Pictures of You[th]

My exploration the so-called "Generation X" strayed once again into celluloid through Timothy Shary's The Image of Youth in Contemporary Cinema, which specifically focused its lens on the films of 1980 to 1999.

Much of it was high time for youth cinema, as previously observed in my writeups about Peter Hanson's The Cinema of Generation X: A Critical Study and, especially, Jonathan Bernstein's Pretty In Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies. The similar themes apply, particularly about how cinema images of my generation showed them with no responsible parents, assuming parents entered the picture at all. Whether finding first love, starting an excellent adventure, getting dumped, getting mowed down in slasher films, or just trying to get lucky, youth in cinema found portrayals ranging from noble to nihilistic, generous to geeky, selfless to shallow.

It's interesting that Shary notes that the traditional teen movie all but disappeared from the early to mid-1990s, as films for these years were more likely to center on young twentysomethings, those mythical Xers. Yet even before the stereotype was established, various incarnations of slackers emerged in the 1980s -- from the gifted idler of Ferris Buehler's Day Off to brooding romantic Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything... to the eponymous engaging knuckleheads in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. But once Generation X was codified, then the characters of Clerks could be seen as cultural touchstones and Ben Stiller could unrealistically pander to his perceived audience's fantastical self-images in Reality Bites.

One interesting breakout observation of Shary's is the way that characters who were popular in school were suddenly knocked down a peg in contemporary films. "Popular characters in '90s school films are enterprising at earning social value, but most are also intellectually or morally deficient," he wrote. He also included a quote from a New York Times piece by Stephen Holden called "A New Rule: The Beautiful are the Bad":

The underlying message seems to be that teen-age girls, having finally been given license to swear like truck drivers and sleep with whomever they want, deserve to be punished. Being born beautiful means being born bad. Only ugly ducklings who have turned themselves into swans have a right to be happy.

Holden's odd sympathy for the possible persecution of pretty teen girls on the big screen notwithstanding, it's also part and parcel of a strange social inversion reported in the 1990s. Nirvana railed against peer pressure and the bullshit of social hierarchy in schools in "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and suddenly even the popular kids were wearing Nirvana T-shirts and pretending that they were alienated outcasts too. I seem to recall mentions on the late, lamented Suck.com about people who were popular in high school in the 1980s telling people in the 1990s that they were unpopular in high school, because uncool was the new cool. If you weren't letting your freak flag fly, then you are, well, some kind of freak.

Shary scores a great point in his observation that screen teens with spiritual belief or community commitments were decidedly underrepresented. "The wide involvement of youth in community and religious organizations is virtually never shown," he observed. "Youth rarely have political affiliations, even if they have clearly political ideas." One wonders if the omission of students on any kind of mission on screen is as much to blame on my generation being viewed as not having any civic engagement as any raging debate over how often we volunteered.

To his credit, Shary does think that films of the last decade tried to encourage youth in their own ways. "With the formation of the Generation X identity in the '90s, young people were told that the path to adulthood is longer and less secure than ever before, and that they must resist the temptation to 'slack' lest they remain in a state of permanent adolescence," he wrote. "Most youth films of the '90s further encouraged such resistance." Fight for your right not to be taken as a slacker. A noble observation.

I think I've gone through the cinema angle about as far as it will go. I'm seguing back to music now by reading the Nirvana biography Come As You Are ... not for the band's memories or fame as much as in how they remarkably faced so many of the same things as did fellow members of their generation.