IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER, BECAUSE THAT WOULD REQUIRE, LIKE, EFFORT, MAN.
War Games has all the ingredients of the ultimate Gen X movie: It stars Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, highlights the first wave of high school computer hackers, and exemplifies how close we were to nuclear destruction towards the end of the Cold War. David (Broderick) starts playing what he thinks is a computer game while he’s actually back-doored into a NORAD system running simulations of nuclear missile strikes. Thinking, “Hey, neat!” David and his friend Jennifer (Sheedy) play the roll of the USSR. But the computer isn’t able to tell the difference between simulations and reality, and next thing you know NORAD thinks the USSR is launching a full-scale nuclear attack and plans to respond in kind. So, it’s up to the teenagers to save the world. How? By making the computer play endless games of tic-tac-toe to understand the concept of futility, which leads to running endless simulations of nuclear war, which leads to it deciding no one wins if we’re all, you know, annihilated, so it cancels the missile launch. War Games pin-pointed how every day we lived with the knowledge that one mistake could lead to mutually assured destruction. Back then, we liked to pretend we knew how to stop it.
Valley Girl is such a paradox. It’s low budget, has a flimsy script, not-great acting, and is kind of sexist. But Gen X loves it anyway. It’s got this Romeo and Juliet theme that plays out as Punks vs. New Wave, which means it has a bitchin’ soundtrack. Nicholas Cage is ridiculously cool as Randy, the punker from the wrong side of the hill. Titular Valley Girl Julie (Deborah Foreman) is torn between Randy and her total dick boyfriend, Tommy, and embarrassed by her hippie-dippy parents. The big problem with Valley Girl is that Julie is wholly incapable of making decisions for herself — and her only decision, really, seems to be which guy to end up with — letting pretty much everyone else decide for her. She ultimately ends up with Randy only because he kicks Tommy’s ass at prom and takes her away, while Modern English’s “I Melt with You” plays out. We all decided a long time ago that this was romantic, and you can’t tell us otherwise. Bonus X points: Watching Julie’s stoned dad fumble with the camera for a prom picture is worth the price of streaming — especially since nowadays there’s a good chance we’re that stoned parent.
Okay, I can hear you saying, “What? That’s not a Gen X movie,” because it was made by and starred early Boomers. BUT, it’s entirely possible 9–5 is the first truly pro-woman movie an Xer ever saw. The three protagonists (played by Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin) initially seem very different, but we quickly learn their critical commonality: they’re sick of being treated like crap because they’re women. Doralee might have big breasts and bleached blonde hair, but that doesn’t mean she wants their boss to chase her around the desk. Judy is so quiet and soft spoken that men have stolen her voice and confidence. Violet is smarter and more competent than many men in the office, but keeps getting passed over for promotion in favor of their mediocrity. When Violet accidentally poisons their misogynistic boss, they end up holding him captive and use it as an opportunity to make productive changes in the office. Unlike other “feminist” films, they’re not punished for their actions (no suicide by Grand Canyon for these sisters): Violet is promoted to V.P., Judy finds true love, Doralee becomes a successful country singer, and their boss is transferred to Brazil, where he’s kidnapped by Amazon women.
THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY (1982)
I recently asked my friend Paul if he had thoughts on why a bunch of teenagers were so obsessed with this somewhat convoluted art film. “There was a way to interpret colonial violence that didn’t need to challenge itself through the recent violence of Vietnam,” Paul responded. “It let the white guy still be a hero, which is not good, but let us get a hard and vivid look into the geopolitics of the moment.” Paul is clearly much smarter and more thoughtful than I am. I had only come up with, “Mel Gibson was kind of cool (those were the days!) in all those sweaty jungle clothes, while Sigourney Weaver is cool as a cucumber, and Linda Hunt as Billy was mysterious and intriguing.” But Paul has a point: Gen X was born during the Vietnam War and had only a vague awareness — if that — of the airlift of Saigon, learning about its causes and complications in the rear view mirror. The Year of Living Dangerously connected us with these visceral experiences, even if we didn’t have an intellectual understanding of them, and cloaked it in a glowing romanticism.
This dark pre-curser to Mean Girls revolves around a clique of girls, three of whom are named Heather, and one Veronica (Wynonna Ryder). Veronica rebels by hooking up with J.D. (Christian Slater), a trench coat loner. J.D. helps Veronica get revenge on the lead Heather for being an über bitch, and accidentally (but not really accidentally) kills her. Boy did he enjoy that! So J.D. connives to kill as many of the mean kids as possible, while making it look like suicide. Back in 1988, J.D. already embodied the “people are mean to me so I have no choice but to murder them” ethos of incels and other angry young men who go on shooting sprees. So, of course he plants a bomb under the gym during a pep rally. Veronica shoots him (which totally shocks J.D. because he thought she loved him!), and then watches J.D. blow himself to pieces in front of her. Veronica walks into the intact school looking like she’s survived a nuclear blast, smoking the cigarette lit from J.D.’s combustion. She takes the scrunchy that’s always been worn by the Girl in Charge and declares, “There’s a new sheriff in town.” We know she means there will be no more of this elitist, toxic crap on her watch.
Dirty Dancing was largely regarded as fluff when it first came out — even though (or maybe because) it was about women taking control of their own bodies. It’s told through the lens of a Catskills resort guest, Baby (Jennifer Gray), college-bound and confident in her intellect, but unfamiliar with her sexuality. An abortion is what sets the entire plot in motion. Penny, the resort’s lead female dancer, becomes pregnant by a slimy waiter, Robbie. This leads to Baby lying to her dad to get money for Penny’s abortion and learning to dance Penny’s part for the night of her appointment, which leads to Baby embracing her physicality and sexuality and falling in love with Johnny, which leads to disappointing her dad. Abortion wasn’t legal, and Penny didn’t have the option of paying big bucks to a private MD for a safe procedure. So she went to a backwoods abortionist who botched it, putting her life at risk. It seemed (and sadly still seems) entirely radical that Baby never questioned that Penny needed an abortion. No one did. Dirty Dancing was clear: Penny wasn’t at fault for seeking an abortion, but society was for not providing safe options. And also, the film was clear that Robbie was the real trash for treating Penny like she was disposable.
DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (1985)
This movie was all about sisters doing it for themselves! Roberta (Rosanna Arquette), a bored New Jersey housewife, becomes obsessed with Susan (Madonna), a free spirit who connects with her sort of boyfriend through personal ads in a West Village paper. When Susan sleeps with a guy who is soon after murdered, and Roberta bonks her head at Battery Park and wakes up thinking she might be Susan, the two are thrown into a web of intrigue and danger. All the men in the movie are at least one step behind Roberta and Susan — even when Roberta has amnesia, for godsake. They aren’t disposable, though (well, except for Roberta’s husband, who is necessary to the plot, but not to anyone’s life). They’re basically nice guys looking out for Susan and Roberta. Except that Susan and Roberta don’t really need them. They manage to rescue each other, catch the criminals, and earn a key to the city. Bonus trivia: The original ending showed the guys wondering where Susan and Roberta were, thinking they’d come back to them soon, when they were actually riding camels together in the desert. I don’t get the camels thing (maybe this was some sort of lesbian code?), but that ending was unfortunately cut in favor of heterosexual coupling as the epitome of Happily Ever After.
This one barely needs explaining. It’s a movie about slacker guys — real slacker guys, who aren’t cool or sexy or smart (like Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites), but they are sweet (unlike Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites). Wayne’s World captures a generation that is self-referential, doesn’t take itself too seriously, and just wants to have fun. (I guess there was something about growing up with vast commercialization and the threat up nuclear annihilation and becoming an adult during a recession that makes you think, “You know, I’m cool with just hanging with my pals. Oh, and I might just create something cool that people like, too.”) Casting Rob Lowe, the essential Gen X pretty boy, as the oily record label rep was a brilliant moment of self-reference: yes, this level of slick worked in the mid-80s, but things were more honest, more real in the 90s. Bonus X points: Wayne’s World was co-written and directed by women.
It would be a stretch to claim that this little film reached mass audiences, and therefore had a wide-reaching effect. It was released in limited theaters in fall of 1991, and grossed about $6.4 million. But Gus Van Sant’s artfully shot story of young male hustlers in the Pacific Northwest had a massive impact on the Gen X audiences it did reach. Did I mention it was about young male hustlers? Which means it featured gay sex. And, more than that, gay love. In a stunningly vulnerable scene around a campfire, Mike (River Phoenix) tells Scott (Keanu Reeves) that he loves him. Really loveshim. This was at the height of the AIDS crisis: in the previous three years, the number of reported annual AIDS deaths in the U.S. had more than quadrupled (from 4,855 to 20,543), and would double to 41,920 by 1993. We had every reason to believe gay sex and love and bodies were dangerous. But My Own Private Idaho treated them with careful respect. We saw the rawness and vulnerability. And now, in 2022, we have additional context that resonates achingly backward through the movie: Phoenix died of an overdose when he was only 23 years old, and Reeves has evolved into not only a mega-movie star, but a mega-mensch.
John Singleton’s tale of coming of age in South Central Los Angeles might be the very first time that mainstream audiences saw that not all of Gen X was living the life of affluent, white John Hughes characters. It clearly depicted the difficulties of escaping the cycles of poverty and violence, because white supremacy is baked into the culture. How did a movie pull this off in 1991, when these same ideas cause politicians and school boards to lose their fucking minds in 2022? Spike Lee paved the way, of course. And the acting was stupendous. Lawrence Fishburne plays Furious, the protagonist Tre’s father. Fishburne embodies the strong father figure, the street preacher, the mentor, and the non-deadbeat dad that all Black children deserve. But Boyz is no fairytale: while Tre and his girlfriend go to college and escape the cycle, their friends don’t get to live happily ever after. The final message: If being able to push through white supremacy is the exception and not the rule, then we haven’t won a damn thing.
