Watching The Detectives

I've scooped up a couple more books from the library in the area of film studies. For now, the idea of looking for clues on Generation X in movies seems like an appealing concept.

It is, as noted earlier, the kind of fertile field that could overwhelm some of the other points of the paper. The way I look at it, so much research and so many pages of notes on other topics would make casting the other threads aside seem like a real waste of time and resources. But part of what we're aiming for by the end of the semester is a breakout "chapter" on a specific topic. So GenX and film seems an entertaining and stimulating option.

The book I really wanted to check out, Timothy Shary's Generation Multiplex, is still out. It was due back in late September. Someone has some hefty fines to pay if/when the book returns, but that's no comfort at this point.

Instead, I took home Jonathan Bernstein's Pretty In Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies, which focuses its lens on the teen movies of the 1980s. Remember that many teens of the 1980s would later become members of this mystery species known as Generation X. Is there any reason we can't view The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off or Fast Times at Ridgemont High as both proto-slacker movies and films that contributed in some way to my generation's collective psyche?

Also making the trek from Penfield to home: Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes: A Guided Tour Across A Decade of American Independent Cinema by John Pierson with Kevin Smith (Clerks/Chasing Amy). This could be a bit of a crapshoot, as it may turn more on specific personalities and such, but just that it dedicates a whole chapter to Richard Linklater and Slackers makes it worth a try.

The mining begins. Hope nuggets of wisdom follow.