Politics, religion, and race often are treated gingerly in Gen-X movies, which is peculiar in light of the forward-thinking attitudes that Gen-X directors display when exploring such polarizing topics as homosexuality and drugs. Gen-X directors’ hesitancy to engage political issues is befuddling, for if these filmmakers are comfortable telling stories about American characters exercising their freedom of choice, the bedrock of the democratic ideal, wouldn’t it follow that they would want to tell stories about how that freedom of choice is attained and protected?
So far, though, only Alexander Payne and Rod Lurie have made politics an important part of their oeuvres. Others, including Keith Gordon and Steven Soderbergh, have made individual films with interesting perspectives on specific political subjects. (Andrew Fleming entered the fray with his whimsical comedy Dick, about two teenage girls who stumble upon Richard Nixon’s infamous audio-taping system while visiting the White House.) Beyond these few examples, however, most Gen-X filmmakers seem comfortable leaving social issues in the subtexts of their films or, in some cases, creating hyperbolic contexts that address social issues through colorful metaphors—one example being Bryan Singer’s X-Men, which uses the clash between normal humans and superpowered mutants to make a statement about intolerance.
One possible explanation for why filmmakers of this generation are reluctant to examine certain divisive social issues is that to do so would require them to engage the institutions in which, as has been shown, their faith is limited at best. Saying that Gen Xers are disinclined to enter into political debates because they grew up in the shadow of Watergate is probably too convenient, but the widely reported statistics illustrating this generation’s apathy at the voting booth seem to support this point. So perhaps the reason Gen-X directors feel queasy about subjects pertaining to politics (as well as religion and race) has more to do with their approach to life than the factors that helped form that approach.
Particularly with regard to crime and drugs, Gen-X directors frequently steer clear of traditional notions of morality; this unwillingness to accept ethical absolutes also is seen in Generation X’s ambivalent attitude toward work. Therefore, it might follow that young people who don’t believe in the old rules governing the workplace, the use of controlled substances, and other aspects of life would find the polemics of politics, religion, and race off-putting. In other words, Gen Xers certainly have opinions on the myriad topics gathered beneath these broad umbrellas, but their opinions might be so mired in ambiguity that it’s difficult for them to ally themselves with any one side of a contentious issue.
If that’s the case, then perhaps Gen Xers avoid the vehement rhetoric surrounding, say, abortion, by concentrating on how individual characters make important choices. This is a hypothetical generalization, of course, but it fits with some important patterns that have emerged in this book: If Gen Xers are disillusioned about social institutions, it’s reasonable to assume they would avoid becoming part of such institutions, and avoid entering into the ideological fray created when factions of these institutions disagree.
Despite the fact that social changes and behavioral patterns seem to bind massive segments of Generation X, perhaps the thing that binds them most—as seen in the paucity of this generation’s filmmakers who take strong stands on divisive issues—is a refusal to anchor themselves to the moral absolutes that, in their cynical worldview, led American society to become the combative arena in which they were raised.
Among Gen-X movies that are unequivocally about politics, the most brazen is Alexander Payne’s debut, Citizen Ruth. The loose, scruffy comedy centers around Ruth Stoops (Laura Dern), who seems like pure white trash when we meet her: She’s a scrawny, dim loudmouth who sniffs glue for fun, gets in trouble with the law so often that she’s on a first-name basis with the cops in her small town, and is such an unfit mother that her children were removed from her care by government officials.
Early in the picture, she gets tossed into a cell with Gail Stoney (Mary Kay Place), a right-to-life activist incarcerated for her part in an illegal demonstration. Upon learning that Ruth is pregnant, her jailers encourage the troubled woman to get an abortion, figuring it will save the unborn child from the neglect that Ruth would surely inflict upon it. Gail sees an propaganda opportunity and pounces. She offers to take Ruth in and pay her expenses, provided the young woman sees her pregnancy through, in effect hiring Ruth as an anti-abortion symbol.
Meanwhile, a group of ardent pro-choice activists seize on the idea that Ruth also could be a symbol for their cause. A manic tussle between the warring forces occurs, putting human faces on one of the most painful debates in modern culture. Ruth watches the insults and speeches fly past her the way a spectator watches the ball at a tennis match, even moving from Gail’s house to that of the witchcraft-practicing pro-choicers so she can see who offers her a better deal. The joke, of course, is that the person who is least invested in the fate of Ruth’s baby seems to be Ruth. For while she appears to genuinely listen to the arguments being put forth by both sides of the debate, she is unmistakably seduced by how much the pro-lifers and pro-choicers are willing to spend to secure her loyalty.
Although he mostly films events in an unintrusive, documentary-like style, Payne exhibits palpable cynicism through his arch characterizations. He portrays almost everyone but Ruth as a hysterical extremist, then shows a “simpleton” playing both sides against the middle and coming out on top. The implication is that the idealism of the various activists is married to their vanity, so at a certain point, they become more concerned with validating their righteousness than with helping Ruth find the path that’s right for her. The movie is a slap in the face to people who let their devotion to political issues cloud their view of reality, and a brutal put-down of the breed of armchair extremists depicted throughout the movie.
Whereas the activists in Citizen Ruth are comical because they’re in over their heads, the activist portrayed by Jennifer Connelly in Keith Gordon’s Waking the Dead is deadly serious because she knows exactly what she’s getting herself into at any given point. The mournful, elegant movie is a love story with a vaguely supernatural twist, centering around the anguish suffered by ambitious young politician Fielding Pierce (Billy Crudup) when his lover, activist Sarah Williams (Connelly), is murdered. The movie cuts back and forth between the 1970s, the time that Fielding and Sarah spend together, and the 1980s, when Fielding tries to find his way without his soulmate.
At first, the couple seem oddly matched: He’s a sailor eager to do his part in Vietnam, and she’s an impassioned antiwar crusader. They disagree about everything except the importance of politics, although each wants to change the world for the better. Fielding wants to make his impact within the system; Sarah believes the system is designed to keep people like Fielding from having an impact. Their passion for the world around them, as well as their intense physical attraction, helps them overcome their differences and land in each other’s arms. Yet as soon as their bond is cemented, it is shaken by the careers they choose.
Strange bedfellows: Love bridges the differences between a headstrong activist (Jennifer Connelly) and an ambitious would-be politician (Billy Crudup) in Keith Gordon’s haunting drama Waking the Dead (USA Films).
Fielding gets taken under the wing of Isaac Green (Hal Holbrook), a seasoned politician who thinks he can turn his protégé’s idealism and good looks into star value. Meanwhile, Sarah begins working with Father Mileski (John Carroll Lynch), a priest who runs an inner-city shelter. The lovers clash because Fielding compromises his ideals, while Sarah seems incapable of compromise of any kind. In a typically heated scene, Sarah accompanies Fielding and Isaac to a cocktail party attended by a slew of political heavy hitters. Regarding Sarah merely as his apprentice’s arm candy, Isaac mistakenly introduces her several times as Sarah “Wilson.” Afraid to rock the boat, Fielding doesn’t correct the error. Her intolerance of fatuousness surfacing, Sarah eventually snaps at Isaac, causing a minor scene and infuriating her boyfriend. The lovers smooth each other’s bruised egos after the party, but the issues that caused the fight remain unresolved.
By the time Father Mileski recruits Sarah for an illegal humanitarian mission to South America, she and her companion are worlds apart: Fielding resents that her idealism makes him self-conscious about selling out, and she’s sad that the man she fell in love with is turning into someone else. So when she’s killed by terrorists during the mission, Fielding is consumed by unresolved feelings. The love affair he expected to go on forever is done, he never got a chance to make peace with Sarah, and her memory haunts every shifty political decision he makes. Gordon shows Fielding’s troubled state of mind by having ghostly visions of Sarah appear everywhere around the young politician, eventually driving him to the brink of madness. The movie plays a sly game with Sarah’s supernatural visitations, because she could be an actual ghost or merely a manifestation of Fielding’s pain. Either way, she functions as a personification of his conscience, which makes the movie a statement on baby-boomer politics.
Fielding, a boomer put onscreen by a team of Gen Xers, was literally in bed with liberalism at the beginning of his career, but by the time he wins a Senate seat at the end of the picture, he’s drifted so far from his ideals that liberalism is merely a beautiful phantom hovering around the fringes of his life. Gordon offers a moving but somewhat pat resolution to this unresolvable conflict when letters from constituents and a final visitation from Sarah remind Fielding that although ambition brought him to the Senate, the needs of the people should define what he does as a congressman. Idealism wins this round, but only after a wrenching fight.
Idealism is even more ephemeral in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, which features Michael Douglas as Robert Wakefield, an American judge recruited to fight the nation’s war on drugs, but who soon learns that his own daughter is a drug addict. Just as Fielding’s ascension into politics is haunted by the memory of a woman who told him what politics could be, Robert’s ascension to the position of drug czar is haunted by the knowledge that he’s caught in the crossfire of the war he’s supposed to be waging. At the end of Traffic, Robert falters partway through an important press conference at the White House, then drops the mask of political resolve and says: “I can’t do this. If there is a war on drugs, then our own families have become the enemy. How can you wage war on your own family?”
This moment represents politics at its murkiest, when right and wrong have blurred so completely that no moral compass can indicate a path out of darkness. Like Waking the Dead, Traffic ends on a compassionate note—Robert and his wife accompany their daughter to a drug-treatment session—suggesting that humanity can heal wounds that punditry can’t.
Punditry runs rampant in the first two movies directed by Rod Lurie, a former film critic who brought his love of words, actors, and politics to the screen with noteworthy force in the late 1990s. His first movie, the little-seen Deterrence, depicts an untested American president forced to handle a major international crisis while he and his staff are snowed in at a small-town diner. Lurie’s sophomore effort, The Contender, garnered infinitely more attention than his first, in large part because the independent production was picked up for distribution by DreamWorks SKG, the young studio co-helmed by Steven Spielberg.
It’s a safe bet that the movie would have turned heads even if it was released independently, however, because the story about a woman nominated for the vice presidency touches on controversial issues of gender equality, liberalism, attack politics, and sensationalism. Although Payne’s Citizen Ruth and Election have more bite because they use satire to peer beneath the surface of divisive debates, The Contender is unique among Gen-X movies in that it feels like a solicitation for viewers to deepen their involvement in the political process, so as to protect the process from abuse by characters like the ruthless conservatives who antagonize the title character.
If Gen-X filmmakers have been timid about politics, they’ve been positively ostrich-like about racial issues, despite the fact that race-related tensions exploded after such 1990s occurrences as the beating of Rodney King and the riots that followed the acquittal of his police assailants. As of this writing, John Singleton is the dominant figure among Gen-X filmmakers whose films are primarily concerned with discussions of racial identity. Singleton, Kasi Lemmons (who made memorable observations about race in her first two pictures, Eve’s Bayou and The Caveman’s Valentine), and George Tillman, Jr. (director of such crowd-pleasers as Soul Food and Men of Honor) are African-American, which suggests that white Gen-X filmmakers are reluctant, if not outright fearful, of addressing the great divide in American society. Lemmons offered a possible explanation for this phenomenon when asked about her ability to write white characters.
As a black person living in a modern world, you know all about it, you understand the “master race.” For white people to understand enough to write like a black person, that might be different, because white people don’t have to understand black people. Black people have to understand white people.1
Ironically, the Gen-X filmmaker who has most famously celebrated black culture is a white man—even though his portrayals have split audiences between those who find his vision of African-American culture sensationalistic and those who find it affectionate. In both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino displays a passion for black slang, dress, and music that borders on the fetishistic: White and black characters alike, for instance, use urban vernacular that could easily fit into a 1970s blaxploitation movie or a 1990s rap song. Consider this line from Pulp Fiction, spoken by the black character Jules: “I wouldn’t go so far as to call the brother fat. He’s got a weight problem. What’s the nigger gonna do? He’s Samoan.”
A great deal has been made about Tarantino’s use of the word nigger, and black actor Denzel Washington reportedly confronted Tarantino about the issue while Tarantino was on the set of Washington’s submarine thriller Crimson Tide, to which Tarantino contributed dialogue; according to accounts of the encounter, Washington was not among those who find Tarantino’s use of the word charming.
Inarguably one of the most loaded words in the English language, nigger has in recent years been stripped of some of its power to hurt by its use among African-Americans as a friendly appellation: Phrases such as “Yo, nigger, whassup?” were commonplace in black-oriented films, comedy routines, and songs of the 1990s. Yet when the transformed word was borrowed by white adherents of black culture, it went through another cultural change. Whether it’s a white gangster in a Tarantino movie or a white teenager in a shopping mall, a Caucasian shouting “Yo nigger, whassup?” or another such phrase is a startling image, no matter if the person being addressed is white or black.
Some have argued that by appropriating loaded African-American vernacular, Tarantino and other whites both propagate stereotypes and make sensational associations to the most lurid aspects of black culture. That argument is bolstered somewhat by the black characters in Tarantino’s films, who recall the jive-talking, street-smart crooks of blaxploitation movies. So even though the director’s affection for characters such as Jules and the titular figure of Jackie Brown (played by black screen icon Pam Grier) is palpable, the question arises of whether he’s performing a disservice by showing gun-toting, streetwise blacks.
One thought worth considering when trying to answer that question is that Tarantino raises the characters above stereotypes by giving them something close to three-dimensional life. Another important fact is that Tarantino often puts across images of whites and blacks coexisting harmoniously: Jules is more or less comfortably partnered with a white hoodlum in Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown is receptive to the courtship of a white man, and so on. But while the final determination of whether Tarantino is an acolyte or an exploiter of African-American culture rests with individual viewers, the fact remains that he consistently features black actors and black culture in his movies—which makes him much more ethnically adventurous than most of his white peers.
Accordingly, it has fallen to black directors to put informed images of African-Americans onscreen, and John Singleton has faced this challenge admirably throughout his career. He occasionally tells stories about blacks with superheroic qualities, as in Rosewood and Shaft, but even these stories are populated with characters who echo people from the real world. Singleton’s celebrated debut film, Boyz N the Hood, was based on the troubled urban milieu he observed while growing up in Los Angeles, and is such an overt plea for an end to the madness of gang violence that the first image is a dolly in to a “Stop” sign, preceded by a series of title cards bearing grim statistics: “One out of every twenty-one black American males will be murdered…. Most will die at the hands of another black male.”
Blood in the streets: Boyz N the Hood, a passionate depiction of the factors behind gang violence, was made by John Singleton, seen in glasses between costars Ice Cube (in driver’s seat) and Cuba Gooding, Jr. (Columbia Pictures).
To show the human reality behind this statistic, Singleton depicts two periods in the life of a character named Tre Styles. In an early sequence, ten-year-old Tre (Desi Arnez Hines II) watches his father, Furious (Lawrence Fishburne), try to shoot a home invader. When two police officers, one white and one black, show up an hour after being called, the black officer shockingly says to Furious: “Too bad you didn’t get him. Be one less nigger out here in the streets we’d have to worry about.” Recalling the sad truth of the opening titles, this moment underscores that white America’s disdain for black America often is complemented by painful divisions within the African-American community.
By the time Tre has grown into a young man (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), he already has watched a friend become a hardened criminal. Shortly after completing a stint in prison that began when he was a juvenile, Tre’s buddy Doughboy (Ice Cube) gets mixed up in a grudge match that leads to the drive-by execution of Doughboy’s innocent brother, Ricky (Morris Chestnut). In one of Singleton’s characteristically heavy-handed but effective touches, viewers learn that Ricky’s recent success on his SAT assured him a shot at a college education—and by extension life outside the ’hood—so his tragedy is felt on numerous levels. Yet Singleton’s clunkier touches are complemented by potent dramatics, such as the scene in which Ricky’s mother and young wife scream over his bloody, lifeless body while Ricky’s infant child squeals.
Despite his father’s many lessons about the need to avoid senseless violence, Tre nearly succumbs to rage by joining Doughboy on a nighttime mission for retribution against Ricky’s killers. After sitting in Doughboy’s car alongside a bloodthirsty friend who’s loading a magazine into an AK-47, Tre comes to his senses and heads home, but his departure doesn’t derail the mission: Doughboy finds and brutally assassinates the three men responsible for his brother’s death, in the process securing his own doomed place in a cycle of violence and hatred. Tre, nobly trying to understand the conflicting parts of his friend, speaks with Doughboy after the bloodshed, and all the killer can come up with is this: “I don’t even know how I feel about it neither, man. Shit just goes on and on, you know? Next thing you know, somebody might try to smoke me. Don’t matter though. We all gotta go sometime.”
This is the saddest and most important statement in Singleton’s movie—that members of this rung of American society feel the disdain that others have for them so deeply that their own sense of self-worth is damaged. Some members of the South Central community know better than to drop out of a culture that doesn’t want them, as Tre eventually proves. But for youths raised amid rampant violence, nearly bereft of positive role models, and lacking proper academic nurturing, the descent to a life like Doughboy’s seems pre-ordained. And destiny is a strong element of Singleton’s storytelling, for his movie ends with title cards indicating that Doughboy was killed two weeks after his bloody revenge—and that Tre went on to college.
The obvious message of Boyz N the Hood is that violence begets violence, and the deeper one is that incessant racism can cause minorities to regard themselves in a racist manner. This deeper message resonates with myriad other Gen-X movies, for while the disenfranchisement of Gen Xers is a cakewalk compared to the pain inflicted upon urban blacks, one thing binds the experiences of these two segments of society: Like African-Americans oppressed and changed by racism, Gen Xers are in many ways defined by society’s attitude toward them, whether it manifests as the choices made by parents when Gen Xers were growing up or as difficulty that employers often have adjusting to the laid-back attitude of slackers and pseudo-slackers.
Singleton’s work on Boyz N the Hood was so assured that he won Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director, the latter of which was notable because Singleton was the youngest person ever to receive such a nod. He seemed poised for a career spent telling relevant stories, but Singleton’s next pictures were unfocused. Poetic Justice was a love story involving two young, black artists, but the story was trite and lightweight, and the inclusion of poetry by revered author Maya Angelou seemed pretentious. Singleton’s third picture, Higher Learning, took the moralistic qualities of Boyz N the Hood to an uncomfortable extreme, and the movie felt more like a Sunday-morning sermon than a melodrama.
Singleton finally got back on track—and brought a bracing new energy to his depiction of race relations—in Rosewood, his most ambitious film to date. Based on the true story of a black-populated Southern town that was better off than its white-populated sister town, the drama is an alternately rousing and terrifying depiction of the moment when the whites struck out at their neighbors by destroying the black town. The film is weakened somewhat by the fictionalized figure of a superheroic black drifter who helps save several Rosewood residents from the white assault, but had this character not been included, the picture might have been oppressively sad.
One of the most striking Gen-X films about race entirely avoided the contentious issue of relations between whites and blacks, for it depicts the lives of young Native Americans, a population virtually invisible in American cinema outside of stereotypical portrayals. Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals, about two twentysomethings who leave their reservation on a quest that leads them to confront the repercussions of a decades-old family tragedy, is a quick, breezy jaunt filled with funny conversations, polemical confrontations, and, best of all, fully realized characters.
Victor (Adam Beach), a bitter loner who tries to scare away the world with his rough manners, and Thomas (Evan Adams), a sweet nebbish who’s continually trying to revive his childhood friendship with Victor, travel from Spokane, Washington, to Phoenix, Arizona, when Victor’s estranged father dies. Along the way, the two unravel the catastrophic event that shattered both their families and sent Victor on a self-destructive spiral. (Victor’s trajectory, incidentally, proves that fleeing from society after a familial schism isn’t a phenomenon unique to the predominantly white slackers who turned such escapism into an art form.) Like the best road movies, Smoke Signals is about people traveling into their souls as much as it’s about people visiting faraway locales.
The script, adapted by Sherman Alexie from his own novel, uses the casual banter of longtime acquaintances to explore racial identity and personal demons. Alexie also tosses in playful jabs at Hollywood’s image of Native Americans: “The only thing more pathetic than Indians on TV is Indians watching Indians on TV,” Thomas jokes at one point. Throughout the picture, the traveling companions wrestle not with what it means to be Indians, but what it means to be Indians in a culture dominated by Indians’ historical persecutors. This stance recalls Lemmons’s point about African-Americans learning the ways of white people, and underlines the tragedy of marginalizing or even destroying ethnicity.
In all of these films about race—from Boyz N the Hood to Smoke Signals—an important recurring theme is that minorities have to rely on each other to survive in a world that is not their own, even when members of their own subcultures prey upon them. This idea, of relying not on larger social institutions but on the solidarity binding a group of outsiders, connects these films about race to a major theme running through the cinema of Generation X: We were handed this world, these characters say, so it’s up to us to help each other find our way in it.
Interestingly, one way that characters in Gen-X movies have found to bridge the great divide is to trust love: Several Gen-X movies depict interracial relationships. At their most sensationalistic, the depictions of miscegenation play up the dangerous thrill of doing something that was once taboo, and even illegal; a pointed scene in The Caveman’s Valentine shows the black hero having sex with a white woman while the spirit of his (black) wife acerbically comments that every white woman is curious to see whether myths about black males’ sexual prowess is true. The titillating aspect of an interracial affair also is explored in John Stockwell’s crazy/beautiful, an intimate drama about a troubled white teen who falls in love with an ambitious young Latino. The self-destructive white girl recalls numerous disenfranchised Gen-X protagonists, so watching her surmount internal obstacles while also surmounting a societal one is heartening.
It is not just the female in this movie’s romance who faces obstacles, of course—her Latino lover wrestles with racism, the diminished expectations that some whites have of minorities, and the pressure placed on him by his family to succeed. That he does so is a testament to his spirit, and similar testimony is provided in George Tillman, Jr.’s Men of Honor and Boaz Yakin’s Remember the Titans. The former film, about a black man fighting racism to succeed in the U.S. Navy, and the latter, about how a black coach helps high school athletes face the problems of integration, are old-fashioned movies about race relations in which the dignity of heroic African-American characters forces white characters to abandon, or at least reconsider, their prejudice.
Just as Gen-X directors as a group are reluctant to address racial issues, they are loathe to court controversy by diving into the morass of religion. Certainly Gen Xers are not alone in their timidity regarding this subject matter; the history of cinema is littered with religious films that sidestep thorny discussions by depicting historical figures as cardboard saints (The Ten Commandments), and daring movies that spark vehement debates by questioning accepted beliefs about icons (The Last Temptation of Christ). Most filmmakers reside in the conservative middle ground between piety and revisionism, choosing to evade religious issues altogether. Therefore, the Gen-X aversion to such issues is less characteristic of generational identity than par for the Hollywood course. That said, the boldness of the few Gen-X filmmakers who have entered the fray of religious discourse is admirable.
Alexander Payne lessened the sting of his satirical portrayal of right-to-life extremists in Citizen Ruth by also poking fun at pro-choice extremists; he’s an equal-opportunity satirist. Similarly, Rod Lurie’s The Contender entertains both sides of a religious debate by having a conservative right-winger take a liberal left-winger to task over issues of sexuality. Both of these films are only peripherally about religion, however—and in fact, it seems that only two Gen-X movies have wholeheartedly entered the combat zone of religious conflict. They are Edward Norton’s sweet Keeping the Faith and Kevin Smith’s salacious Dogma. The movies couldn’t be further apart in terms of content and style, but their thematic intentions are similar. Through different means, each demonstrates the value—and, importantly, the validity—of spirituality.
The plot of Keeping the Faith sounds like the setup for a bad joke: A priest and a rabbi fall for the same girl. But the wrinkles that director-costar Norton and his collaborators add to the material make it a touching, memorable exploration of the role religion can play in people’s lives. The priest, Brian Finn (Norton), and the rabbi, Jake Schram (Ben Stiller), have been friends since childhood, and the playmate of their youth was a tomboy named Anna. Early in the picture, she returns to the trio’s hometown, New York City, as an adult—but the tomboy of yesteryear has become a sexy, confident businesswoman (Jenna Elfman).
The male friends are attracted to their old pal, but their desire is problematic because Brian is devoted to his vow of celibacy, and because Jake feels pressured to date women who share his faith. (Anna is a Gentile.) The romantic triangle is further complicated by misunderstandings, other women, and, most importantly, the revelation of where Anna’s affections truly lie. She loves both of her childhood friends, but is only in love with Jake. Yet at the end of the film, both men are happy: Jake is involved with Anna, and Brian strengthens his relationship with God. This payoff may sound cloying, but a key scene between Brian and his mentor, Czechoslovakian priest Father Havel (Milos Forman), articulates the tentative peace that can be achieved between physical desire and religious devotion. The conversation is sparked when Brian reveals that he tried to kiss Anna, but was rebuffed.
HAVEL: I remember I fell in love with this girl in Prague. It was in 1968. She was beautiful. She looked like Carole Lombard. She grabbed me. It was in the alley behind my church. She kissed me. Whew! I felt like Richard Chamberlain in The Thorn Birds…
BRIAN: I’ll tell you something—if she had kissed me back, I don’t think I’d be sitting here right now. I would’ve given it all up…. I keep thinking about what you said in seminary, that the life of a priest is hard, and if you can see yourself being happy doing anything else, you should do that.
HAVEL: That’s my recruitment speech, which is not bad when you’re starting out. It makes you feel like a Marine. The truth is, you can never tell yourself that there is only one thing that you could be. To be a priest or to marry a woman—it’s the same challenge. You cannot make a real commitment unless you accept that it’s a choice that you keep making again and again and again. I’ve been a priest over forty years, and I fall in love at least once every decade.
BRIAN: You’re not going to tell me what to do, are you?
HAVEL: No. God will give you your answer.
Keeping the Faith is filled with moments in which the clergymen question their life choices, yet the movie also is filled with gentle humor poking fun at the sterility of religious services. Jake tries to liven things up at temple by working the room like a stand-up comedian, and by enlisting a black choir to spice up a service’s musical component. This is a far cry from the hyperbole of Hollywood’s Biblical epics of the 1950s and 1960s, and a far cry from the satire of Citizen Ruth. Keeping the Faith may be the warmest movie yet made by a Gen Xer, and while some might find its kindhearted message of tolerance naive or false, the movie nonetheless offers a heartfelt alternative to the turmoil that often characterizes Gen-X cinema.
Dogma offers an outrageous alternative to Keeping the Faith—the Kevin Smith comedy is so polarizing that its original distributor, Miramax, was forced to drop the picture after pressure from parent company Disney. Whereas Keeping the Faith is a sedate romantic comedy, Dogma is a vulgar farce. The plot, culled from the arcana of Catholic theology, is a doozy: Two fallen angels find a loophole in God’s law that will allow them to reenter heaven, but to do so will cause the nullification of the entire universe. So as the former seraphim (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) make their way to a church in New Jersey through which they plan to return to their former home, a nonbeliever (Linda Fiorentino) is recruited to help stop them.
The movie slaughters as many sacred cows as possible. Black comedian Chris Rock appears as a mythical “thirteenth apostle” named Rufus; God’s right hand man is an embittered angel (Alan Rickman) who’s unimaginably tired of immortality and who resents terribly that he wasn’t gifted with genitalia; and God (played by rock singer Alanis Morrissette) is depicted as a impulsive but just ruler as likely to use her celestial might to smite wayward souls as she is to feebly attempt cartwheels on a patch of grass. In one of the film’s most brilliant bits, a bishop (George Carlin) tries to lure young people to the church by replacing the somber icon of a crucified Jesus with the smiling image of “Buddy Christ”—the son of God reimagined as a snarky Vegas lounge lizard. Smith caught heat because he freely mingled vulgarity with spirituality, but his movie ultimately is a testament to faith and, despite his obvious misgivings, the Catholic Church.
For even while suggesting that a black man sat at the last supper and proposing that Jesus might want to lighten up, Smith clearly identifies which characters in his story are amoral. The fallen angels have such compromised souls that they’re willing to summon the apocalypse in order to realize their selfish goals, and their accomplice is a demon complete with horns, a deceptively charming smile, and a bad attitude. The characters pursuing righteous goals may include a sexy stripper, but they also include a nonbeliever who learns to acknowledge and love God. Therefore, those who called the film anti-Catholic were at best uninformed and at worst ignorant. As the writer-director said:
The movie’s not an attack. It’s a challenge. To me, Christ is like a friend I’ve known my whole life. You know, the friend that doesn’t talk to you. But everyone tells me he said a lot of things while he was here, so you follow what he taught. When you’ve had a friend for twenty years, I think you’re allowed to joke around with him…. The movie’s so pro-faith, I feel like I’m doing the Catholic League’s job.2
Smith’s attitude is a terrific example of what Gen Xers are capable of when they choose to fully participate in society, instead of merely sitting on the couch and making sardonic comments about life as it passes them by. As do Payne’s and Lurie’s movies about politics, as well as Singleton’s and Lemmons’s movies about race, the Gen-X movies about religion prove that Gen Xers don’t disdain social institutions because of ignorance, but because of disagreements with what those institutions represent. Therefore, when filmmakers risk controversy by asking provocative questions about contemporary political, racial, and religious issues, they take a bold step away from the apathy with which Generation X has long been associated. They dig deep for answers to that most essential Gen-X question, “Who am I, and where do I belong?” By doing so, they help look for means by which people of all stripes—Republicans, Democrats, blacks, whites, Catholics, Jews, boomers, Gen Xers—can live together if not in peace, than at least in understanding.