Happyish Curmudgeons

I'm working on a separate blog with a goal to focus on stories - film, television, literature - and how it changes through the Saeculum.  And as such, this article about a new series, Happyish, would be a great fit with it. However, it kept hitting so many Crisis touchpoints that it seems worthwhile to list them here, anyway:

• "A curmudgeon creates a curmudgeon" and Xers are the new curmudgeons, like other Reactive/Nomad generations.
• The idea that the change to this current turning is very much starting to creep into how people view the world, as the lead character tries to understand his Millennial co-workers and their different perspectives on life.
• The character's name is Thom Payne, and references to Common Sense are called out in the article and presumably on the show as well.
• The ads juxtapose a standard-for-advertising happy family with a mushroom cloud. And really, isn't that how life feels right now?

Unfortunately, initial critical response appears to be negative.

Dumb

It's previously been noted that 1994 was a significant year in film, at least for Generation X. While Boomer nostalgia tale Forrest Gump came out early in the year, it was Tarantino's Pulp Fiction that really made an impression and heralded the new kids in town.

(Although, yes, there was also Shawshank and Bullets Over Broadway and The Lion King and some other notable films, if you really want to dig into it....)

It was also the year that Jim Carrey made a splash in movies, after several years on In Living Color. First was The Mask (with Cameron Diaz), then Ace Ventura Pet Detective, and finally Dumb and Dumber.

Which has a sequel coming out ... twenty years later. Probably a little late, and not only because it's been twenty years.

Let it be noted, again, that the book Generations gives "stupid" as a "word of high praise" for Gen Xers. Still, here within the Crisis, and this Nomad generation in midlife, a movie about being stupid beyond mere words may be difficult to internalize. Really smart people have had trouble over the last five, ten, fifteen years: The survival of these two may be asking for too much suspension of disbelief in the modern world.

Danger

In Sunday's Los Angeles Times, film critic Mark Olsen has a feature on "New Dangerous" filmmakers, entitled "Danger is the realm's new coin."

The thing that binds these films is that they all risk failure, the possibility that the sleek, knife-edged dive into the water could also be a sloppy belly-flop.

The description of a new and unexpected direction in new films made it seem possible as an sign of the Millennial generation breaking out their own style in film.

However, most of the filmmakers mentioned are Gen X and Boom, not Millennials. 

• Chris Rock (b. 1965)
• Kevin Smith (b. 1970)
• Jonathan Glazer (b. 1965)
• Jason Reitman (b. 1977)
• Alejándro G. Iñárritu (b. 1963)
• Shira Piven (b. 1961)
• Dan Gilroy (b. 1959)
• Olivier Assayas (b. 1956)

There are some Millennials, or at least they appear to be. Surprisingly difficult to track down their birth dates....

• Alex Ross Perry 
• Justin Simien - 30 years old according to The Advocate
• Gillian Robespierre - Millennial membership inferred completely on incidental evidence

In any case, the connecting thread isn't generational. The non-Millennials are middle-aged or older, and might be looking for a different direction in their individual careers as they move past young adulthood.  Perhaps some new attitudes towards film are informing their artistic choices. The Millennials' films do sound different - a romantic comedy about abortion, a satire about race set at an Ivy League college.

Maybe it's starting. Not a problem, if not - it's a bit early, yet.

Now

Turned on The Spectacular Now, expecting to see a Civic coming of age story or something similar.

But rather quickly it didn't seem like it was working. And the possibility came to mind that maybe it was a not a good match for the Four Stories model - the idea that people from a particular generation tend to set up a standard story that fits them best, and that stories will tend to do better if targeted in that way. That is, this one should have been a Heroic arc, with success coming through working with friends and sacrifice in support of the greater good.

Instead, though, the main character is clearly Bad right from the start.  Not a bad person, really  - he seems to be the guy at parties who is Liked and maybe even Well Liked - but he obviously and seriously has a drinking problem right from the start. The Civic generations - what were called Hero archetypes in The Fourth Turning and later books - might be depicted as flawed but not so severely. That makes it easier for their stories to focus on winning their struggles, while Nomad stories are more often about redemption. If anything, though, this film was looking like it matched the "everyone is Doomed or Damned" model of an Artist story. Still, there was stretches where it seemed like it had to be heading in a redemptive direction, so maybe not that ... but ultimately it just couldn't be Heroic. Which didn't fit well with high school students who were clearly in recent times.

Of course, Four Stories is a simple model of a complex world, which certainly may have flaws. There's not a problem if it doesn't explain everything - that helps ensure that it's being honestly compared with it's subject. Maybe there's something to be added to it....

Eventually, though,  the disconnect about where it seemed to be heading became too much. To the extent that I had to check where the story came from and sure enough, the screenwriter is Generation X, as is the director. Although the original novel is from a late Boomer (Tim Tharp, 1957), not a Reactive. Which makes him the same age as Cameron Crowe, who came to mind because Sutter seems like a much more flawed Lloyd Dobler.

All of which might explain why it didn't do super well at the box office, although critics - mostly Boomer and GenX - did like it. It was marketed in one direction but with a narrative that doesn't match what's expected. It does, in fact, turn into a perfectly fine redemptive story, so it might have worked if marketed that way - i.e. as a troubled teen redemption story rather than romantic comedy or coming of age.

Robin

There's a post from a while back that notes that while Generation X may discount the importance of the Awakening, there were still unavoidable influences that weren't always adversarial or otherwise negative.

Similarly, while Boomers may be Gen X's least favorite people as a group, many of them had a direct and positive influence. Including the late Robin Williams.

There are people who think Dead Poet's Society is not only a great but an important film.  There are probably fewer that consider Hook a compressed microcosm of the post-Awakening Boomer mindset, even if it seems like an example to Gen X of What Not To Do When You Grow Up. (It does, however, have a Prophet who succeeds without sacrifice, based on pure moral superiority, in an effort to save the next generation....)

If there was one undeniable chunk of his art that touched us when we were willing to listen, though, it was the comedy album Reality ... What a Concept. Frequently played at parties or wherever people were together in the early 80s,  the source of its subversive attitude wasn't easy to pin down.  It was definitely different from the albums put together by the previous generation of comics. The only similarity was in having cuts where one section ended and another began, usually where a specific persona was started or stopped. The rapid-fire references, and lightning moves from one line to another, all said that How Things Were Done didn't have to be the only way. It was funny where you knew what he was saying, it was funny where you didn't, it was funny when he was ridiculing Old(er) Hollywood ("send in the clowns") or then-active televangelists ("I know you can walk without that chair!").

Prophets are supposed to rebel against What Came Before, tearing down so that a new world can be built up again. Some, Robin Williams, do it more thoroughly than others.  Nobody will quite be able to walk in his footsteps, for he made quite a mark.

Ahab

MOBY DICK AND THE METHODS OF RATIONALITY

(as related by Eneasz on LessWrong)

"Revenge?" said the peg-legged man. "On a whale? No, I decided I'd just get on with my life."

The above is the complete text of Moby Dick if the primary characters were rationalists. The link has excerpts from other literature similarly written as if the characters involved were, similarly, thinking about what they were doing, and about how they were thinking, and about what they know.  Besides its brevity, this one sticks out because of the relationship between Nomads, Prophets, and rational thinking. 

Herman Melville’s (b 1819, Prophet) most famous novel was released in 1851. That point in history is three years after the start of the California Gold Rush, ten years before the start of the Civil War, a few years before Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, and Harper’s Ferry - in the Third Turning, that is. There isn’t quite the same feeling of easy riches that one might remember from the dot-com era or The Great Gatsby. (Although it’s fun to note that the crew of the Pequod are paid with the shipboard equivalent of room, board, and stock options.) And while Ishmael notes that his recompense will barely replace the clothes that will wear out by the voyage’s end, it seems as if he values the less tangible benefits of adventure and excitement on the open seas, of traveling around the world. Ishmael, that is, seems like a Nomad. And Captain Ahab acts like a Prophet.

Doing the math on Ahab, who is 58 years old when the novel begins, we can estimate that he is probably also a Prophet, like Melville, of the same Transcendental generation that includes Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Lloyd Garrison. This depends on when one wants to estimate the start of the novel, however: 58 years back from 1851 is 1793, near the start of the Transcendental cohort. Assuming Ishmael took some time to set down the events he survived, it could be in 1848 or earlier, which has Ahab born in 1790 - near the end of the Compromise (Artist) generation. While there is probably another post’s worth of comparisons to be made with Ahab as an Artist (or someone very close to the Artist/Prophet line) this post will work with the Captain as a Prophet. 

Prophets, in the regular (non-archetypical) sense, aren’t rational. They speak on behalf of God, are unwilling to accept alternative explanations, and often aren’t bearers of glad tidings. In the Strauss & Howe sense, they reject the status quo, and are willing to take on entrenched institutions - even when those institutions are willing and likely to fight back. John Brown (b. 1800, Prophet) turned 51 the year Moby Dick was published, and one could certainly imagine Captain Ahab on the ground at Harper’s Ferry, as easily as Brown might be seen exhorting the crew of the Pequod to find and kill the white whale. 

The short version of Moby Dick above, then, could be seen as not only what Captain Ahab would do if he was a rationalist, but if he was a Nomad.  Eliezer Yudkowsky, the man behind HPMOR and Less Wrong,  is Gen X (b. 1979) and one might predict that the rise of rationalism parallels the move of Generation X into Young Adulthood and Mid-Life. The idea of reacting to a whale as the equivalent of God, of taking on the whale to attempt to undo fate - well, it all boils down to the short summary above.

Playing around with this a bit more, Captain Ahab has been played by Boomer (William Hurt, Barry Bostwick), Silent (Patrick Stewart), G.I. (Gregory Peck) and Missionary (John Barrymore) actors.  It’s not surprising that it skips Generation X (none of whom is quite Ahab’s age) but it is interesting that it skips the (also Nomad) Lost Generation.  Khan Noonien Singh similarly goes for vengeance - and spits out Ahab’s last words for his own - well, he was in suspended animation for a while, so the math could fail us, but he similarly appears to be a Prophet:  In his mid-40s during the Eugenic Wars, so he was born in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

Braff

Because I can.


And why not.

And also a bit because it's a Gen Xer going through a personal Crisis, at just this time when Crisis surrounds us already. It seems fair to say that this is his Pragmatic Mid-life Xer film, much as Garden State was his Alienated Young Adult film.

Finishing off with a line like "Maybe we're just the regular people, the ones who get saved," certainly sounds like it.

Lost

The Lifecourse site has Generation X as the only living Nomad generation. That didn’t seem right - surely the oldest living American was born before 1900. And that turns out to be the case. She just turned 115 last week.

Born May 23, 1899, Jeralean Talley is a member of the Lost Generation (born 1883-1900).  It was tempting to complain about their exclusion as a a living Nomad generation, if she is still around. However, it appears that no males remain from that cohort: The oldest man alive today was born in 1903. Time marches on.

Slackers

There's not much to say that this doesn't already say.

Generation X gets really old: How do slackers have a midlife crisis?

A perfectly good question, and worth considering again. Even if this article was written last summer.

X

Generation X has actually been used to refer to several generations, depending on which reference is meant:

The original Generation X was a 1965 book about post-war youth in England. The older ones (up to mid-20s, say) would have been Blitz - "born in the war," the equivalent of America's Silent generation - while the younger ones would have been Prophets, like American Boomers.

Billy Idol's first band used that book's title for its name - an appropriate one for a punk band. Mr. Idol (born 1955) is solidly in that Prophet generation - whatever the equivalent is of the Boomers in England, anyway - although too young to have really been a part of the earlier X.

Douglas Coupland used the band's name for his book, Generation X: Tales For an Accelerated Culture. (Well, really he acknowledges Billy Idol for the term, while saying it actually was based on references in a book called Class by one Paul Fussell.) Mr. Coupland (born 1961) is in fact the Nomad generation by Strauss & Howe's definition, although he has since disavowed the idea that there Generation X even exists.

Strauss & Howe did not use Generation X in their books: The post-Boomer Nomad generation was called 13th Generation in both Generations and The Fourth Turning. They use it currently on their websites, though, acknowledging that it is the dominant and preferred term.

Screaming

I think I'm gonna be the balding virile type, you know, as opposed to say, the um distinguished gray, for instance, you know, unless I'm neither of those two. Unless I'm one of those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag screaming about socialism. Woody Allen (or Alvy Singer....), Annie Hall

There are times when the biggest concern about blogging is how soon the witty posts are going to devolve into screaming about socialism. And if anyone would then be able to tell the difference.

When Annie Hall came out in 1977, an older man like the one Mr. Allen fears becoming could easily be in his late 70s - which is to say, born in 1900 or earlier, solid Lost Generation. Which is less about being an acquiantance of Hemingway than a contemporary, growing up when Williams Jennings Bryant was traveling the country to speak to adoring crowds;  old enough to fight in The Great War, but a little too old by the time WWII came around; ending up in a world that didn't quite fit them after the fighting stopped. Similar folks are seen in popular culture all around the postwar era. Mr. Wilson, Mrs. Porter, Statler & Waldorf: Grumpy, cynical, virtually -  sometimes literally - yelling at the kids to get off their lawn.

And that phrase - "You kids, get off my lawn!" - is a popular enough sentiment among my generation, meant ironically or not. The Lost were the previous generation of the Reactive archetype - previous to GenX, that is - and we can expect to follow in their footsteps.

Survivalism

This is not a survivalist blog. There aren't recommendations on how to have enough gold and lead to survive the collapse of civilization. Indeed, there's no guarantee that will happen - within ten years, or even a hundred. Such an occurrence is unlikely: most Fourth Turnings have been much milder than that, so the probabilities say that this one will be as well. There are preparations that can be made short of five-year food supplies and fortified stockades. While paying off the mortgage is a fine idea, it isn't going to do much good if Sherman rides through town.

There may be enough information here to help recognize whatever is coming next.  Find a safe place, hunker down, wait for the shaking to stop. Recommendations made earlier still hold true: Keep far away from actual fighting, and be on the winning side. That may help people to survive.

If that's what they want.

While in the best of worlds, everyone who has a chance to read these words will live a long life beyond the end of this Turning, the Crisis isn't here merely to be lived through. It happens because there are important matters to be solved, and those of us alive, here, will help to solve them.

King Henry V didn't convince his army that they could survive. "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers... Gentleman in England now a-bed shall think themselves accursed that they were not here."  General Patton was closer in spirit to survival as a virtue - "Spill their blood! Shoot them in the belly!" - while similarly reminding them that they would be happier in the future after fighting in Germany than if they spent the War somewhere safe like Louisiana.

Pragmatic, cynical Reactives aren't supposed to think this way, but that's the simple logic of our times.

Judge

Yesterday’s post started because HBO is premiering a new show, Silicon Valley. Clearly a case of Hollywood copycatting, it was obviously going to be another premium cable vanity project. Someone thought it would be cool to do a show about the tech industry, and there was no way it was going to be anywhere near as good or topical or relevant as Betas. 

And then it turned out that it was being produced by Mike Judge, and all was forgiven.

Mike Judge (born 1962) is a Gen Xer, with a number of iconic productions that are representative of GenX over the last 20 years.

Beavis & Butthead began as an animated short, "Frog Baseball," showing what happened when two dimwitted teenagers used a frog as a baseball. Expanded into half-hour animated series on MTV, the titular characters were SO stupid that they required an opening screen imploring viewers not to do anything like them. (It's worth noting here that the book Generations gives "stupid" as a "word of high praise" for Gen Xers.) He followed with another animated series, King of the Hill, about Hank Hill, American, family man, and seller of propane and propane accessories. While animated, it was very realistic in tone, rarely going beyond what would have been possible in a live-action series.

Both series were long-running successes. Real fans, of course, also watched The Goode Family, about an earnestly hyper-liberal husband and wife so politically correct that they'd probably object to being described in such sexist and patriarchal terms. Because anyone who wasn't a real fan probably didn't find it that funny.

(C'mon - what's not funny about trying to adopt an African baby and ending up with a white boy from South Africa?)

He's also done several feature films with varying degrees of success. Office Space sets the bar for Generation X workplace comedies, with its cubicle-drone protagonist who becomes much more successful after being hypnotized into not caring about his job. The more ambitious Idiocracy has a similarly average guy who ends up hundreds of years in the future, where intelligence has been slowly bred out of the populace. (The early segments, showing what happens when smart people have incentives to put off child-bearing, are brilliant.)  It's a national tragedy that it was given almost no theatrical release.

(Sorry, nothing to say about "The Extract" - heard it was good, haven't had a chance to see it.)

Silicon Valley is getting great reviews, and sounds like it may be his biggest hit yet.  Good luck to him.

Hoffman

At a charity silent auction today we bid on a lot that included a dozen lollipops and an animated figurine of Alvin (well, one of the Chipmunks) that plays their “Christmas Song.” My son thinks has been playing it over and over and over since we unwrapped it. Which had me thinking about Almost Famous and considering watching it tonight...

It’s on now. Actually the extended “Untitled” version, which inspired some scrambling for the remote because it doesn’t have audio over the Dreamworks bumper. All to relive my initial introduction to Philip Seymour Hoffman,  whom I previously called “one of Gen X's most celebrated actors.” Which might not be clear if you follow that link, since I intentionally left his name out in order to avoid spoilers for Catching Fire. I have since been informed that it was actually perfectly well telegraphed that he was manipulating the events there, so it’s not nearly as much of a spoiler as I thought.

The man is dead of a drug overdose tonight. I’m shocked and dismayed, and clearly haven’t been paying attention to his life, since evidently he’s been in and out of rehab since graduating from NYU in 1989. And I’m not paying attention to what I write, either, as it practically goes without saying that Mister Most Celebrated would end up burning out - that seems to be What We Do.

And, sure, it’s not like GenX invented drug overdoses or dying too young. We do seem to be the group that burns out at the peak, more than fading away.

Here’s what I remember of him, though, after that great portrayal of Lester Bangs in Almost Famous:

• The attendant in Magnolia. Don’t quite remember anything about it, but remembered him.
• Gust Avrakotos, the guy “working hard” on an Afghanistan strategy in Charlie Wilson’s War, and later pointing out what a big mistake was being made by not following up 
• And of course the aforementioned darkly manipulative Plutarch Heavensbee in Catching Fire

One of the cool things about Untitled is that you get more of Lester, complaining about everything about Rock and Roll in 1973. “Take drugs?” “No.” “Smart kid...”

Royals

Grammys were last night, and an article in the Times evoked a precursor to my previous prediction. Mr. Soderbergh notwithstanding, the point at which distinctively Xer films appeared was a few years after they made their mark in music. The real, no-kidding, here-we-are-now point would have to be 1991, when Smells Like Teen Spirit destroyed what came before. (Still, what came before was often solidly of the same generation. Axl Rose, Slash and most other original members of Guns N Roses are Xers, as are many denizens of that “hair band” era.) 

Which means when someone starts talking about a “night for the underdogs,” "austerity themes," and victories for “second-hand culture,” contrasting (Xer) Ryan Seacrest with almost completely Millennial victories, it may be that music, at least, has fallen to the Hero hordes. Film is bound to be around the corner.

Afterthoughts

Before going on with that previous prediction, I have to acknowledge Steven Soderbergh as another young Xer with a distinctive style who was making a name in the film business - and five years earlier.

I realized it while watching a bit from “Frozen” where an “Are you ready?/I was born ready” exchange occurs. In Ocean's 13, of course,  this is spoofed by having Andy Garcia say it - then Clooney rolls his eyes as he walks away. Similar deconstructions happen in Oceans 11 and other films, which suggests that it’s a common thread - unfortunately, I haven’t seen Sex Lies and Videotape to say that it happens there. That it was a popular indie with an unusual focus is enough on its own for me to say it was a precursor to what came later.

I’m also realizing that I’m unlikely to predict HOW the next Civics will change the world. There’s nothing obvious about the attributes of these Xer filmmakers that makes it clear where anything derives from the generation. Maybe - MAYbe - you could say that Reactives are Bad, they know they are bad, and the ability of making hit men et al relatable was about externalizing their own recognized Bad-ness. (Whereas in Goodfellas or The Godfather, there was more of a "these actually are NOT people like you or me" point of view.) A cursory consideration of Boomer, Silent and G.I. films and filmmakers is similarly unhelpful. Any forecast to that depth might have to take into account the state of the industry, of technology, the moment (and catalysts) of recent Turnings, et cetera.

Influences

Guy at the coffee place we frequent was complaining about Tarantino, how one word that does NOT describe him is “great.” Although it is not an applicable word for his last couple of films, he has enough under his belt to keep his legacy in the “great” column for a while yet. I’ll jabber on about that for a moment before taking a chance with an actual near-term prediction.

An earlier post mentions Tarantino, Smith, and Favreau as significant Xer filmmakers. Although each has a different justification, one connection is that their films that really heralded a new age were in the consecutive years 1994, 1995, and 1996. Although Reservoir Dogs made its director’s name, Pulp Fiction was a massive critical and box office hit. It had a distinct style and attributes that hadn’t previously been visible in mainstream movies. The most obvious of these is the non-linear story, moving back and forth so that the (chronological) beginning of the film is in the middle, the final events shown are after that, and the actual end of the film is halfway through the events shown. (But it all makes sense...) There is also the use of cultural ephemera, from Clutch Cargo to nostalgia clubs to obscure breakfast cereals, as a way to describe the people being portrayed, and to give the world depth. And while it was nothing new to make movies about criminals, hit men, molls, or washed-up boxers, how they were made relatable, even admirable, was at least different. All the talk at the time was about how it was world-changing, and looking back now it’s amazing how truly influential it was.

It did not immediately appear to be hugely influential on Kevin Smith, who produced and directed “Clerks.” on a budget so paltry it was shot in black and white -- there wasn’t enough money for color. It focuses on the truly ordinary Dante and Randall, a convenience mart and video store clerk, respectively. A lot happens on this day that the film portrays, even though much that we see (like Pulp Fiction) is people talking about what they do, what they’ve done, what they plan to do. The language is casually filled with profanity, to the point that it nearly earned an NC-17 rating despite having no on-screen sex or violence. Again, though, it is not like films that came before, and it was influential on what came after. Smith was able to parlay this into a respectable and continuing career. He helped launch the careers of Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Jason Lee, and others. Further, his ability to create a marketable film on the proceeds from sale of a comic book collection meant that almost anyone could at least consider selling a film regardless of their initial financial state.

That might not have been exactly what happened with Swingers, but director Doug Liman realized that their more substantial ($200K) but still minimal (by Hollywood standards) budget required a similar outlook. Still, we are seeing cultural callbacks - Reservoir Dogs is directly referenced and lightly parodied - and still it’s a film largely of people talking to each other. This time, those people are struggling actors in Hollywood, begging for anything that can help pay the rent, whether its a TV pilot, a character at Disneyland, a job at Starbucks. They are quotable, recognizable and (again) casual users of profanity.  Vince Vaughn’s career was launched when a request for permission to use music from (yep) “Jaws”  meant his performance was seen by Spielberg. Writer/director Favreau would get a few gigs, too,  and would eventually direct the huge Marvel Ironman movies. 

There's an additional thread of influence from Doug Liman, who followed on directing another indie film, “Go.”   With a non-linear narrative concerning a drug deal gone bad (or two, or three, depending on how you count), it may not be actually derivative of Pulp Fiction, but that film’s success probably made it easier to get this one to the big screen. The screenwriter was John August, who would go on to work with Drew Barrymore and Tim Burton. It was the big-screen debut of Melissa McCarthy, and one of the first big roles for Timothy Olyphant. And, of course, Liman himself would go on to direct big-budget action films.

Three young adult Xers, three writer/directors, three exceptionally influential films, all starting about 20 years ago.  Although its based on more than only them, my prediction is that we are nearly due for another world-changing few years like that. No later than 2016, we will see the first films with a true Millennial view, written and directed by people born after 1982, which will unstoppably influence movies for the following twenty years, possibly more. The first indications will be a young auteur, probably not yet 30, who is noticed for a film that is just not like what is out there now. 

I will fill this prediction out more, although that will require looking back at least to the mid-70s, and possibly back to the start of motion pictures....