure. And who knows? When Reality Bites celebrates its twentieth anniversary in 2014, perhaps the film’s vision of a tentative solidarity among the divergent factions of Generation X will seem prescient.
Setting the issue of its larger statements aside, it’s enjoyable to revisit the details that Stiller’s movie got right. The language of the movie captures a moment when a TV generation developed its own vernacular, as seen in a vivid moment involving Lelaina and Troy. The slacker seductively invites his female friend to sit with him on the couch—for TV babies, the adult equivalent of a womb. But he isn’t motivated by the desire for a little hanky-panky. Instead, he wants company while he channel-surfs. Lelaina declines, warning that her day will disappear if she parks next to Troy, whom she calls a “master of time suckage.”
Another memorable bit of slackage in Reality Bites is the scene in which Lelaina and three friends venture from their living room to a convenience store so they can stock up on junk food with the credit card Lelaina just received from her dad. As the quartet of twentysomethings gather Pringles and Diet Coke and other goodies, they hear the Knack’s nonsense song “My Sharona,” which would have been a hit when these characters were children, on the radio to which the store clerk is listening. Lelaina and Vickie (Janeane Garofalo) pester the clerk to turn up the radio, promising that he “won’t be sorry,” then reward him by dancing foolishly to the amped-up rock music. The moment is a celebration of doing nothing—the characters bond over disposable pop culture, and turn a functional trip to a bland destination into an effervescent adventure. The vaguely depressing implication of the scene is that acting like idiots in a convenience store might end up being the highlight of the characters’ evening, but such are the delights of slackers.
Linklater elevated slackerdom to poetry in Before Sunrise, his glorious romance about American twentysomething Jesse (Ethan Hawke), who meets young Frenchwoman Céline (Julie Delpy) on the last day of his trip through Europe. As noted earlier, Jesse is an unusual Gen-X protagonist in that he superficially resembles a slacker, but has a timeless quality seen in his refusal to spout cheap pop-culture references and his disdain for societal institutions.
Jesse is more representative of a moment common to every young life than one common exclusively to youths of his generation. The moment isn’t exactly a coming-of-age, and it certainly isn’t a loss of innocence, but it has elements of both of those landmark experiences. The moment that Jesse finds himself in during Before Sunrise is the frightening, intoxicating surprise of his first mature relationship. That the relationship begins and ends in the course of one day is among the several subtle nuances that make Jesse a quintessential Gen Xer; just as others of his generation rush through life on warp speed because of their short attention spans and/or abilities to process information briskly, Jesse has an Information Age epiphany through his love affair with Céline.
And while it’s true that countless previous fictional characters have undergone major psychological changes because of brief encounters, the combination of the brevity of Jesse’s affair with Céline, their over-intellectualized discourse, and the hesitancy that they both exhibit about becoming grown-ups brands the characters as youths on the verge of joining a society they don’t understand. As Linklater’s Before Sunrise cowriter, Kim Krizan, noted:
Ours is certainly a disillusioned generation. Born into the slow-motion explosion of everything our parents believed in, we found ourselves coming of age in the social wreckage, then trying to transcend that dark mire by laughing at all things sacred. It seems that we’ve all nearly succeeded in postponing maturity, extending adolescence, and giving ourselves over to cynicism and detachment—a very romantic pose, really…. Ultimately, love is an exquisite mess, one that is safer to avoid than to indulge in. So what? Dive in anyway.2
If Jesse and Céline are symbolic of their generation, the actions they take also are symbolic, and one such action is among the first to bond the couple. They notice each other while seated in a train passenger car, then start chatting because a couple near them is arguing loudly. Jesse and Céline quickly suss out each other’s nationalities, and she asks him if he speaks anything other than English. Jesse defensively explains that he took four years of French lessons, but once the moment came for him to speak French to a railway clerk in Paris, he blanked and spoke English. “No more French for me,” he adds.
Jesse took four years of classes to learn the Gallic tongue, then tossed those years away in the moment when he should have reaped the rewards of his education. So Jesse apparently didn’t learn the language with the intent of using it in later life; had that been the case, he could have cheated with a translation guide and forced the words to come out. Instead, he learned for the sake of learning. This passive approach to intellectual endeavor isn’t unique to Gen Xers, of course; Beatniks and hippies predated slackers in the far-reaching way they drank from the fountain of knowledge. But the ease with which Jesse casually discards four years of education is a poignant depiction of how Gen Xers deal with all that bombards them.
From birth, Americans born in the Gen-X era were subjected to nonstop cultural and societal stimulus, and the speed with which information seeped into their brains accelerated throughout their maturation. So in a sense, it’s only natural that Gen Xers can toss away knowledge as if it were garbage. In fact, doing so may be a survival skill: If Jesse and his peers don’t shed the knowledge they’re not going to use, they risk tumbling into madness like computers crashing from a data overload. Still, it’s understandable that casual observers might characterize actions like Jesse’s refusal to speak French in France as arrogance or laziness.
The arrogance interpretation has a lot of validity, in that Gen Xers who don’t employ their education waste a commodity that less-privileged individuals would treasure. Yet the laziness interpretation—which is at the very heart of how the slacker stereotype emerged—actually is false. The key? Jesse completed his four years of French classes. He didn’t give up because the classes were too much work or because he couldn’t grasp the concepts. He gave up because when the moment came to speak French in France, he felt false. His action is one of misguided integrity, not contemptuous laziness.
That distinction may, in fact, be an essential insight into the character of Generation X, or at least into how that character is represented in cinematic fiction. Gen Xers may seem to value nothing, including their own generational identity, but perhaps they actually value that identity more than they know or acknowledge. The identity that these people value is, in part, a refusal to value anything, so the decision of whether to slack or not to slack tests how deeply each Gen Xer subscribes to beliefs shared by peers. When conundrums such as this one are considered, the confusion at the heart of Generation X quickly comes into focus.
Every generation’s films offer a different take on the eternal issues facing youths who reject their parents’ values—the 1950s James Dean classic, Rebel Without a Cause, remains the sine qua non of this genre—and the Gen-X pictures that map this emotional terrain range from the docile to the furious. Moreover, the turmoil within them offers yet another manifestation of the central thrust of Gen-X cinema, the quest for meaning. As so much of this generation’s ennui stems from the chaotic social climate they inherited from their peers, watching Gen-X characters slam against—and burst through—the parameters of existing society is highly informative.
On the tame end of this spectrum are pictures such as Reality Bites, in which the schism between parents and their children is painted in broad strokes: A son shocks his mother by revealing his homosexuality, et cetera. Pictures that address the difference between generations timidly traffic in timeless, universal themes, so the coming-out story line, with its variables altered, could play in a 1950s story as viably as it does in a 1990s story line. Thus, the most interesting pictures in this area reside on the extreme end of the spectrum, and the most extreme is David Fincher’s Fight Club, adapted by Jim Uhls from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel. The pitch-black comedy features Gen Xers engaging in a violent, anarchistic revolt against contemporary American society, particularly the numbing sameness of consumer culture.
Early in Fight Club, the nondescript office drone played by Edward Norton (the character’s name is never revealed) retires to his nondescript apartment after a day of nondescript work. His leisure activity is consumption. He sits in his bathroom and flips through a mail-order catalog labeled “Fürni,” but clearly modeled on Ikea. (“I had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct,” he notes in voice-over. “I’d flip through catalogs and wonder what kind of dining set defines me as a person.”) The character fixates on a particular dust ruffle, then glances at a photo of an empty apartment while ordering a ruffle over the phone. The camera tracks across the empty apartment, and Ikea-like items appear alongside superimposed prices and product descriptions, a catalog’s contents come to life. Then Norton’s character walks through the scene—it turns out that we’ve been looking at his apartment, which now seems more like a showroom than a home.
Chaos theorist: David Fincher’s provocative Fight Club stars Edward Norton (left) as an office drone who becomes enmeshed in the life of a charismatic anarchist (Brad Pitt) (Twentieth Century–Fox).
This arch device identifies that Norton’s character is obsessed with consumer goods not for their utility, but because mass marketing has convinced him that his disposable income is burning a hole in his pockets. The early scenes of Fight Club (which depict the protagonist’s empty lifestyle) are filmed in bleached-out color, and often feature unflattering overhead lighting, making Norton’s character look like a bloodless cipher wandering through his half-life.
It takes a massive shock to free this protagonist from his insular bubble, and that shock is provided by one Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a straight-talking soap manufacturer clothed in kitschy, thrift-store clothes. After the two men share drinks and lament the inanity of modern existence—unsurprisingly, a common subject of Gen-X discourse—Tyler asks Norton’s character to hit him as hard as he can. Our “hero” protests before obliging, but soon the men beat each other bloody. They find a release in violence akin to that found in sex, and eventually develop a cult around Fight Club, an illegal organization in which men escape the emasculation of consumer culture by pummeling themselves back to “reality.” The dark edge to this metaphor—that the action reviving these men also destroys them—is never far from the surface of the movie, perhaps the most subversive of all Gen-X films.
The rebellion of Fight Club’s members is in several important ways a rebellion against the people who brought Generation X into the world. Tyler, who laments that “We’re a generation of men raised by women,” confronts Norton’s character early in the movie with this pointed dialogue:
TYLER: Why do guys like you and I know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No…. We are consumers. We are byproducts of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty—these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear, Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra … Fuck Martha Stewart! Martha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic. It’s all going down…. I say “Stop being perfect.” I say “Let’s evolve.” Things you own end up owning you.
Tyler soon welcomes Norton’s character into his dark, disturbing world. Tyler works as a projectionist and splices frames of pornography into family films; he waits tables and urinates into lobster bisques at lush banquets; he lives in a condemned building where the faucets spit brown water and the walls and furniture are coated in grease and filth. Norton’s character quickly becomes an accomplice in such missions as stealing bags of biological waste from dumpsters behind a liposuction clinic so it can be mixed into Tyler’s soap. (“We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them,” Norton’s character observes.) Yet there’s a decidedly postmodern wrinkle to the misadventures of these two characters, because late in the movie we learn that Tyler (probably) is a figment of his friend’s imagination. Norton’s character let his id manifest as a cocksure rebel so he could escape his numbing life, and once Norton’s character realizes what he’s done, he’s shocked to discover how deep a hole he’s dug for himself through the actions he took as Tyler.
By the end of the movie, which loops back to the scene that opened the story, Norton’s character is driven to kill himself as a way of stopping Tyler’s rampage. So the last scene of the picture features Norton’s character with a gaping wound on the side of his head reflecting his suicide attempt. As bombs that he/Tyler set topple skyscrapers, Norton’s character holds the hand of his demented girlfriend Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) to watch the carnage as if it were a movie. The myriad metaphors of this moment are composed of pure Gen-X malaise and attitude: The wound reflects either the self-inflicted misery of modern consumer culture, or the shock needed to extract oneself from such culture, or both; the emotional connection with Marla suggests that people who share contempt for contemporary society can only truly bond with their own kind; and the vision of an apocalypse as entertainment underlines the morbid, ironic perspective through which the most outrageous Gen-X characters watch America succumb to its excesses.
Adding extra fuel to this metaphorical fire is the fact that at the end of the scene, the image shimmers as if the projector is breaking, and then a subliminal cut of a shot from a porn film intrudes at lightning speed. So the final wrinkle to Fight Club is an instruction to do what the characters in the film do: Look for the messages beneath the messages, then do with that information what you will. Or, as Tyler says in one of his most impassioned monologues, delivered while watching Norton’s character writhe in pain from a vicious chemical burn:
TYLER: Stay with the pain! … This is the greatest moment of your life and you’re off somewhere missing it. You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you, never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. It’s not the worst thing that could happen…. We don’t need him. Fuck damnation, man. Fuck redemption. We are God’s unwanted children—so be it…. It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.