Generation X Finally Grows Up (via Esquire)

As an actual member of Generation X (The Harvard Center uses 1965 to 1984 to define Gen X), this article from Esquire, which riffs on a recent column by A.O. Scott in the NY Times, is both insulting and frustrating. Gen X has been judged in large part by its most visible representatives - actors, musicians, etc. Most of us do not fit so neatly into these stereotypes, which is the insulting and frustrating part.

We are the in-between generation - some say the 13th generation in American history - sandwiched between 80 million Boomers and 78 million Millennials, and nearly half their size at 46 million. Yet, much of the world we live in today was created by Gen Xers:

Jeff Bezos, founder of the retail giant Amazon.com was born in 1964. YouTube was co-founded by three former Paypal employees, Chad Hurley, Steven Shih Chen, and Jawed Karim, born in 1976, 1978, and 1979 respectively. MySpace was first overseen by Brad Greenspan (b. 1975), Chris DeWolfe (b 1966), and Tom Anderson (b. 1970). The creator of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was born in 1976; and Wikipedia, the first collaborative, multilingual online encyclopedia was the brainchild of Jimmy Wales (b. 1966) and Larry Sanger (b. 1968).

Gen X also includes novelist Brett Easton Ellis, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, actors Rob Lowe, Robert Downey, Jr, Halle Berry, Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Uma Thurman, and Drew Barrymore, as well as musicians Trent Reznor, Lenny Kravitz, Tracy Chapman, Shania Twain, Kurt Cobain, Billy Corgan, Dr. Dre, and Ice Cube.

For a more realistic look at Gen X, see this site.

Generation X Finally Grows Up

Nineties icons are ready to face adulthood after all

By Stephen Marche on September 12, 2014


Jennifer Aniston in Cake at TIFF and Ethan Hawke in Boyhood.

Read more of our dispatches from the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival

Generation X is famously the generation that wouldn't grow up. This week, A.O.Scott has written a New York Times obituary for American adulthood, identifying a well-established phenomenon that Adam Sternbergh noticed nearly a decade ago: the rise of adults who are not really adult, at least in the traditional sense. The trend has coincided neatly with the rise (or semi-rise anyway) of the children born to the Boomers. It began in the nineties and has continued to swell since then. Which is why the Toronto International Film Festival this year may actually prove to be something of a turning point. In 2014, several different icons from the nineties, who are right at the heart of Generation X, are trying desperately to be grown-ups. They're even succeeding to some degree. Ethan Hawke, Reese Witherspoon, and even — gasp — Jennifer Aniston have made excellent, deadly serious movies that are, for lack of a better word, mature.

Jennifer Aniston's movie, Cake, may be the event of the festival. Its reception here has been highly reminiscent of the reception Dallas Buyers Club received last year. Standing ovations. Industry people crying in their seats. Matthew McConaughey won an Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club, and it would not surprise me if Aniston repeated the act for Cake. It would certainly be weird if she weren't nominated. That's certainly why the movie exists. The story itself is classic suffering-redemption-porn Academy bait. Aniston plays a woman recovering from a car accident that killed her son. The emotional trauma is secondary to the chronic pain she must endure. Popping massive quantities of Percocet and OxyContin, which she sometimes has to buy in bulk from a Tijuana pharmacist, she doesn't kill herself mainly because she doesn't have the guts.

Much will be made of the "look" of Jennifer Aniston in this movie. She wears no makeup and is covered in scars, including her face. "Ravaged" would be the correct word. No matter what she does to herself physically, however, she's still going to be Rachel and everyone watching will sympathize with her instantly. That sympathy is a powerful weapon given the subject of chronic pain. The character's constant, unremitting discomfort, which is alleviated only by drugged stupor, makes the audience's skin crawl. There is not a moment to settle down and relax, not one. You feel bad for her the entire 98 minutes. The misery is compounded, and complicated, by the fact that Aniston's character is a bitch — a self-aware bitch, but a bitch nonetheless. It's a courageous position to take: This woman's pain does not mean that she is a good person. Rather the opposite: The pain just makes her already nasty traits nastier. This is much, much braver than any other attempt by Aniston to recreate herself. She is willing to trade in on her strengths as an actress while pushing the audience as far as they can go. In other words, she is acting like somebody who wants to make something truly great and is willing to make personal sacrifices to help achieve it. In other words, she is acting like a grown-up. 

Ethan Hawke, too, is doing some maturing this year, a year that may also turn out to be McConaugheyesque for him. He was in Boyhood, of course, one of the greatest films ever made about the nature of maturity and immaturity. And he has come to the festival with two great follow-ups. The most unlikely is a documentary about Seymour Bernstein, a classical pianist who teaches lessons in his single-room apartment in Manhattan, as he has done for nearly 59 years. It is a quiet, contained portrait of a single eccentric individual that nonetheless reaches far enough to ask questions about what the nature of art may be, what qualifies as a successful life, and where craft and ecstasy meet in the psychology of the artist. It is a film, really, about what creative work means. And it eschews the usual banalities about authenticity and personal expression in favor of a straight look into the minutiae of the business. Apparently Hawke had finally, mercifully abandoned the bullshit of Dead Poets Society and (shudder) Reality Bites.

Then there's Reese Witherspoon in Wild, which is most explicitly about maturation. The film version of Cheryl Strayed's memoir about hiking the Pacific Coast Trail, it is literally a pilgrimage away from the bad behavior of her youth — heroin, screwing random guys — and away from her grief at her mother's death, into a new life, into as she says "becoming the woman my mother thought I could be." In other words she had become an adult. The woman who was Tracy Flick in Election has finally grown up. The woman from Legally Blond has finally grown up.

All these actors are, or were, icons of the grand Peter Pan syndrome that has generally gripped culture, and which A.O Scott is the latest to identify. But I wonder if Scott may have spoken too soon. Adulthood hunger is starting to rear its head, although it's also possible that his piece is a symptom of the desire for maturity as much as an identification of its reality. At least these three actors show a kind of reprieve in the onslaught of kids' stories being the only stories. Eventually, acting like a kid gets boring. One of the most unexpected results of growing up is that everything gets much more interesting, even as it gets much harder and much more complicated.

Generation X's Midlife Crisis Bites Back (on Where Spike Jonze's "Her" Fits in the Gen X Tradition)

Logan Hill, writing for Esquire, places Spike Jonze's Academy Award Nominated (best picture) Her as an examination of the midlife crisis of Gen X romance. It's an interesting and literate article. According to Hill, Gen X was BORN into midlife crisis.

As a Gen Xer myself, I have often been dismayed by the limited view of our generation as represented in the media (novels, television, films). I am not as pop culture obsessed or ironic as any of the familiar Gen X characters. Nor am a I a "slacker," perhaps the most serious misreading of my generation.

Gen X — a term that's still most accurate when applied to the sort of person who has strong opinions about Pavement and less useful when not — is that rare generation that wasn't defined by war, depression, or social upheaval.

This also is a misreading.

In 1987 (Black Monday), the stock market fell more than 500 points in a single day (22.61%), then fell some more. When the first Gulf War (2 August 1990 – 28 February 1991) began, now known as Operation Desert Storm, many of my high school classmates were in the military. We came of age amid financial crisis and the threat of a draft.

Even earlier in our lives, we saw Nixon resign, we saw the last soldiers airlifted out of Vietnam, we saw an American embassy overtaken in Iran (with 52 diplomats and citizens held for 444 days) and we saw an American military bunker blown up in Lebanon (229 soldiers killed) by two truck bombs.

We also saw the beginning of MTv, the congressional hearings on offensive lyrics in music (in which a baby boomer, Frank Zappa, saved music for our generation - transcript), and the emergence of computers as the dominant technology in culture.

If anything defines our generation, it is flexibility and resilience.

Be that as it may, this is still an interesting article.

Generation X's Midlife Crisis Bites Back

Twenty years after Reality Bites, the slackers still don't know what they want

By Logan Hill on February 27, 2014

"At the beep, please leave your name, number, and a brief justification for the ontological necessity of modern man's existential dilemma..."

In February of 1994, exactly twenty years ago, Ethan Hawke recorded that insufferable answering machine greeting as the unemployed, flannelled poet Troy Dyer, the most zeitgeist-y guy in Ben Stiller's directorial debut Reality Bites. Troy, the prototypical Gen X slacker, grew up so fast in what Douglas Coupland termed the "accelerated culture" of the time that he went straight from college into a fashionably precocious midlife crisis: the knee-jerk rejection of conventional comfort; the hyper-verbalized, oh-so-exhausted angst; the meaningless affairs; the guitar; the dubious facial hair. When he didn't let the answering machine chime, he picked up the phone with the grousing of an older man: "You've reached the winter of our discontent..."

And why not? Gen X — a term that's still most accurate when applied to the sort of person who has strong opinions about Pavement and less useful when not — is that rare generation that wasn't defined by war, depression, or social upheaval. It was named for its lack: that "X," which stood primarily for all those X-ed out marriages. Latch-key kids like Troy Dyer were birthed by the same adults who created record-breaking divorce rates and a pop culture seeded with midlife crisis tales (from Thirtysomething to John Irving). Gen X was literally born into midlife crisis: 1965 marks both the beginning of "Gen X" (which includes anyone born between then and Reagan's election) and the birth of the phrase "midlife crisis," coined that same year by psychologist Elliot Jacques.

Like many Gen X kids, Troy may have joked about his parents' divorce, but he seemed determined to get his own soul-searching messiness out of the way. And he did. In the final minutes of the film, Stiller pushed Troy into a new town, a real job, a house, and a committed relationship with Winona Ryder's Lelaina at the ripe age of 23. Stiller didn't resolve any of Troy or Lelaina's self-contradictory existential dilemmas. He sped through them in montage. Of course, what you repress often comes back to haunt you.

Gen X was literally born into midlife crisis.

What happens at the movies, when Gen X kids, who thought they'd outsmarted their parents years ago, finally confront their own middle age?

In 2010, New York Times critic A.O. Scott spotted this oncoming wave of "Gen X Midlife Crisis" stories in an essay that dwelled on Stiller's aging grouse in Noah Baumbach's Greenberg. Since then, there have been plenty of man-child comedies and middle-aged sitcoms, but there's been no generation-defining middle-age movie like The Big Chill. (Judd Apatow's too-earnest This Is Forty tried but flopped.) Richard Linklater's Before Midnight from last year earned raves and an Oscar best screenplay nomination by pushing the nineties heartthrob Ethan Hawke into divorce scuffles, custody battles, and marital less-than-bliss — but that film never made it out of the arthouse. For a generation splintered into 76,897 Netflix micro-genres, the sharpest midlife-crisis pop narratives have been narrow-cast stories riven with itchy weirdness (Enlightened and Louie, starring the 46-year-olds Laura Dern and Louis C.K.) or nostalgic tales from Gen X auteurs who position themselves in relation to an older generation, as in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, Noah Baumbach's The Squid & The Whale, and Matthew Weiner's Mad Men.

This Oscar season, one big Gen X midlife-crisis movie, Ben Stiller's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, was groomed for Oscar glory with a December release date, big stars, a literary pedigree, and a big budget — but it didn't click. Only the third film Stiller's directed since Reality Bites, Mitty also stars the actor as the sputteringly impotent Walter. He turns 42 in the film's first act — the same birthday celebrated by Kevin Spacey's fucked-up Lester Burnham in American Beauty. Whereas Lester retreated into teenage dreams of pot and Dylan, Walter broke out his old external-frame backpack and regressed into his teenage, Outward Bound vision of adulthood: He climbed a mountain, fought a shark, grew a vacation beard, wore a choker, and skateboarded away from an exploding volcano while wearing a Buzzcocks t-shirt as Arcade Fire's soundtrack swelled. "It's like Indiana Jones decided to become the lead singer of the Strokes," Patton Oswalt crowed — and that awful line made Walter, at the moment of his triumph, appear to be Gen X's most-despised bogeyman: the poseur. The breakthrough was bogus. Stiller's Mitty didn't have to re-evaluate his immature, implausible, selfish dreams of manhood. Instead (as in Old Hogs or City Slickers), the movie made them manifest. The film has made twice as much abroad as at home, perhaps because its earnest approach repelled the audience it was built to court.

But Her­, written and directed by Spike Jonze, the skate rat who co-created the MTV generation's magpie music-video aesthetic, has triggered ecstatic raves, earned a Best Picture nomination, and triggered a roiling online debate, largely because it was endlessly self-aware about the middle-aged issues that plagued Mitty. All that while being about a man who falls in love with his operating system. Jonze somehow gets away with it in his most personal film yet by crafting a high-concept, high-waisted aesthetic more befitting of his restless generation. Like Dave Eggers's Gen X touchstone A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Her armors naked truths in a dizzying array of ironic, defensive plot machinery: Sold as a satirical sci-fi romance, Her plays as a dark drama about a man emerging from a painful divorce. Heartbreaking Work, meet BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com.

Samantha is more than a cool gimmick. The film begins with Theodore's post-divorce retreat from reality. The absence of a "real" relationship is this film's painfully self-aware premise, subject, and form. With Theodore talking and talking about all those feelings to a receptive audience, often while lying on his back and staring at the ceiling, the film sometimes unspools like a therapy session.

Many (particularly women) seem baffled as to why Theodore's digital companion would be smitten with a mopey, dopey, sad-sack who's licking at the wounds of his divorce in his half-furnished living room. But she has been programmed to please. When Theodore boots up his new OS, the Freudian program asks him if he wants a male or female voice, and then asks a question about his mother. Theodore answers, "One thing I found frustrating is that I'd say something and her reaction would usually be about her." Calibrated according to that simple data, Samantha coddles. When she's laughing at his jokes, telling him he's sexy, and giggling girlishly at his hilarious emails it's because that's how she's been wired.

The film's entire first act embodies most of the feminist criticisms hurled against it (and what's more Gen X than pop critique?). It begins as a sick, realistic joke about how badly men crave affirmation, even if it's purchased, or fake, or delusional. Initially, Samantha is the ultimate younger woman: Just a millisecond old when she and fortysomething Theodore first meet, she's so young she hasn't even been named. Voiced by Scarlett Johansson (a decade younger than Phoenix), she's flirty and fascinated by all of his mature problems, which seem so far beyond her limited comprehension. She is infinitely less complicated than his ex-wife and "excited about life." In Mad Men terms, she's Megan, not Betty — only upgraded and disembodied. Samantha is Theodore's lover, yuppie status symbol, assistant, lover, therapist, tech toy, cheerleader, friend, IT specialist, secretary, editor, and video-game co-pilot.

Theodore, who says he's such a mess he can't prioritize "between porn and video games," doesn't have to choose anymore. He can play love like an Xbox, reveling in the Pavlovian thrill of mashing Samantha's buttons and getting exactly what he wants, no matter what he does, or how pathetic he seems. Many of the critiques of Samantha's character seem to miss the fact that the first act was terrifying as a kind of psychological horror film. This is not a healthy man in a healthy relationship, as his wife points out later. As his date says, Theodore is a "creepy dude."

How can Gen X middle age not be caught up in technology? If there's one thing different about this generation's midlife crises, it's that they're the first to be mediated by technology so thoroughly. But in Mitty, Stiller's vision of the dating site eHarmony is so out-of-touch and odd that Walter's main interaction with the site involves an impotent mouse that won't click and old-school telephone calls with Patton Oswalt's customer service rep. Jonze's future feels like Gen X's present. Theodore gets lost in the bespoke technology, like so many of us. Every shot of Phoenix stumbling through a frame all alone, talking to nobody, exaggerates that push-pull feel of how technology can blunt our worst days and also, perhaps, prolong them with distraction. He mistakes technological mastery for psychological maturity — and lifehacking for living.

In the second act, Samantha's intelligence rapidly evolves and, for a while, she and Theodore sync up and genuinely seem to connect. Samantha becomes more than his algorithmic projection and evolves into a more-human intelligence. Theodore becomes slightly less solipsistic, while still latching onto the childish pop-song view of love he spouts at work ("Suddenly this bright light hit me and woke me up. That light was you!").

In the third act, Theodore continues his slow slog down the post-divorce, Kubler-Ross path of his grief, but by the time he's ready to engage in something resembling a mutually respectful relationship, it's too late. Samantha is built to evolve: "What makes me 'me' is the ability to grow from my experiences," she says, paraphrasing zen guru Alan Watts, a favorite of Jonze's. In a sci-fi sense, she's evolved exponentially beyond the singularity. In midlife-crisis metaphorical sense, she's sick of being the rebound girl for this self-centered divorcee who's always bitching about his ex-wife. So she leaves Theodore, along with 8,316 other deluded lovers just like him.

Theodore's melancholic ending — in which he accepts his divorce and has, perhaps, learned to love by trying it out on a bot — is the slightest of victories. As it should be: Gen X, having grown up in the pop hysteria of midlife crisis, has always had extremely realistic, if not pessimistic, romantic expectations. Its filmmakers have complicated the idealistic movie romance over and over again, from Before Sunrise to (500) Days of Summer. Her isn't a wholly new model of the middle-aged movie, but it's an honest upgrade.

Joseph Gelfer - GenerationX-Men

Joseph Gelfer, PhD, has an interesting new article up at Disinformation on the non-traditional masculinity of Generation X. His books include Numen, Old Men: Contemporary Masculine Spiritualities and the Problem of Patriarchy (Gender, Theology and Spirituality) [2009], The Masculinity Conspiracy [2011, also available for free online], and 2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse [2011].

He also the Editor of Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality. His latest book is Masculinities in a Global Era (International and Cultural Psychology) published in 2013 in Springer’s International and Cultural Psychology series. I would love to get this book, but at $103.20 for the Kindle edition (cheapest option), it's a little outside of my purchasing power.

Anyway, this is a good article that I would love to see expanded into a more thorough analysis at some point (hint, hint). Perhaps, as a GenX male (by age), I am biased in my interest for this topic. Also, as a male who has rejected many of the gender norms passed down from my father. My father and mother were cohorts with the Boomer parents, so I am in a kind of no-Gen land, GenX by age but raised with the same values as the Boomers. I am interested, too, in the notion of how GenX rejected work (I sure tried) as a defining feature of our identity.

In my 20s and early 30s I worked jobs well below my post-graduate level education. I could never imagine myself doing anything that I would stay with long enough to retire (my father worked more than ten years, combined, at Boeing and then Lockheed, then spent 20 years in the US Postal Service). Even now, the longest job I have had is as a personal trainer, mostly self-employed, for more than 10 years now.

Of the GenX folks I know, a lot of us are transitioning into our "true work" as we have reached our late 30s and early 40s. I don't know that we want power in the traditional sense. And those of our generation who do want power are still living in traditional gender roles and seem to be politically inclined. Until the parents of the Boomers pass along, it's not likely that any "alternative" folks are going to hold positions of traditional power.

But that does not mean we are not leaders. We just tend to lead from the group and to do so locally, in our own workplaces, religious institutions, and communities. I wonder if this is different in Australia where Joseph lives and works?

GenerationX-Men

By Joseph Gelfer on August 30, 2013



Do you remember when there used to be lots of references to Generation X? Then you’re probably a GenXer. Douglas Coupland, Reality Bites, the whole slacker stereotype was across the cultural domain, poised at the edge of a generational battle with the Boomers.

The way I remember it, we would soon be taking over and instilling society with our values. Whatever happened to that? All I read about these days is the never-ending discussion between GenY and the Boomers. It’s as if GenX never existed. You might note that a significant percentage of the GenY vs Boomers discussion is work-related, usually with GenY telling us what they need in a workplace, and the Boomers quipping in reply, “GenY employ them.”

Indeed, the issue of work may have something significant to tell us about the disappearance of GenX, and the construction of a certain type of archetypal GenX masculinity. Of course, there is no archetypal GenX masculinity, but bear with me while I entertain a few generational clichés. In short, mature Boomer masculinity (as opposed to its free-wheeling early years) is largely defined by work, whereas GenX masculinity is not. Remember Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites? Clever but annoying, oddly effeminate yet sexually predatory, and certainly dismissive of Winona’s efforts to secure ongoing employment. That’s the stereotype of GenX masculinity.

But what happened to that stereotype as it matured into manhood? Contrary to the Ethan Hawke story recently reprized in Before Midnight, most of us did not write books and enjoy a trans-Atlantic lifestyle of existential angst (and, damn it, those of us who did manage to write books probably didn’t write successful ones). Rather, we reluctantly embarked upon a work trajectory while simultaneously resenting work values and finding it all rather beneath us. (Forgive me if that wasn’t your experience, but I’m willing to bet there are enough people who share it to warrant the point).

Then, when we did not play the game of work, we became rather put out to discover that work had no desire to reward us with positions of power, but it is willing to at least acknowledge the existence of GenY who seem to oscillate between the poles of being unemployed-but-really-wanting-work, or entrepreneurs with millions in start-up venture capital. And so Boomers and GenY lock horns, but nevertheless understand one another due to their mutual centralization of that classic masculine signifier of work. GenX masculinity, on the other hand, is quietly erased from everywhere but a few sketches in Portlandia.

But here’s where I want to shift into manifesto mode. Because like all good GenXers I paint on a broad canvas, and despite all the superficial skepticism, I am at heart a hopeless optimist. I believe GenX has yet to have its time, and here’s how I hope it’s going to pan out.

GenX values will soon be viewed via a lens of sustainability. All that being dismissive of work, houses and cars was paradoxically not about slackerdom but proactivity. By rejecting consumer and corporate culture, GenX was, perhaps unwittingly, nurturing a set of lived values that would evolve into what we now understand in mainstream society as social, economic and environmental sustainability. The flow-on effect for masculinity is that it is no longer defined purely by work and possessions, rather a whole spectrum of alternative sustainable values.

The point, then, is not that GenX has been overlooked in receiving the baton of power from the Boomers: GenX has chosen not to receive the baton of power, opting instead to explore a different way of being and constructing identity. As Gen X embarks upon what Jung described as “the afternoon of life” we can expect to see many of those empty-day thinking exercises of youth begin to manifest in real life acts of subversion, mutuality and generativity. As society unravels from social, economic and environmental mismanagement we might just be lucky enough to be passed into a safer pair of hands. Of course, GenX has to stand up and play its part, but it’s a role it has coveted for years.