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I’m far from the first person to observe that Baby Boomers are the most entitled generation in American history; it’s a commonplace observation. What’s really interesting, though, is that Baby Boomers have an entire subgenre of films devoted to telling them that they are good people.

What I call Boomer Validation films are movies, sometimes quite good movies, that are all about telling Baby Boomers that their particular generational angst du jour is valid and real and that they, the Boomers, are nonetheless pretty great individuals.

One of the first big landmarks in the genre is THE BIG CHILL, addressing that early-80s Boomer crisis of conscience: Weren’t we going to change the world? Why the fuck did I just vote for Reagan? Fortunately, the movie tells us that selling out doesn’t make you a bad person, you still listen to Motown so you’re cool.

CITY SLICKERS is another classic of the genre, here dealing with the male Boomer mid-life crisis. Validation is provided by surrogate father-figure Jack Palance and a realization of boyhood fantasies through a lens of American mythology.

FORREST GUMP is, of course, the most enormous and obvious example. Forrest, metaphorical representation of an entire generation, is responsible for basically every single cultural memory the generation retains. It’s like a narcissistic “We Didn’t Start The Fire”, only longer. Here, again, we see the singular importance of Baby Boomers reaffirmed, along with the vital fact that they are good.

AMERICAN BEAUTY is a wonderful film, but still falls into this subgenre. It, like CITY SLICKERS, is the fantasy version of the mid-life crisis. It tells Boomer men Your emotional reactions to middle age are totally valid, that guy your wife has the hots for is a complete tool, and that cockteasing little cheerleader really does want to sleep with you but you won’t indulge her because you’re just too good a man.

Perhaps my favorite, though, is SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, the only movie I can think of whose central message is “I’m sorry, daddy, I tried to be good!” William Goldman said that the movie starts out saying “War is hell” and ends up saying “War is a neat learning experience for Matt Damon”, but I think he missed some of it. Context, for one thing. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN came out soon after Tom Brokaw’s big push to rename what was once called “the G.I. Generation”. That whole “Greatest Generation” hoopla, the campaign for a WWII veteran’s memorial, all of it was largely Baby Boomers canonizing their parent generation as saints. Whether they had a point or not, that’s the key to understanding Spielberg’s WWII opus: Ryan represents the Baby Boomers. He’s the one the whole war (in the context of the movie) is being fought for. All the sacrifice and blood and death we see in the characters is all so that he can live in a nice safe America and have a decent life. The movie is the long, graphic version of the speech Baby Boomers all heard from their dads when they were bad. In case it was too subtle, there’s a very good scene where this essential tradeoff is explained, and of course the scene where a dying Tom Hanks tells Ryan to “earn it.”

Well, okay, Platonic-ideal-of-citizen-soldier, how shall we, the Baby Boomers, earn it? What standard must we meet, and good lord, have we met it? Please, tell us, so that we can sleep complacently soundly at night.

“Am I a good man?” Ryan asks his wife. “Yes,” she replies.

And bam, a whole generation is validated like a parking stub.

This is far from a complete list. It’s just some of the big hits, and it’s overwhelmingly about male Boomer validation. If you think I’ve overlooked some good examples, or if you think I’m full of shit, let me know.

Labels: movies

So Mighty God King had a very good recent post about romantic comedies, including the following point:

A fourth, rarely used option is to explicitly go with the fairytale aspect of romcoms and deliver the happy ending with a complete lack of irony; this is actually probably the hardest of the four to manage, partly because it’s almost a meta-answer that plays on audience expectations, and partly because you need total audience acceptance of your narrative, which means only a really strong screenplay can dare to pull it off. Think The Princess Bride or Enchanted or Love, Actually.

I find myself both agreeing and disagreeing. I agree with his point in terms of my own experience--I generally approach romantic comedies with a certain amount of ironic distance, unwilling to simply root for the lovers to get together and cheer them when they do. But I don't think that's necessarily how it has to be.

Let me give you an example. I recently saw a Japanese romantic comedy called TRAIN MAN: DENSHA OTOKO, and I loved it. Loved it. It's about this sad little geekboy who, totally by accident, starts talking to a woman for the first time in his life. Trying to seize the opportunity, he calls on the internet for help, and soon has a cheering section of various other misfits and weirdos, a geek chorus who offer contradictory advice and all the help they can muster. It's Cyrano meets the Global Frequency, and it's wonderful. You (or at least I) root for these people, wail at their reversals, and when a happy ending is finally attained, you feel the sense of vicarious emotional fulfillment that romantic movies are supposed to provide but never do.

For all that, I wouldn't say the screenplay's topnotch. It's uneven, drags in more than one place, has several scenes that strain credulity, and gets repetitious sometimes. But I think that what saves it is the lack of irony.

I've written before about how romantic comedies have gone downhill in their quest to become more harmless and fluffy, and I think we're overdue for another reinvention of the genre. We are tired of going along with the premise that Matthew McConaughey cannot get a girlfriend. We're tired of those posters where everyone's smirking at the audience, telling us "Dude, we're totally having love problems. It's, like, such a big deal, and we might wind up lonely. LOL." We're tired of movies, in short, where the stakes are nonexistent.

I'm reminded of an old Jon Carroll column in which he sings the praises of LAGAAN, just because he finds it so refreshing to see a movie that takes its own premise completely seriously. We want to see justice prevail and underdogs win, and dammit, we want to fall in love. Our real love lives have enough smug, ironic distance as it is; we don't need it in our fantasy. We don't want it in our fantasy; half the paperbacks sold in America are romance novels, not a genre noted for its postmodern self-awareness. (Indeed, one imagines a potential direct-to-DVD market feeding that same audience and their need for non-comedic tales of unironic love. Romnoncoms.)

So let's try that, people. Let's put the Tracy/Hepburn canon and WHEN HARRY MET SALLY to bed, and try writing romantic comedies from new premises, ones without the word "zany" anywhere in them.

Labels: movies, writing

A small online zine called Freight Train was good enough to publish a short story of mine today. Go check it out.

Labels: prose, writing

Blogsurfing around, I came across this remarkable article from last year, describing in some detail a study that demonstrates quite clearly what those of us in creative fields have long suspected: hits are random. There is no model that can predict which artistic endeavors will become huge successes and which will vanish into obscurity. People like what's popular, which of course is a feedback loop, so something that starts doing well will likely start doing better, but what initially crosses that threshold of "popular" is determined more or less at random by the choices of relatively few individuals, and you can't predict who they are, either.

It's easy to see examples of this in our own lives, of course. The book you bought because you heard everyone was reading it, the TV show you watched because people you knew were talking about it, the film you saw just so you wouldn't be the only one who hadn't seen it... make your own list.

Man, you ever wish that scientific study would disprove your own grim cynicism for a change?

Labels: writing