Transcript
Speaker: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Death is a Photograph. This is a podcast about culture at the end of history. This is Chase Beduzniak here with my co-host, Samuel McElhaga of the ah Bristol McElhagas. Entirely wrong.
Speaker: Okay, we're here today with Shallon Van Tyn, who's a Gen X cultural historian. What led you to bring these two movies to us, Shallon? Well, I wrote my dissertation on a cultural history of Generation X. So I think that these two movies really kind of capture some common themes amongst Gen Xers. And it can look at ah sort of early Gen X culture and later Gen X culture, I think, with these two movies. And there's a lot of overlapping themes. So we could talk about those.
Speaker: And your dissertation explicitly sort of takes the generational angle, which i I did want to at least briefly touch on because that obviously stands behind the podcast. And we you know people can feel very strongly one way or another about that idea. And I think we think there's a good way to...
Speaker: you know do a sort of material analysis. It's not all just vibes. It has to do with the events that structure your life, your childhood, the economic situation, um even the common cultural experiences that you have. So, yeah, what made you decide to go that road in evaluating this group of people?
Speaker: Well, when I first started ah my PhD program, I was speaking to my advisor. His name is Dr. Kevin Mattson. His most recent book is also very Gen X focused. It's about punk and the Reagan years. And I was talking to him about how ah the 80s and ninety s generally in the historical scholarship gets somewhat overlooked. Mm-hmm. or gets a sort of cursory glance. And I wanted to really delve into some of the cultural aspects of that late 20th century. And he essentially said to me over coffee, why don't you just write about Gen X? So I was like, oh, that's a great idea.
Speaker: So as someone who's sort of depending on how you slice it a late Gen Xer or an older millennial, these sorts of cultural touchstones were something that I could identify with on a personal level.
Speaker: But I also wanted to explore why Generation X is... such a unique generation in terms of its characteristics and worldview. And I wanted to look into why they developed these sorts of characteristics and sort of personality traits, if you will, that they did. What were so some of the social and economic and technological and essentially historical reasons why Gen X developed the kinds of worldview and aesthetics that they did. So that's what really led me to writing my dissertation about Generation X. Essentially, it's even though it's a cultural history of Generation X, it still is very much steeped in a very material, social, and economic reasons for why they had the particular tastes in everything that they did.
Speaker: No, that makes a ton of sense to me. And it maybe it brings us to the first of this doubleheader, if you will. Sam, that's a baseball term, just in case you're a confused. None the wider on that one there. It's when you talk about two movies back to back. The first you brought to us is kind of an interesting pick. It's it's Martin Bell Streetwise from 1984, which is, i think... It's subversive insofar as it's a movie about street kids in Seattle. And I think most people, especially now, think back on even the early 80s as a time of immense prosperity by comparison to ah you know what the opportunities are now. So maybe let's talk a little about Streetwise.
Speaker: What attracted you to this movie? I mean, it you said it features an illustration. I'd never heard of it before. it It was, I thought, a really wonderful movie, but it also felt kind of pulled from the gutter, at least to me as ah as a cinephile, I guess.
Speaker: Yeah, it's it's ah it's a great film, and I have to give credit to a cousin of mine who recommended it to me um some years ago, and I sort of fell in love with the movie and talked about it a lot in my dissertation.
Speaker: But essentially, like you said, Streetwise is a ah documentary film. It follows the lives of homeless teens, essentially, and kind of how they survive. They they live in abandoned hotels, and they dumpster dive and panhandle and sell drugs and Of course, they'd turn tricks.
Speaker: And really, the background of this was photography. um The photographer Mary Ellen Mark was hired by Life Magazine to photograph this story of homeless children.
Speaker: And she sort of became friends with these with these kids and essentially called in her husband, who is a film director. And um the project eventually became a documentary and a couple years later you even won an Academy Award for a documentary feature, if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker: So that's really the sort of basis for that. But what's really important about it, like you said, there's a sort of wrong historical memory, cultural memory, that the 1980s were ah prosperous and and a wealthy era, the Reagan era, But the reality was that was really only true for the wealthy. um The Reagan era essentially gutted ah a lot of social welfare programs, and that had a detrimental effect on kids growing up during this period.
Speaker: And so a main feature of this film is, of course, teen homelessness, which was becoming a ah major problem in the 1980s, partially because of significant cuts in housing assistance under the Reagan administration. So in the early 80s, essentially the Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, there was huge cuts by the Reagan administration for the HUD program and um homelessness in the United States doubled from 1984 1987.
Speaker: And there was also a lot of um other social welfare programs that were being dismantled, especially um deinstitutionalization of mental homes and ah homes for people with mental illnesses. And so you have all these factors coming together that are essentially forcing people out into the streets. But there's some other factors.
Speaker: reasons that we see a lot of teen homelessness throughout the 80s. And that is really quintessentially a core part of the Gen X experience because they were the they're considered the least parented generation of all the generations. A core theme for Gen Xers is absentee parents. So when Gen Xers are coming of age, you have divorce, which is skyrocketing. That's because of Because of a lot of other social factors happening, you have the no-fault divorce changes in laws, you have advances in the women's liberation movement causing more women to go back to work, but more importantly, you have stagflation and all the economic downturn of the nineteen seventy s which is causing
Speaker: more homes to have two parents that need to work rather than just one parent. So for a variety of reasons, Gen Xers are often considered the latchkey generation. They were coming home in much higher numbers um to an empty house and essentially just sort of left to fend for themselves.
Speaker: So this created a ah situation where they were essentially called proto-adults. And many of them were being kicked out of their homes in the 80s. They were leaving homes because of abuse or neglectful parental situations.
Speaker: Parents were kicking them out. And by the late 1980s, there was a huge focus on teen homelessness. And there was some estimates that there was as much as 1 million gen Xers in the United States who were homeless. So this is a ah core theme for Gen Xers and especially like the 1980s. And it really challenges the kind of cultural memory where people think that the 1980s was full of wealth and prosperity.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, for me, and Sam, I don't know if this is the case for you, but for me, one of the most shocking things about this movie is how young the kids actually are, right? So when you're watching, you know, I i knew what the movie was going to about, but you turn it on and you're like, that's a child standing on the street, you know, trying to solicit sex from like a 65-year-old man. And living in the time that we do now, I mean, that's...
Speaker: almost like unrepresentable even if we actually talk about it a lot more now we keep we sort of refuse to symbolize it i would say you know artistically and here it's just kind of like it's just put before you and you just kind of have to reckon with it it's just a reality it's a huge i think sort of a shock of the old or shock of the new i'm not sure what the right term is here but yeah i i mean it's what like 40 years ago around about when the film was sort of made and yet that kind of like open sort of what yeah let's be frank it child prostitution that's depicted it's just not something you see on city streets anymore as far as I'm aware but it's not a deliberate sort of intentional attempt to shock right it's just this kind of historical relic that's kind of there and it's all its shocking glory
Speaker: Yeah, I was just going to say there's a history there and um that requires a lot of historical context that younger generations, millennials and Zoomers probably don't realize, ah which is that the current worldview from from today, you know, to think of these kids as child prostitutes and soliciting sex from these old men on the streets, like you said, is is kind of unheard of. But at the time, um notions of um around sex and sexual harassment and and child safety and things like this, these sorts of things were sort of new back then. um
Speaker: There was a movie called Something About Amelia, which is ah a made-for-TV movie that came out in the early 80s. And this um film was essentially showcased a girl who lived in a a very sort of upper middle class home, but her father was molesting her. and And I think in the movie, she was maybe like 11 or 12 or something like that.
Speaker: And this movie won lots of awards and ah people people really loved it. And one of the weird things about the movie is that the solution in the film would be unheard of today. ah The solution in the film was the family all goes to therapy together and works through it. therapy ah um And it's funny, I watched someone from from today, you know, from recent years reviewing this movie, and they were blown away by this concept. They were like, how could this movie win all these awards? This is terrible. ah And the thing is that the notion of child abuse and even like sexual harassment, these sorts of
Speaker: contemporary views on these things sort of had to be developed over time. And a lot of this happened when Gen Xers were growing up. It's Nambler, isn't it? It's the American organization. The North American Man-Boy Love Alliance, I think. Yeah, yeah which effectively presented it or tried to sort of ride the wave of the civil rights movement.
Speaker: I think that was started up in 1978 and then sort of wound up in 2006, right? Oh, wow. that's like exactly the kind of span of Gen X's sort of coming of age. Yeah, so I mean, you have in the partially because of the women's liberation movement, which was largely boomer women, but they challenging lot of sexual harassment things that back then were just sort of commonplace. Women experienced sexual harassment in the workplace all the time, but there weren't laws about it. And these sorts of things began to be developed around the 70s and We gained
Speaker: we gained a stronger awareness of sexual harassment. And around the same time, we also get a stronger awareness about things like child abuse. I mean, it wasn't until, I believe, 1974, I could be wrong about that date, that we get the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. And probably in the 1980s, we start to see more organizations um focused on children and child abuse and and protecting protecting children and things like that. But this sort of thing was was sort of developing when when Gen Xers were coming of age.
Speaker: Most Gen Xers would remember a lot of stranger danger campaigns. And, you know, don't talk to strangers was a core core Gen X tenant. And this was sort of the beginnings of people worrying about child safety. Mm-hmm. There's another weird history about this, which is that this was also the time of the satanic panic.
Speaker: but So when did the satanic panic start? Because I always associated it as being much more of sort of 90s phenomenon. Yeah. So ah we really start to see this in the nineteen eighty s One of the teens in Streetwise is talking about getting a Dungeons and Dragons tattoo, which yeah kids today probably don't realize because Dungeons and Dragons has been popularized today. But back then, that was a very nerd thing to do. So this kid is sort of, I guess you could say, edgy for the time.
Speaker: This is Shadow, I think it is. The character's name is Shadow, right? Oh, yes, yes. i I'm sorry, just have to say that this idea of Dungeons & Dragons is sort of like an evil thing persisted. i mean, I can remember, i was born in 1993. I was at a block party probably in the early 2000s. Maybe I was 10, 12, something like that.
Speaker: And we had we were we were playing, my friends and I played a lot of World of Warcraft. So we were sort of like in the updated version of that, I guess you could say, for that generation, right? And we were talking about it and some 52-year-old woman came up and was like, you kids better and not be playing Dungeons and Dragons.
Speaker: i know a guy in high school who killed himself because of that satanic shit. you know Something like this. That's the story. That's the story. And it just kept... i mean ah In other words, like that the cultural relevance of that idea of Dungeons and Dragons, to be honest, it it feels like it kind of succeeded in making it Not a huge deal until maybe like seven to ten years ago when it seems like... I remember when it felt like people started playing again, and to be honest. um Yeah. You know, those kind of games were not a huge part of like my childhood. It feels like because there was this weird lingering sense that it was a weird thing to do.
Speaker: Would do you think that would be partly just because America is more religious? Oh, yes. I mean, I'm sure, but also, like, we've talked about video nasties on this, like a thousand. I feel like the impulse gets mediated differently, but the impulse is sort of, like, yeah beyond, you know, that particular category.
Speaker: Shallon, I wanted to ask you about the kind of, the hidden set of characters in Streetwise, which is that, in one sense, this is very much Gen X film. But in another sense, it's very much a film about the silent generation.
Speaker: So Gen X's parents. And a lot of these homeless kids have parents who are in the background of the film. So for instance, Tiny's mother, who's, ah I think, a waitress and an alcoholic, who she kind of like, in a sort of peripatetic sense, sort of keeps going back to and then was sort of like leaving. And then I think, is it Dwayne?
Speaker: His father. the Yeah, Dwayne Pomeroy, the... um Yeah, the kid who ends up committing suicide, his father's in jail. So you have this kind of like Gen X, silent generation relationship playing out in the in the documentary.
Speaker: I'm just wondering why it was that sort of the silent generation were sort of on average per capita so negligent or, you know, had such a particular parenting style.
Speaker: Well, um and this also kind of connects back to that satanic panic stuff that we were talking about earlier. So like I said earlier, a core theme for Gen Xers is the fact that they were the least parented generation.
Speaker: And there were a few reasons for this. ah One, during the there was this... there was this revival of this ah focus of the self.
Speaker: So boomers were really becoming focused on psychic and and wellness and mental health. And you see the rise of a lot of self-help books and new age spiritualities and things like that.
Speaker: This sounds a little familiar. Sorry. Yeah, this this ah this ah hyper focus of the self we we see then. There's also, like I mentioned earlier, um a drastic rise in divorce based on ah various economic and legal reasons, history for that.
Speaker: You also have a whole generation Generation X, which is raised by people who have a lot of alcoholism. I mean, I think there's a very telling scene in Streetwise where you see Tiny with her mother and her mother's like, you know, be quiet, I'm drinking. um and and And so many of the teens who were homeless in the 1980s, not just in this film, but um generally for Gen Xers, some core reasons that researchers found that led them to be homeless were they were in ah financially precarious situations at their homes, or their parents had just sort of abandoned them, or their parents had alcohol problems, or they were escaping sexual abuse,
Speaker: I mentioned earlier the satanic panic thing, and um this sort of correlated with another phenomenon called the Parents Music Resource Center, which I'm sure you're you're familiar with, in the nineteen eighty s founded by what were called the Washington Wives, um Tipper Gore and Susan Baker, who they were the ones who essentially got the bad lyrics um sticker warning stickers on the music albums. The classic like black and white parental advisory. This is where this comes from. And these people were also connected to another group called Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, also called BADD.
Speaker: Yeah, all these groups um sort of came together in the 1980s because they were sort of looking for, oh how do we solve all these problems? Because there were high high teen pregnancy rates, which I believe peaked in 1991, high suicide rates for Gen Xers, high teen homelessness for Gen Xers, a lot of stuff that is sort of gone forgotten in the cultural memory. But we start to see all these different sort of ways of dealing with these problems. Now, these these ways were kind of dumb. they They wanted to focus on things like Dungeons and Dragons and and occult and sex and drugs and music and video games and things like that.
Speaker: But, you know, of course, we know that the socioeconomic political reasons for for why all these kids were homeless and leaving homes obviously had more impact than they were playing Dungeons and Dragons and things like that. So um I think there was ah ah essentially to go back to your question.
Speaker: Parents also had a different view of childhood then as well. And and this is one big difference between gen Xers and Zoomers is that um Gen Xers were essentially adults as kids, whereas the younger generations are essentially kids as adults. So Gen Xers and multiple articles at the time were often called proto-adults because they were left to fend for themselves for various social and economic reasons. They were expected to sort of act like adults. They they dealt with many heavy adult themes at a very young age.
Speaker: And so that's why there's this... you know disconnect between younger generations today looking backwards would be appalled, but you know going back to your original question at how kids were expected to act, but that was considered common then.
Speaker: a couple things, because I think there's so much there. One is ah is a brief little story about made-for-TV movies that solve the problem of child molestation with group therapy. right I mean, that's the same period where there's a New Yorker piece a few years ago, maybe we can put it in the episode description about this West German program where they let this pedophile medical doctor, like he was like, oh, it's perfect. We just replace the kids who need homes or orphans with these men who need they need children. it's put you know Everybody's going to be so happy. And and like they were this like made sense to them. I mean, obviously, oh boy unenlightened by our lights, but
Speaker: it made sense to them. But in terms the, I just had to tell that story. I'm sorry. The actual thing I wanted to talk about on the basis of that, I wanted to talk a little bit about the kinds of quasi parental relationships that form in the movie or the sorts of hierarchies that get re-inscribed despite the kind of maturation and anarchy that you're talking about, right? So In the film, we follow these various kids.
Speaker: For those who haven't seen the movie, just watch it. it's You can't really summarize it because it's just watching a bunch of kids run around and and get into trouble on the streets. So, you know, we're we'll do our best. But several of the characters develop...
Speaker: or are a part of parental relationships that we see. Tiny's already been mentioned. There's one of the two boys who is not um Dwayne, but the other one... His name's Rat. Rat, thank you.
Speaker: Who basically, like... I mean, I think he's still alive. He's doing reasonably well. And he does that because he teams up with, like... the most non-pedophile drifter of all time, as best I can tell, who's this like kind of dirty hippie guy who teaches him the kind of hobo way of the rails and the streets, teaches him to put in these phone calls. I thought this was so clever. To the pizza place, you know, from the payphone outside, you don't pick it up and then they throw it away after it's been too long and you raid the dumpster and you get the pizza, right? That's one kind of relationship we get that actually does seem quite fruitful. It seems to allow him to survive. He even says at various points in the movie, like,
Speaker: you don't need to turn tricks. don't doing these things. have be smart, right? He has this kind of quite literally streetwise attitude about how to deal with it. You also have a character like Patrice, who's a a pimp, some sort of Voltarian atheist, among other things, who is visited by his mom and what appears to be grandmother.
Speaker: And they have this really like, like he's a really hard-nosed character, very mean, almost like the 70s, like, the The idea, the sort of white America's fear of the street pimp.
Speaker: He has a confrontation, doesn't he, with ah a street preacher. yeah he sort of goes, you know, you're scamming, everyone's scamming, but the whole world's scamming. for fuck's sake, I'm streetwise. Entirely right, Sam. But he is the only one who actually seems to have an overtly good and loving mother who like comes and is like, you get you better get something to eat with me, even though he doesn't want to. So that's another kind.
Speaker: But then there is the relationship between, oh i can't keep these kids straight. There's a loving relationship between, i think it's Patty and her sort of boyfriend, who for a lot of the movie... Shadder. Shadder. Oh, that is Shadder. Okay. Thank you.
Speaker: and And you get these kind of scenes, and they're very young. like There's a point where, and in the beginning, where the boyfriend is basically trying to convince this other guy that Patty is like 16 or 17 or 18. And he's like, that girl is not a day over 13. And she does look extremely young.
Speaker: So much of what you see of them is this kind of loving relationship that involves a little bit of fighting, but it's kind of cute. They're meeting with social workers. And then, you know, maybe about two-thirds of the way through, you realize that he's pimping her out on the street to make sure that they can keep living in this, like, junk hotel where the social worker visits them, right? Like, it's that's another kind of quasi-familiar relationship. Pimping ends up forming a huge portion of the I don't want to call it parental because then I'll sound like the pedophile West German psychiatrist, but like it is basically the closest thing to a parental relationship many of these kids end up having. So I guess the question, insofar as there is a question here, is just about the ways in which the movie shows us these substitute relationships. they like Gen X, these are still kids. like Even if they're made to grow up young, they're still fundamentally kids, and it obviously, it fucks them up, for lack of a better way of putting it.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, again, it just kind of goes back to this, you know, ah have to take yourself out of the contemporary context and and think about the historical context where, you know, these kids weren't considered kids at this point. You know, they they were treated like adults. They acted like adults. because they had to deal with really adult realities, um and they didn't really have anyone. So you do see a lot of substitute families, alternative families, was a term that was used a lot to describe how Gen Xers sort of created families that weren't their own families. And you see this actually a lot in even a lot of the popular television shows and and movies and things like that of of the Gen X era.
Speaker: you see a lot of alternative families and sort of makeshift families um developing. So one key theme that you see for Gen Xers is this decay of established institutions. And that's a key difference between the the boomer worldview and the Gen X worldview. and And sort of the core at what Gen Xers beef with with boomers was that they sort of watched boomers who were this huge generation who got a lot of attention, arguably the most historically privileged generation of all time.
Speaker: And they had these big ideals boomers. And they presented themselves as radicals, even though most of them actually weren't in reality. um But at least the historical memory of boomers is that they were these radical people who changed the world and civil rights and all this stuff.
Speaker: And then Gen Xers, as they're growing up, sort of see them essentially trade their love beads for stock portfolios. You see this shift from yippee to yuppie, this total selling out of supposedly the boomers' radical ideologies and voting for Reagan in huge numbers, you know. so These sorts of things, not to mention you know the political polarization that really starts in the late 60s and the seventy s and you see this hollowing out of the middle class during the nineteen eighty s So you see a lot of this, and Gen Xers sort of watched this and became increasingly cynical and skeptical about these sort of big um ideologies and worldviews.
Speaker: And so... and this This sort of points to one reason why Gen Xers developed this very pragmatic, independent kind of disposition, where essentially, like many of the researchers said at the time, they ended up becoming proto-adults.
Speaker: i was going to say, like you kind of see in the 1990s, late 1990s, it's kind of that end of history moment. in the sort of Unipolio moment in the 1990s, you could almost understand it as a ah resurgence of that boomer idealism coming to the floor again after the cynicism of the nineteen eighty s And it's really interesting that so many of the characters in Streetwise have this kind of almost kind of like nihilistic eschatology to them. So for instance, the girls, all of the girls, including Tiny, who's a kind of arguably the protagonist of the film, is kind of constantly at odds with the 60s, 60s, 70s sexual revolution because of HIV and AIDS. yeahp I think there's ah there's a scene where she's getting tested.
Speaker: And then one of the male characters, I think it's Dwayne Pomeroy, is getting checked up for tonsillitis by the doctor. And the um the doctor sort of asks him, what do you want to be when you're older?
Speaker: And, you know, Dwayne sort of goes, I might join the Navy if the world lasts that long. Reagan's sending all the Marines, shooting everyone. All the Marines shooting, cutting out rushtra Russia. Russia's probably going bomb us or something. um So like, right nuclear war is like really present there as well. so you've got this kind of like... Rue is kind of undoing the idealistic utopia of, you know, peace that was trying to be, the Tipees were trying to construct and you've got AIDS undoing this sort of sexual revolution. And so, yeah, it seems like these kids are kind of like straddling that that moment where all of these things are coming undone.
Speaker: And AIDS would be a big thing, which I'm sure we'll talk about, especially when we start talking about kids. But um AIDS has an undeniable huge impact on the Gen X psyche. So i'm but I'm sure we'll talk more about that.
Speaker: Yeah, no, we we definitely will. I mean, i just on that, I was thinking about the way in which, where that energy goes, right? So, you know, we're talking here about, we're not doing the human potential movement anymore.
Speaker: We're not doing California ideology. We're not doing EST or whatever it's called. We're, you know, we're we're we're doing something You're going to be cynical and nihilistic. But that energy goes somewhere, right? And I think in the world of the movie, it goes towards getting by, basically, right? It goes towards surviving, seeing the next day, basically believing in what's in front of you, right? The street preacher must be scamming. Even though, I got to least deranged street preacher I've ever seen. Very patient with him. was like, you can come stay. You can't have sex in there, but we'll feed you. Yeah, I believe that guy was actually starting homeless shelter. I can't remember if I read that in the actual Life Magazine article about it. Yeah, he definitely is doing something like that. Yeah, like you said, he's probably the least...
Speaker: irritating street preacher. Well, and but that's what makes it so interesting to me. Because again, you know when I'm born and I'm kind of looking back at all these things, it's this weird moment where you don't know.
Speaker: you The film is very you know cinema verite, right? it's not It's just showing you. It's not necessarily overtly framing things, although obviously all all film's going to. And so in that moment, the argument between Patrice and this this kind of advocate who says he was converted by Billy Graham, right? Who's like the superstar of early mid 20th century American Christianity, like this larger than life figure who is evangelical Christianity, basically. Mm-hmm. And they get into this argument, and Patrice is basically saying, you're a scammer, everyone's a scammer, we're just scamming in different ways, and you know you're a hypocrite because I'm not allowed to bring my girlfriend into your place and have sex, and you know these these sorts of things. And it's funny, like on the other end here, i'm like if I'm in 1984 and I'm watching this movie, right and this may be a very stupid question, but it it feels relevant to like thinking about the world into which the movie is released.
Speaker: And I'm someone who's interested in documentary films about street children. I'm someone who's interested in probably Reagan being bad, right? Who do I think is reasonable in that scene? Because like I'm watching it and I'm like, I feel really bad for this kid and I hope that this guy can help him out. you i hope I hope he gets himself a good meal and you know stops beating women in the street.
Speaker: But there's a way in which in the world of 1984, I could imagine more people thinking like, yeah, all these guys are just totally full of shit, even if it seems like they're not. And ultimately, Patrice is taking the more reasonable perspective.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. And i think I think essentially these kids, they're not dumb and they're not naive. And and they they are streetwise, as the as the movie sells. And I think one of the kids even uses that term.
Speaker: And during that scene with the with this street preacher, I think it was the scene with the street preacher, one of them says... hey, you know you're you're collecting canned foods and then you just turn around and give us the canned food. like You're a middleman or something along those lines.
Speaker: And they're wise to the to the grift, right? um And because they're actually on the street. so And this is this is different than... The modern day, oh, hustle or whatever you want to call it. You know, these kids actually live on the street. They actually have to figure out these ways to survive. And again, it just goes back to this sort of independence of Gen X, which is...
Speaker: probably why gen Xers tend to be more libertarian politically in their thinking. And I say libertarian in the pre-T Party sense, um in the way that it would be used in in like the nineteen ninety s like So you know Gen Xers are often...
Speaker: accused of being either a politically apathetic generation, very apolitical, or they're accused of being very conservative. And both of those sort of accusations are kind of inaccurate.
Speaker: It's more accurate to say that Gen Xers on the whole leaned more towards the classical libertarian worldview. I feel like even it's it's underlying that it's a more capacious libertarianism, right? Like it's it's everything from like Noam Chomsky yeah one end to like run all the other. You get the anarchist bent in there, yeah. But essentially, that is sort of that end of history kind of worldview um that they're growing up in. so And that mixed with this forced independence.
Speaker: I think I can tie that into my Tipper Gore question, actually, because I want to move to kids, and I think this folds together kind of nicely. so The broad libertarianism you're talking about, which I think Sam is totally right, like probably explains to some extent the support that the outside support Trump sees from Gen X cohort people, but is also why the left of the 80s and 90s, except for like Bob Avakian, is all like punk anarchism. like There's really not an alternative within the mainstream American. I mean, it's not mainstream, but you know what I mean.
Speaker: I would argue that the American left, at least, is still dominated by the next sort of notions of self-reliance and self-governance. Oh, I mean, i I would agree, but I'm wearing a suit and have a mustache, so i don't really know that my opinion is to be taken seriously. um No, so to tie this to the Tipper Gore thing, I think one of the big pivots that happens in our culture, even over my lifetime,
Speaker: And I guess I'm asking this just because it it feels like it has some explanatory power about a divide that exists generationally and culturally in the US, s maybe in the UK too, Sam, we could talk about that.
Speaker: um Is that like I sort of feel like everyone is Tipper Gore now, that we've sort of accepted, not obviously in the most extreme sense, like obviously people don't think that Dungeons and Dragons like you know drives you insane and makes you worship Satan.
Speaker: The British equivalent would be Mary Whitehouse, which I think has come up with a few times. Yeah, the nasty lady, right? Yeah, well, I mean, it's important to remember that the Parent Music Resource Centre was a bipartisan group, and a lot of these groups were bipartisan. Now, of course, the politics have changed a little from how they were viewed in the 80s and 90s than how they're viewed today, but these were movements that were considered bipartisan at the time.
Speaker: Yeah, it'd be interesting to think about how it politically breaks down now because that gets kind of messy. But yeah, I guess the the point or the thing I want to talk about is that it feels like now, especially for generations raised in the internet, right? And Gen X is you know usually held as one of the more computer literate generations for pretty obvious reasons. But I guess I'm thinking of millennials and certainly to some extent the older Zoomers.
Speaker: There's sort of just an accepted reality that like what you consume does... We are consumers. Our subjectivities are sort of totally formed by which subcultural niche we fall into, right? So if I get really into anime when I'm 12 years old, that's going to form me in a certain way.
Speaker: There's just a sort of like an acceptance of the subject-forming potential of cultural realities usually digitally mediated at this point, right? right and And that's that's another ah sort of major difference between Generation X and the generations that came after Gen x is is their interactions with media.
Speaker: Really with with Gen X, one major difference is that they preferred alternatives to everything. And this this also plays into their whole... you know independent worldview and sort of skeptical worldview. But they preferred alternative do-it-yourself DIY paths to both art and politics, which which is another thing. They they preferred...
Speaker: you know, grassroots politics, they preferred do-it-yourself artistic creations. ah And really, Gen X is the last generation to have real distinct subcultures. I mean, it's it's it's really the last generation before that sort of thing just became completely post-modernized, if you will.
Speaker: What do you make of the the sort of use of third spaces in Streetwise, especially? Like, they're always in arcades, right? Yeah, I mean, I don't think Gen Xers would use the term third space. But yeah, these sorts of alternative spaces for gathering um were a big deal to Gen Xers. Arcades, of course, you know Gen X was was the generation that that brought video games into the into your homes. um And a lot of that still went back to their sort of independent preferences, um generally speaking. Of course, these are you know general terms, yeah general trends and patterns.
Speaker: But ah you know they preferred independent film and independent music. And there was a lot of hobbyist things. So video games, computers, all of this kind of fell into the hobbyist culture well before we have things like the World Wide Web. And then, of course, hacker culture fits into all this too, which was another big Gen X phenomenon.
Speaker: Again, also, you have to, this is one of those historical context things, before the internet, you have to kind of take your mind out of the virtual space. We didn't have the internet to to just gather in.
Speaker: People gathered in physical spaces. um Coffee shops and arcades and public places like parks and things like that is where youth culture would be hanging out anyway. So they weren't like very online.
Speaker: Yeah, our our sort of mutual friend and guest on this podcast, C. Derek Varr, and I've heard him talk several times about running a zine, you know, like in the mid-late like right before that culture goes away. And you have access to whatever dozen records you have with the little money that you have. And you print your zine, and maybe if you're lucky, it's going to make it, you know, ah hundred mile in a hundred-mile radius around you, you know, if you get if things go really well.
Speaker: It's just a totally different understanding of, like, when I talk about a subculture now, what I'm talking about is like Discord channels with, you know, various kind of funneled versions of people in them. I'm not talking about local scenes, right? And that is a big, a big difference.
Speaker: What picked up on is like Seattle, which is a ah fairly large city. I mean, it's not New York or Chicago or LA, but it's... iss By New York standards, we're saying thumbs down, not as heavy. It's a fairly substantial city, right? And yet, in the film and streetwise, don't know if it's just the filmmaker's perspective that allows for this impression, but it feels like they're in a village, right? Like they're always like crossing over with each other. there are all these like serendipitous meetings.
Speaker: You know, everyone's sort of just like flowing between different streets, like is the bumping into someone. And yeah, I don't know if that is a sort of historical artifact of the era or just Seattle being small enough to allow for that. But it's it it really, I think, affects the film.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think this is is, you know, what the world was sort of like before the internet took over our lives. um So I think it's it's it's really um sort of the last gasp there of the 20th century before everything became virtual.
Speaker: Yeah, i'm I'm fascinated by the idea. and maybe we can close with this just because it kind of summarizes this broader question or set of concerns. I think when I talk to a a gen X friend, and you know I'm a a man of of capacious understanding and generational friendship, I have some Gen X friends. And I feel like if I were to suggest to them that the media they consume has any effect on who they are, they would come from my throat. In fact, I've basically had that happen before. Whereas I feel like if I said that to you, Sam, or to you know someone else who's Very close to my edge, I'd like, well, obviously. And to me, that like psychic distinction, that chasm between I'm sort of able to be independent to some extent, even of the things I choose to consume, right that I can stand outside of it, is um is different. And I think that must have, to a certain extent, downstream consequences um that you know maybe we'll be able to talk about kids, maybe not. But i just I've been sort of like obsessed with that
Speaker: that it's it's almost to me, and i'm this is maybe a little putting it too big, it's almost like we were talking about with the child abuse thing earlier, where there's just like a moment where the understanding changes, and it's invisible to everyone beforehand and totally visible to everyone after.
Speaker: Thomas Keene-style paradigm shift going on like yeah as the film is. But also, I think your your point, Chase, that there's a kind of a larger division between subject and object for this generation. Where, like for instance, Shadow, when he's talking about the Dungeons & Dragons tattoo, if he was a character in a 2000s film, he would be immediately pigeonholed as like a nerd. And yet, he can sort of like like be into Dungeons & Dragons and still be kind of like this hot rocker.
Speaker: person who his female friends are attracted to who has this mystique um yeah there's a sort of like a gap for complexity there which is quite interesting Two things on on what you both said. um There was a ah core idea that was around when Gen Xers were coming of age was this tension between techno-optimism and techno-cynicism. And this is something I talk a bit about in my dissertation, but essentially you tended to have two different camps with with the arrival of
Speaker: of computers, or well personal computers, I should say, and and eventually the internet. And of course, there's kind of a big difference between the early internet with early chat rooms and things like that versus when the web really became...
Speaker: how it is now. And there was one camp who was highly skeptical of of this new technology and warned about a lot of the problems that we now have.
Speaker: And those people were often you know called many of the same names that are are still used today you know for The same kind of people who raise concerns about the power of the internet and social media and things like that on our lives, ah you know, like Luddites and grandpas and stuff like that.
Speaker: And there was another camp which would would eventually turn into the kind of tech bro culture that we have now, the Silicon Valley thing, who were very... you know optimistic about this new technology. And the people who tended to be optimistic tended to be the people who would gain the most financially from this. So they tended to be the pro-capitalist business types who were pushing um for this kinds of technology. And I'll just clarify when I, when I mentioned internet technology, I'm specifically talking about who owns the technology, you know, the corporate ownership of this looks very different if this is publicly owned stuff, but we're, we're well beyond that, I guess at this point. Um, So there were tensions within Generation X um between these two different camps looking at that. But another another aspect that i i I want to touch on that's sort of a difference between these, a generational difference, is that for Gen Xers, a common theme is to not sell out. They were
Speaker: very adverse to the notion of selling out. There was a lot of anti-corporate attitudes, which permeated the films, but also the music. I mean, punk, hip-hop, grunge, at least in their origins, all of these different you know musical genres started out as being sort of independent, anti-corporate, alternative music.
Speaker: Now, of course, we all know how capitalism works and it finds that stuff and and markets it and sells it back to you. But at the time, doing independent art was truly independent.
Speaker: When people talk about doing independent art now, it's not really independent. I'll give it a small anecdote from one of my classes. There was ah a younger student, probably Zoomer age, who was talking about the topic of the gig economy came up, which is something that was a core to the Gen X slacker stereotype. And the student was like, Oh, I don't get what the problem is with, with, you know, the gig economy and stuff like that. And, and the student was talking about, Oh, you know, I, I make my own independent music and now I just put it on YouTube or whatever. And yeah, they They didn't seem to realize that these sites like YouTube, like all of these ah systems, they these are corporate-owned entities. They are not independent. you like
Speaker: Sure, you can you can put stuff out on them and and you can... gain a sort of independent following. But at the end of the day, these are still corporate owned. And um so they're not truly independent. And Gen Xers did not have these technologies. They were actually making truly independent stuff. They were recording a lot on cassette tapes and doing a lot of home video for independent filming. And just sort of their hobbies were were much more independent. So there is a disconnect there where the younger generations have grown up
Speaker: in an environment where literally everything that they do and touch is basically branded. um And and and i I don't think there's any way out of that, and but you know, beyond world-scale revolution.
Speaker: But that's a different comment. But ah but um yeah, there's there's a major disconnect there. and And it's harder, I think, for younger generations to be able to conceptualize a world where you know it's not completely owned by corporate entities.
Speaker: I think that's ah a really good place to finish. And I'll just say that I think you make a very important point, which is that it's maybe easy for us to look back at the sort of ad busters moment and think, you know, what are these guys on about? I mean, you know. i was going to say it's notable that Gen Z will talk about capitalism or eating the rich, but they won't talk about like fuck Starbucks.
Speaker: Yeah. or fuck Apple. it's it's it's It's very much more, it's a systemic rather than an aesthetic thing. It's the inverse. Yeah, it's the inverse. Yeah, and I'll just say that um the story you're telling there, Sheldon, sort of interesting because it's, you know, shout out Yasha Levine, whose book Surveillance Valley is more or less about the internet as a kind of a national security technology that is privatized.
Speaker: right So there's a way in which we can think about this political evolution we've been talking about generationally in terms of even what the internet is. It starts as this thing routed through public universities that exist for more or less national defense slash kind of counterintelligence reasons.
Speaker: It is eventually in a series of agency decisions sold off in various ways. It becomes possible to own, you know not the if not the infrastructure, then at least the access to that infrastructure. That's you start getting companies like AOL and these you know early ISPs that will determine not only the internet that we get in the 90s that shapes Gen X, but then eventually become this series of you know sort of platforms we all pretend are public, but are actually not public at all. Right. And there was there was a huge push um in the legal world to make that happen. There was, you know, these businesses lobbied federal laws, you know, to change, to allow the internet to become something that isn't just a utility, but something that's a privately owned phenomenon. so
Speaker: Which is, I guess, interesting to think about the different kinds of libertarianism. Because, I mean, I think all Americans are sort of infected with the virus of libertarianism. That makes me sound a little mean to the anarchists. I just mean that, um that That impulse, that notion of freedom, I think is often it deeply embedded in American society, and it changes its expression based on all sorts of things. and If we think of the Gen X conception of the internet as still sort of like tacitly rooted in the idea of a public internet, like there's still this hope that you were talking about that maybe there could be this quasi-communized idea
Speaker: It's not a kind of like big state public utility, public publicly owned internet. It's very much more a kind of fragmented open source. Yeah. it's yeah it's it's It's things like Linux. It's the Bitcoin. It's sort of atomized self-governance rather than a kind of like collectivist. It's not like the goth plan.
Speaker: Whereas what is Bitcoin to Gen Z, but an asset that you can basically either do arbitrage with or just, you know, um yeah you but you basically scam people with crypto, right? In other words, like, there's really not an ideological component. There's kind of an understanding that we are all just grifting. Whereas... all i like when was the declaration of the independence for cyberspace? I think that was...
Speaker: That's the 90s, right? Yeah, that's the 90s. Yeah, so there was ah the hacker culture. of gen X really started a hacker culture. You could trace it back to you know the the boomers, people like the whole earth, people like the well.
Speaker: But a lot of hacker culture for Gen X was about what used to be called hacktivism, where you are using hacking as a way of a kind of Robin Hood way, as a way of exposing um sneaky government stuff or, you know, hacking into things, showing your technological ah capability and things like this. um So even the Hacker Manifesto,
Speaker: which they even quote a little bit of the hacker manifesto in the movie the ninety s movie Hackers. That was a real life manifesto. And essentially, hackers were portrayed in the media as these sort of dangerous subversives. um But really, amongst themselves, they they considered themselves people who were doing good in the face of a you know overwhelming overwhelmingly privatized system.
Speaker: Sam, maybe you know this story, but there's um a guy, i want to say it's right after nine eleven He's from the UK, I think London. He's Gen X. He's like 40 or something around 9-11, maybe a little younger than that.
Speaker: And he is like, can't remember if he's getting divorced or so He basically is like, things aren't going like super great for him. So he's like, you know what? again Let me get a little hacking. Let me see what that's all about. And he eventually takes it from hobby to the point that he is maybe he like, maybe hacks the CIA, like gets really like way further than a random British guy should have been able to. And it becomes this whole like extradition thing once they figure out who he is. And he literally did like slacker to hacktivist in like a two year period because the internet was still so new that you could kind of,
Speaker: you know, you could get really good at it. was going to say, all of those like early 90s like hacker films and like cyberpunk films coming out of like Japanese anime like William Gibson, Neuromancer, stuff like that, even The Matrix, right? Like this was at a point where the internet could still manifest a kind of directly hollery subculture in the real world in a way that I just think. I think now it's a fragment it's a sort of fragmentizing force. But at the time, like those got that early 90s period, but you could have a kind of very sort of internet subculture that you could sort of see with your own eyes on the street.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure. no I don't remember, but... i hate to shut us down. Maybe we should talk about HIV AIDS and the ah children of New York City. ka yeah, for sure. The question wanted to ask Sharon was like, did your thesis deal with the idea of micro generations? Because these are kind of two micro generations here, right? Like if Tiny and Dwayne and Rat are born in maybe like 1969, 1970, the characters of kids are probably born in 78, 79. a 10-year gap there.
Speaker: I mean, how big a gulf is that really in terms of different identity, different culture? Yeah, so in my generation, excuse me, in my dissertation, i i look at generations and more of a cultural sensibility rather than a strict demographic sociological way. um I think people get kind of hung up on like, oh, you know, someone was born in 1963, so they're a boomer, and then someone born in 1964, so they're Gen Xer. I don't really do that in my um in my studies of Gen X. I think it's better to approach generations more in terms of a cultural sensibility, um getting a mood of an era,
Speaker: And while there's definitely differences between the kids in Streetwise in the 80s and the Gen X kids in the 90s in the movie kids, these are still dealing with some of many of the same themes.
Speaker: And we could talk about that a little bit more, but they're still dealing with the AIDS crisis. They're dealing with being on the streets. There's A lot of teen pregnancy, um suicide, these sorts of things were core to the Gen X experience. um And I think you can see both of them pretty well and in in both films, even though the films are are very different.
Speaker: Well, and I'll just say, you know, friends, Romans, countrymen on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, we're talking about the Larry Clark-directed 1995 kids written by one of my favorite American sort of freaks, Harmony Corrine.
Speaker: um And I think, Sam, you ask a good question because what you're saying there, Sean, I think reflects a lot of what we're we're trying to do with this little project here, which is to say...
Speaker: recognize that there's a certain amount of fluidity. I mean, you we were talking about you know when we were born, and and you were saying that you you know technically, if we're doing a strict generational cohort thing, could be you know an older millennial as opposed to a younger Gen X. But you you sort of end up almost um choosing a side or representing a borderland. And I say that because I feel that way very much. I mean, I'm born 93, so I'm sort of squarely millennial, in in again, in this kind of cohort sense.
Speaker: But I'm a young enough millennial that millennial culture had sort of already begun petering out by the time that I was old enough to care. You know, the the hipster is like dying by the time I'm becoming like 21, 22. So, you know you know, in a way, i feel between the...
Speaker: the wasteland of the millennial and Gen Z. i'm I'm neither nor. And so really what i end up being is an amalgamation of the sorts of traits that defined me growing up, these kind of material circumstances that make me maybe wince at certain millennial things, but also feel distant from some of the Gen Z stuff. And I think maybe that's part of what allows us to try and take this more, you know, not objective eye, but to try and view it from outside. Yeah, and and one thing that i I tell people is that people tend to have a kind of moralizing sense when they talk about generations, and that's really a mistake um because, again, we're talking about history, not vibes. It's not really good to think about generations in these sort of discrete terms where it's like, oh, there's this generation, and then there's this generation, and then there's just a generation, and they all have their own unique whatevers.
Speaker: It's much more better to think about generations in more dialectical terms. um you know Every generation simultaneously draws from certain aspects of the previous generation and rejects certain aspects of the previous generation and then creates sort some of their own new stuff.
Speaker: And what's interesting about looking at generations as opposed to other sociological categories that are also fuzzy, which you know race and gender and nationality, religion, all those all these sociological categories are fuzzy. None of them apply to every single individual within those groups. These are looking at trends and patterns. um So it's much better to think of like, what are some things that Gen Xers sort of drew upon or expanded upon from the generation before them? And what are some things that they rejected? and then
Speaker: For millennials, what are some things that they drew upon with Gen X and what are some things that they really differed on? So it it's it's much better to think about generations in more fluid terms.
Speaker: I think, Sam, maybe you you might agree with this, that something we keep coming across is that you can't really understand any of this without thinking about what comes before and how it structures the desires of the generation. So this is a great example because Larry Clark is born before World War II, right?
Speaker: But is a seminal kind of skateboarding culture photographer who shapes our idea of like what skater culture is. and Right. Yeah, there' there's often like a vanguard, like before, which defines a generation from sort of like before it actually emerges. So like, if you look at someone like Bret Easton Ellis being born in 61 or Right. In my dissertation, I even talk about certain boomers that are technically like late boomers. And if if you think about micro generations, they would be like Generation Jones, you know, people who were a big influence on the Gen X worldview.
Speaker: With Larry Clark and kids, um there is a good connection between both Streetwise and kids because both of the people making these films start, you know, they are photographers. yeah And documentary photographers. um So even though, you know, Streetwise is a documentary, but kids is fiction, it's still filmed with that kind of documentary photographer eye. And and for for those who don't realize or or keep up with um the history of photography in the U.S., Larry Clark was most known, before kids, he was most known for a photography series known as Tulsa.
Speaker: where he looked at teen culture doing, you know, drugs and sex and and crime and things like that, um you know, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was supposed to be kind of this, um you know, middle America, you know, Norman Rockwell kind of vibes. And ah instead, Larry Clark kind of made waves with with his photography of Tulsa. Right.
Speaker: which just showed a very different picture of what we consider middle America. So you can kind of see that with how kids is filmed and in this kind of startling way um of how he's portraying these kids.
Speaker: a Could I ask you sort of what you're reading is on intersection between class in America and Gen X and generations? Because... Those of these films are sort nominally about street kids.
Speaker: And yet the characters in Streetwise from 1984 are like truly derelict, right? Like their parents are in prison, their parents are alcoholics. Right. They're like living in flophouses. And the shift with kids is that at least the sort of main two male characters, Telly and Casper, and I don't know if am reading this right as a foreigner, but like they come across as at least middle class, right?
Speaker: Like and you there's a bit where they go back to Telly's house and the mum kind of comes across as a as in like a struggling journalist or academic, there's a bunch of big bookshelves at the back. Then yeah, all of that cynicism, all of that kind of violence, all of that kind of degeneracy or whatever you want to describe it, it's still very much like at the fore.
Speaker: yeah I just wonder how like, Is there something universal about generational experience that like a working class Gen X kid from Seattle and like an upper middle class Gen X kid from the Upper East Side is going to share? Or is that like too presumptuous?
Speaker: Can I also just slot in an additional example? Because I do want to hear answer, Sean. But it's that the opening scene is Tully having sex with this girl who is convincing have sex. and there's this really disgustingly long kiss and and she doesn't want to have sex and blah, blah, blah. We learn that he is...
Speaker: basically obsessed with deflowering these young girls. He himself is underage. And my wife and I were shocked. We've both seen the movie before. Kids really occupies this like mental space for people of our generation as this sort of transgressive 90s movie. And...
Speaker: We were like, wait, this is, it's like a huge apartment. There's a scene where he spits down and it like goes down the townhouse, like all three flights of steps. It's like an Afghan rug, yeah. And it took us a second to be like, wait, is he like rich? Or, I mean, I think basically you realize that the girl must be. But the point is still that we were sort of shocked. like In our mind, the entire movie was sort of streetwise style, just like totally destroyed flop houses in the worst parts of New York City, but yet it opens with this like gorgeous townhouse that implies you know pretty substantial wealth. So sorry to cut in, but I just had to put that in there.
Speaker: I can't remember, but i I do think just for that scene, um I think that was the girl's house. Yeah. But yeah, I think that Telly, I believe his name is, is and and most of the kids shown in the movie kids are supposed to be kind of New York middle class, whereas in Streetwise, they're of course, you know, actually on the streets.
Speaker: Now, As far as like the class differences, I think that Gen X is one of the last generations to have a kind of monoculture in the sense that regardless of your class, there is you know a lot of overlap in culture. and You can see this a lot with the skater culture that they have in kids, but also how interracial it was. So one thing about Generation X is that of all the generations, even the generations after them, they attended the most racially diverse schools.
Speaker: And this was really the result of the of the legislative changes of the boomers with busing policies. So Gen Xers attended schools um when busing policies were in place, and they were leaving schools as busing policies were beginning to be dismantled. And because of that, um Gen Xers actually had the most racial integration of all generations, and that actually started to go away for millennials, and now it's even less so for for Zoomers because these sort of busing policies had went away and a lot of um zoning policies changed and and neoliberal kind of stuff.
Speaker: This does reflect the generational experience in that the sort of racial divisions you might have seen for earlier generations become less so. And and during the time,
Speaker: Generation X was considered a post-racial generation. And, you know, this is before Obama. And it was because of things like this, where there was a lot of blending of, you know, class didn't seem to make much of an effect on these racial divisions. And we see ah a large amount of African Americans entering the suburbs at this time. At the same time, the suburbs are also kind of they're not as distinct from urban environments as well. So like you see this sort of, a good movie that kind of captures this is Linklater's Suburbia, where you see sort of how suburbia is changing. It's not this nostalgic view of suburbia from the 1950s, you know, with the white picket fences and everything.
Speaker: Suburban environments are starting to look like urban environments and vice versa. So yeah, I think that there's a lot more blending here um between these youth cultures for Gen X that will start to go away as the internet starts to take over and people end up really communicating through virtual spaces rather than these like physical spaces. Another thing I'll just ah mention, you know, before millennial generations, there were no things like play dates for kids um in the neighborhoods that are specific to age. That's a sort of new phenomenon. And, um, when when um pre-internet generations were growing up, you played with the kids in your neighborhood. So that could be, you know, if you're in a sort of lower middle class neighborhood or, you know, just in the city, you're probably interacting with all kinds of different kids from different backgrounds and different ages, more so than in contemporary times where these things are much more structured and and divided by age groups and sort of de facto by class. So yeah, I i don't know if that really kind of answers what you were going for. But but yeah, there there was a lot of blending, which I think you see in in both of these films, um which i that's one aspect that I think is kind of accurate. Now, kids is is a little exaggerated in other ways, but there are some pieces of it that do reflect the reality, I believe.
Speaker: i amm I'm positively buzzing. There's so much there that I need. I'm going to pop out of my jacket because there's there's a lot there. um The first thing is just ah maybe a bit of an answer for Sam because I'm maybe more familiar with New York and the neighborhoods represented. So they spend most of their time on What is sort of like right above Midtown, kind of just south of Yorkville on the east side, which, you know, I mean, traditionally would have been a relatively working class neighborhood. By this time is probably less so, and certainly now is, you know, a relatively comfortable area if sort of oddly close. It's not like the richest neighborhood, but it's also not the poorest neighborhood. They then go downtown to the lower east side. They spend quite a bit of time in Washington Square Park, where you and I have been together, Sam, when you're visiting the U.S. Oh my gosh, yes.
Speaker: Yeah, and you know that's where they beat the guy up. And that area you know now is is basically just owned by and NYU, but at the time was still... I think, kind of a heavily you know Dominican, Puerto Rican sort of ah neighborhood and area. More maybe towards Alphabet City, but still in that area. So when they go downtown, they're definitely like, they're going downtown in a financial sense as well, if I can put it that way. So you do kind there is the subway and which they jump over the turnstiles, right?
Speaker: it belies a certain permeability that that just exists in New York City and certainly exists for them at the time. And you know I think that, as Sean is saying, that is pretty realistic. I think for adults, in a certain sense, it might not have been. But for a lot of kids, it it would have been. Now, here's but here's what i got why I was buzzing. Because when I was watching this movie, I could not get over...
Speaker: you know Sam, you'll understand this because you were on the episode. We had um Spencer Leonard on, who's a an academic at James Madison University for the movie Glory, which is a movie about the first this first black regiment that gets formed in the Civil War and fights to the Union Army.
Speaker: I could not stop thinking about kids as like Glory. it's the same i mean It's not the same movie, but it accepts the reality of Glory. like the The thing that Glory is arguing, because in the Civil War context, you still need to be making this argument because of the lost cause and as a hostility to the union and the historiography of the United States, it needs to argue it. But kids just accepts it. It's a world where white kids are saying the N-word constantly.
Speaker: it's I mean, it's like unbelievable. And there's no sense of any kind of cultural division. I mean, you know, Telly, they beat up this black dude in the park. The group is totally transracial. They're standing outside this girl's window whose name, i think it might be Dory or something. It's basically this girl that he is- Fascinating. Darcy, yeah. Darcy, thank you. Clearly Hispanic coded. I mean, whatever that might mean in this context. But the point is that the movie, for those who haven't seen it, go out and see it. It's basically just about um a female character played by Chloe Sevigny who Harmony Crane met in, I think, Washington Square Park when she was a senior in high school and cast in this movie. She obviously now has quite the career.
Speaker: And she finds out that she's HIV positive, which is very ironic because she's only at the clinic because her friend is being tested who has sex much more often. She's only had sex once, I think, with Telly.
Speaker: And the movie is just close to me trying to catch up with and find the Telly character as he goes around basically spreading HIV like Johnny Appleseed through the streets of New York. And so he he's in lower Manhattan.
Speaker: He's outside this girl's window. And let's be clear, he's talking with a black cent. like My question was like that Gen X is like relationship with authenticity, right? Like these two characters, him and Casper, his some other white best friend, just the entire movie are talking and they're like to the patois. And the thing is that for Gen Xers, that would not have been considered inauthentic. That would have actually been considered authentic because, you know, a lot of the like language policing that, you know, the millennial gener, this is one big difference between millennials and Gen Xers. And then of course, Zoomers and Gen Xers,
Speaker: is that is the language policing thing. That was not really a thing. And that's because Gen Xers grew up during the height of the culture wars of the 1980s and 90s. And what we now call woke now um was then called PC, politically correct. And no one wanted to play into being PC, quote unquote. um So, you know, these these sorts of like language policing that we have now would have just been considered slang. And, and you know, the the way you hang around with your friends and talk about how you talk with your friends, that would have all been considered normal. um So, you know, it again, it it goes back to that kind of thing of where younger generations really have to step outside of themselves and put this um into put these films into historical context. And that can be hard to do. um was going to say this.
Speaker: There's kind of an easter egg in the film where you're talking about the the sort of their reaction to the PC culture at the time, which like I suppose would have been being pioneered in the universities by the whole Alan Bloom moment, like by the... Right. He's reacting against PC, but it was being pioneered by late boomers. Yeah. I'm just interested because there's this ah weird easter egg at the start of the film where Casper's waiting for Telly to finish having sex on the steps of this massive townhouse.
Speaker: And you get a sort of five-second flash and he's reading. i think it's the only time where a character interacts with any source of media in the entire film. And he's reading Crumb, which is like 60s counterculture figure.
Speaker: And alternative comics were a big part of ah like underground comics. Alternative comics really took off for Gen Xers. um So it does kind of make sense that he was reading R. Crumb. I mean, a bigger one for Gen Xers would be Daniel Close, who did things like Ghost World.
Speaker: Oh, yeah. yeah and and there was all things genx um wanted to be alternative alternative lifestyles was a big term and it often referred to being part of you know lgbt queer culture but it also applied to other things like the kids and and the movie kids and you know artists and hipsters and people doing underground media and things like this. We're all kind of lumped under alternative lifestyles. But going back to the New York City and everything, we also see with kids kind of a a last gasp of these these sort of alternative lifestyle type of cultures because during the mid-1990s, Rudy Giuliani vowed to implement really strict policies to deal with what he called quality of life issues that were plaguing the city. um And these things weren't just like violent crime, which often gets the focus, but it was also things that made like middle-class people feel uncomfortable. Things like homelessness and panhandling and prostitution and graffiti and... you know adult bookstores and and sex shops and a lot of queer culture things like the New York City Club Kids is often considered one of the last Gen X subcultures. um And all of this stuff got kind of wrapped up in Giuliani's policies today. You know, they were all kind of considered, quote unquote, quality of life issues.
Speaker: And a lot of that was, you know, so-called cleaned up by Giuliani. So you don't see a lot of this stuff anymore, partly because of the New York City's legislative changes.
Speaker: Yeah, and and it I mean, the the policing movement there, just for anyone interested, is called Broken Windows Policing. There's a book a guy named Jack Maple who pioneers this thing called Comstat, which is basically a um you know ah in ah an attempt to use technology to deal with these quote-unquote quality of life issues that you know then make it impossible for these sorts of things to exist. And obviously, there are other economic factors too, but I i just have to come back. i you know Again, this topic gets me sort of very excited, you'll to forgive me, but...
Speaker: um it I guess i'm I'm interested in the film as hyper-reality, I guess you could say, right? like What I mean by that is it's a movie that luxuriates in the transgression of kids having sex, kids doing drugs, kids transmitting HIV. Some of that is you know obviously Harmony Corrine, who is, you know you can I feel like I can almost feel him laughing at certain points in the movie. like you know i think... He thinks, for example, it's very funny that Chloe Sevigny is the one who gets HIV as opposed to her friend. like i If you've seen enough of his films, that just makes sense to me. But with Clark in the directing role here, you do get these like long takes sometimes of just like,
Speaker: the midriffs and chests of these young people independent of of gender. You get these, sometimes it'll be quick cuts between different like passed out teenagers. Like the party scene at the end was a lot longer than I had remembered it, right? This kind of really like...
Speaker: you know the feeling of waking up after a college party or something, and everyone is just sort of bleary-eyed and has fallen asleep in these awful places. I guess i'm I'm interested in the way in which an audience at the time might have responded to that. like it It feels intended to transgress.
Speaker: And do you think that that's itself a kind of shot at this more kind of tipper-goer version of culture that existed at the time? or Because for me, it it didn't transgress that much it in the way that I think it would have in 1995. But it feels like it's really intended to, that they want you to be in some way scandalized by what you're seeing.
Speaker: Well, I think, again, this this goes to the AIDS crisis, um which played a big part for Gen Xers. So i I agree that it does feel purposely transgressive, but also I would also say that it's almost propagandistic. And there is there is some stuff that's realistic, although hyperbolized, I guess. ah But When Kids came out at the time, it was considered very controversial film. There weren't a lot of films kind of portraying kids in this very hedonistic way, especially in the mid-90s when AIDS had been drilled into everybody's heads um since since the 80s. So the AIDS epidemic really... um
Speaker: left just an indelible mark on the Gen X consciousness. The AIDS crisis was everywhere. There were public service announcements about AIDS everywhere.
Speaker: Tons of Gen Xers died from AIDS. Most of Gen X activism was around AIDS groups like ACT UP and things like that. And Gen Xers essentially became terrified of sex because of AIDS. And you know when I was doing my research, well, and also from personal experience, I i remember a lot of this, But so many Gen Xers were talking about how they were just afraid to have sex, you know, because they were afraid to get AIDS. This this was everywhere. And by the mid-90s, when kids came out, AIDS had become one of the leading causes of death for Gen Xers.
Speaker: And there there was a survey done by the organization GLAAD just a couple years ago um where they surveyed people by generation on their knowledge about the disease.
Speaker: And of course, I was not surprised, um but of course, Gen Xers were the most knowledgeable about the disease. And that was compared to both boomers and millennials and Zoomers who were significantly less knowledgeable about it.
Speaker: That didn't surprise me at all because this was just such a big part of the Gen X experience was seeing their friends die of AIDS, seeing it all over um the media and the news.
Speaker: And of course, you know, for for the younger people listening to your show, we didn't have the medical advances then that we do now for, you know, if you get HIV now, it's not an automatic death sentence. Back then it was. I mean, even the public service announcements had like grim reapers and everything. I mean, It was bleak.
Speaker: um So in many ways, that makes sense when you when you watch kids knowing the AIDS crisis because people were terrified of AIDS. And there's this great scene in in Kids where some of the teens are, so some of the the guys are sitting around and talking about like, oh, you know, if I'm going to go out, I'm going to go out fucking or something like Yeah, it was early in the movie. ah Yeah, and and that's a very nihilistic view. um I think that the girls going to get the HIV test is a bit more accurate of how most people felt. I mean, even in Reality Bites, which came out around the same time, maybe a couple years earlier than Kids, Janine Garofalo's character says something about how um you know getting your your first HIV test is sort of like the mark of your Generation of generation x
Speaker: There's an element of conspiracy in that, because there's the guys and the girls talking, it's the cuts between the two, and they're both talking about sex. And one of the boys sort of goes, you know, I don't know any fucking kids who've died of AIDS. It's all fucking made up, man. like it's Right, yeah. There was a ton of that. There was a ton of that. I mean and like i think you maybe mentioned earlier, or maybe when we were talking offline, about how like there was some similarities between that and the COVID um pandemic.
Speaker: I will say that I think you're not wrong, Sam. Something that we haven't really talked about a ton ah so far on the podcast is, of course, 90s conspiracy culture, the world of Art Bell, the world of um The X-Files, right? this is ah Even something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is a bit later. i mean, these are, I think, very indicative of the kind of mindset that that emerges in this period. I mean, a character like Dale Gribble on King of the Hill is ah is a recognizable type.
Speaker: you know You were talking earlier, Sheldon, about the characters who... It's just slang, right? A white person who talks like a you know in AAVE or whatever. Only a few years later, in Can't Hardly Wait, the sort of seminal teen millennial movie with Seth Green, he plays this character who's like inauthentically trying to be black. And that's the joke of the character, right? Right. To the point now where, I mean, that kind of person is is itself a joke, that there is this there is this change in how those things are perceived, and kids is a weird moment where it still feels authentic.
Speaker: I feel like it's kind of a circle, like in the sense that Gen Z are Gen X's children. like and I don't know if this is is ah a feature of New York life, but at least in London, you see a lot of white kids using what we call MLE, Multicultural London English.
Speaker: And there's not like a sense that there was within the millennial generation of like a cringe in authenticity to that. It's just like natural. Yeah, I think that's more of an American phenomenon.
Speaker: I have some some bad news, which is that I need to go. wearing a suit for those who don't know, which means I have somewhere to be in seven minutes, and I need to, you know... Sean, thank you so much. I'm sorry we're just like, got to run here. Is there anything you'd like to promote or plug or or so you know say about yourself here and there? No, nothing on me, but I mean, if you want to check out my writings, my website is shallonvantine.com. I usually put stuff up there on blogs and a lot of film movie lists, so...
Speaker: Definitely love to talk about movies. So if you ever want to talk about that again, I'm your gal. It has it has been an absolute pleasure. Go check out Sean's website and ah ah go go go take one of your classes where you can find out about ah why hustle culture is bad. All right. See you guys later. Thanks so much for having me, y'all.
Speaker: I just have to thank Shallon for a wonderful episode. And you can show your love and appreciation by hop on over to the Patreon at patreon.com slash deathphotopod, where you can become a paid subscriber. There's some extra goodies up there. What are they? i don't know. Go there find out.
Speaker: Also consider liking, leaving review. You don't have any money, and neither do we, which is why we're asking you for some. But if you also don't have any, like it, review it. We're on all of the different potential places you could go looking, except for Stitcher, which I believe is deceased. Rest in peace to Stitcher.
Speaker: Have a good one, everybody.
