Transcript
Speaker: I'm frozen.
Speaker: Welcome, welcome, welcome back to Death is a Photograph Culture at the End of History. This is Chase here with Sam, coming to you live from one of those months where different body parts are just falling off one by one.
Speaker: So currently I have to hobble on one foot, I'm missing a tooth, ah part of my finger has been skinned off, and ah psychologically I'm actually doing pretty well. Thanks for asking. So...
Speaker: Yeah, mind-body separation. it's a It's a Descartes style scene. Chase is actually lying perfectly horizontally in a cork-lined room right now. I'm in an iron lung right now. This is all to say, dear listeners, that today we're conducting the wrap-up episode to Gen X season.
Speaker: I think it was yesterday. There was ah one of the most Gen X posts of all time online, which was like, it was a short form video of um ICE guys using like racial slurs.
Speaker: And Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine had quote tweeted it and said like, you know, it's almost as if some of those who work forces are also the ones who burn crosses. And it was like sort of everyone Gen X style sagely nodding this at this wisdom. So Rage Against Machine, weren't they pro-Kamala Harris?
Speaker: Actually, Sam, thank you for saying for like bringing up that question because is that not how this whole season started? was like me watching Dirty Girls and seeing these kids who were like, I'm going to become so stinky that it frees Tibet and like avenges the Tiananmen Square Massacre you know victims.
Speaker: But now they're like in Patagonia sort of sweatshirts and you know doing like yoga atop a mountain Colorado. Big semi-boho felt trilbies.
Speaker: but the Not the male trilbies. That's also very Gen ah Not like a pinstripe trilby, but like the big floppy trilbys. Yeah, yeah. To me, that's a very millennial-coded thing, but I guess there is a lot of overlap, as we've discussed throughout the season. Yeah, I also like the late-gen access. And I think because it's become uncool, the only people you see wearing it now are people born in 1970 or something. but Yeah, the thebe the the big sun hat, essentially.
Speaker: Yeah, the big floppy sun hat. But i this is this this is very true, because I i was watching... ah What's it called? Fire at the Heavenly Gate? It's like a three-hour Tiananmen Square documentary.
Speaker: But it was like the most Gen X thing ever. in And i can see how this all links together, you know, in the sense that you have, for threat, right it's called the gate of heavenly peace. There we go. And for three hours, you just have no idea what they're really protesting about. It's like, yeah, like, fuck the old communist bastards. And them yeah we want Nike shoes. It's very late Soviet coded because it's very like just the word democracy. And you're like, not really sure what that means. Yeah, it's like, we want democracy. And it's like, can we like have a substantive policy platform? Can we get Liz Warren out here at Tiananmen Square down to lay down a platform?
Speaker: ah Yes. I'm just saying if there was a Tiananmen Square Banksy, there was. There's one of three tanks. There's a guy standing in front of it with a sign saying, Gulf sail. Ha-ha. Banksy's smart to have kept his identity ah private because I would be so embarrassed if I weren't.
Speaker: by it's um I know. I feel like a similar thing about it. Do you know Voynia? No. The Russian art collective, Voynia? They look kind of like semi-launched Pussy Riot. So a few of the members of Pussy Riot were formerly in Voynia. Another of my least favorite like groups of all time. Very Gen X. Early millennial, late Gen Xs.
Speaker: Yeah, years active 2007 to 2024. And they were sort of like an anti-Russian, sorry, anti-Putin style art collective. um I'm just looking at the Wikipedia and there's like a blue link to Banksy within the first four paragraphs.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, like all their art pieces are called like, Fuck fuck for the Air, Puppy Bear. Humiliation of a cop in his house. Cop in a priest's cassock. Memory of the Decembrists. The storming of the White House.
Speaker: Banning of the clubs. Dick in the ass. Punk concert in the courtroom. It's like, and you know what? I bet you satanic feminists and Banksy are huge fans. Yeah. I do think like, I'll give Fort Vaughn-Yer their due and say that they're very anti-Putin, but I think they're also quite anti-NATO.
Speaker: Well, and listen, the issue is not being anti-Putin. The issue is just that they achieved a certain level of like elder millennial younger Gen X, just embarrassment that is really hard to sit with now. It just is like, I'm sorry. It's just, it's from a different era. like it it looks ridiculous. Yeah.
Speaker: One of the most famous pieces is a massive graffiti of a cock on ah St. Petersburg, like ah one of the drawbridges. Well, it's like we have, Mom, can we have the situationist? No, ah son, we have the situationist at home. like It's just, it's like the worst version of these things.
Speaker: you know I mean, what have we learned? What have we learned about Gen X in the last year? Before we get there, i have I have one additional thing we never got to talk about I want to just throw in that I touched on through some of my choices, but I never made explicit.
Speaker: One of the early dominant figures in the internet who's now sort of been like chased to the corners, but like the guys who ruled the internet from 2007 to 2012, it was the Gen x like film and comic book guy. like A lot of the early kind of successful accounts were guys like Doug Walker, better known as the Nostalgia Critic,
Speaker: And his sort of coterie kind of coderie of like freakish 35-year-old men who acted like 16-year-olds, these sort of man children, like Linkara, the cinema snob. ah Oh, God, yeah. Amazing Atheist. Bennett the Sage. like just you These names are so funny now.
Speaker: Or like there are definitely other versions of these guys that are escaping me right now, but you know who are already 30 years old when like YouTube and the kind of internet that influenced...
Speaker: millennials especially mid and lower millennials and elder Gen Zers. when that all When they were kids, that initial YouTube internet was dominated by these guys. And so I think, bizarrely, that part of Gen X actually ended up having an outsized influence on...
Speaker: Even today, even though they these people are like reviled and forgotten, basically, and almost all have been Me Too'd and like cast to the outer darkness. But I think that they sort of culturally had so much to do with the childhoods of um people, probably even more like people who are your age, Sam, because you would have been 10, 11, 12 when these guys were popular. like I was slightly too old for most of these guys.
Speaker: But I recently re-watched, or no, watched the first time, excuse me, thet hidden nostalgia critic Doug Walker. His channel was called Channel Awesome, which again, wow.
Speaker: And Channel Awesome did a three and a half hour film that is on YouTube. You can watch it. And I watched it. It's called To Boldly Flee. And there are parts of that film that are literally just a redo of Star Wars.
Speaker: And then in the movie, they're talking about the fact that there' it's this very self-referential, like, epic bacon era, like, horny nerd sort of mode that, again, has sort of been like... But that is so alive today for those with eyes to see. Oh, yes. You know, like like, there's a very popular... and i just found out about this. Shout out to the Get Cynical podcast for making me aware of this.
Speaker: There is a very popular Dungeons & Dragons podcast called ah Critical Role that has, almost 3 million YouTube subscribers and is staffed, like, entirely by people who try and, like...
Speaker: who were experimenting with polyamory before anyone in Brooklyn had heard that term. um And they are still doing this. And they have 3 million subscribers and are so popular that one of their like podcast animations they made for a campaign was released in theaters as a movie in 2021 or something. like This stuff is still with us.
Speaker: And um this is not the same demographic as the Dirty Girls demographic. you know Gen X has its own cohorts within it. but it's It's with us. It's not gone. And so I just wanted to touch down on that. like we We all grew up with like the greatest movies you ever made are Indiana Jones and Star Wars and Die Hard. And it's like, that's because the Gen X guys controlled the internet version of what movies were for like 10 years. um No one would care about fucking Die Hard if it weren't for the Gen X guys.
Speaker: Yes, it's very... I do wonder about... What was that? it Yeah, we were sort of being drip-fed Gen X taste in a way that was slightly odd. I remember like as ah maybe a 10-year-old watching. Do you remember The Ultimate Showdown on Newgrounds? I do remember Newgrounds, but not The Ultimate Showdown in particular, no ah It was like a musical animation about like different superhero characters ah fighting each other. um and I think it resolves with Chuck Norris versus Mr. Rogers. ah Neither of whom I knew who they... I didn't know who either of those people were. Like, you know, oh why I suppose i going to have to go and look that up now as a 10-year-old. And then I knew who Chuck Norris was because they're...
Speaker: um So, yeah, it's still with us. And I you know i think Gen X are only in some ways coming... yeah They've been in their cultural prime maybe for 10, 20 years, but they're only becoming their political prime. It's only you know starting. because Because of how gerontocratic... our a Samuel Moyne's shadow. Our system is. ah you know Referencing Samuel Moyne's... Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've just got our first... Is that our first?
Speaker: I think Boris Johnson might have been X, but he was too posh to really be the spiritual Gen Xer that we needed, that we wanted, that we desired. But you know Andy Burnham, the first real, you know in my opinion, the first real Gen Xer to be Prime Minister. you know He's 64, Johnson, so for being very strict, he actually is still a boomer.
Speaker: Oh yeah, okay. Well, Starmer. I think Starmer was too old as well, actually. So yeah, Burnham might be... Oh wait, Liz Truss and Richie Sue. I think Sunak might have been a millennial. Well, no, but Liz Truss was sort of Gen X. like To me, the only way to be... Just imploding immediately. Yeah, like i and and I'll be very you know safe in my way of putting this, but there were many rumors that were reported by people that I am not repeating, but I'm simply saying exist.
Speaker: that had to do with her interest in certain certain sexual things, that to me personally is like the most Gen X coded like sexual activity you can be engaged in. And i I don't know why I feel that way, but I just do. So, you know, there it is. Yeah, something that ah but ah Michelle Horbeck wrote very vehemently against in Platform, I think. Let's just leave it at that.
Speaker: So, yeah, Burnham is 1970 and Truss 75. So, yeah, proper gen axis. Yeah, I just feel Burnham is is is is the man we need. He's he's um the northern Mancunian version of ah Beto O'Rourke, you know?
Speaker: he's just He's tough to look at. i can't cringe at it. Compared to beautiful Keir Starmer, who's going to lead us into a golden future. Yeah, Starmerbot. He was a man. He was a he was really the Stakhanovite Stalinist man, wasn't He was the new Soviet man, Starmer. His beautiful square jaw. Burnham sort of looked like he emerged out of sort of a canal. Yeah. It's 24-hour party people and he walks out of the canal and they're interviewing um interviewing the 100-year-old guy. yeah arts let' ah Let's get rid of rough sleeping. I think it's absolutely outrageous that in the seventh largest economy on earth, we're still people sleeping on the streets. And I i don't disagree with that, it's awful. And
Speaker: He's got that Gen X earnestness, right? The first thing he did was like, we're going to end a rough sleeping in the UK. I don't think he'll manage it, but I admire the brio of just being like, well, that's a bit fucked, isn't Well, he's not going to be able to the rough sleeping that Liz Truss is being accused of others and not me of doing.
Speaker: ah no No way to put a stop to that. No, well, he might. That's a good Catholic boy. might Sharia police, but for like Catholic in the UK. Yeah, Catholic says, I mean, yeah, I just hear the whole, you know, oh, Manchester was great, wasn't it? In the 80s. And oh, I just, I don't go for a fucking point and watch the football.
Speaker: And like his his way of wearing like slightly baggy jeans with like a black polo shirt, yeah it's just very like that that era of Gen X. i just I hate them and I love them in equal measure because of my parents' generation. I has actually met the most Gen X guy.
Speaker: I've got a wedding, an ex-colleague's wedding next week. And I went to this Taylor Ukrainian-Turkish collaboration between a Ukrainian woman and Turkish man. And yeah i went in and they were like, we're just filling this guy up in his suit. It'll be 20 minutes, just wait. i was like, okay, cool, cool. There's this guy is about 50 and he was just whinging the entire time. He was like, oh, I don't want the suit to be too baggy. I don't want to look like an old man. i don't want it to look like an old man's so i don't look like an old man.
Speaker: And then... i'm Like four minutes later, he was like, oh, I don't want it to be you know too too loose. It needs to be skinny because I don't want it like an estate agent. An estate agent is the worst fucking people in the world.
Speaker: And i was it's just so funny. And then like I was like, okay, this guy's a bit annoying, whatever. And he just kept whinging. And he was like, right, you're finished. Go change, take the suit off. And he comes out. It's a 50-year-old man in a full Beastie Boys get-up. Oh my God. I kid you not.
Speaker: Shorts down to his ankles, like massive like Nike Airs, like a street art jumper and like a big hip-hop flat cap. oh my God. like A massive gu like silver
Speaker: Just like, yes! Yes! Fantastic. ah That's, oh my god. i um i just it was good. ah Yeah, i I think that there is, you know, we talked about this a lot early on in the season, but if we're sort of touching on the various, but're true if we're trying to do two things here, right? Like develop a categorization of some of the traits we've come to associate with this generation. and secondarily, how those trades led to its development.
Speaker: I do think that a certain type of earnestness, um which ironically... If we think of someone like David Foster Wallace, this whole like new sincerity thing, obviously felt it was rejecting a certain kind of ironization right that was like happening in that in the 90s and 2000s. But this is the thing I think is odd, is like what ironization, what cynicism? Because the preceding generation had been what? like The boomers? I don't really consider the boomers to and to be particularly ironic or cynical.
Speaker: I suppose you get like earlier, like pre-David Foster Wallace, the biggest writers were who? I mean, Martin Amis? no you got No, but there's Brady Stinellas. I think that... I guess they are a bit more like... Yeah, they are a bit more cynical, I suppose. But they're also... je But I would also say I think it's it's more... um If you think about like Adbusters, right?
Speaker: Like this... Okay, here is how I would describe it. And you're going have to follow me on this because this might be a little crazy. Do you remember bo Burnham's Inside? The like Bo Burnham thing that was big during COVID. Okay.
Speaker: I never saw it, but um I was subjected to the single from that film, A White Woman's Instagram. Yes, yes. By my brother's brother's girlfriend. She was very keen to show me that. So I have seen that. And it's it's it's it's a well-put poignant, you know. Well, here's my thing. So first of all, many such cases. Second of all, I watched it and I hated it. And I will explain very briefly why I hate it. The whole thing. I don't remember any of the individual songs.
Speaker: I grew up with Bo Burnham and I enjoyed his videos because he's like exactly, his moment on YouTube is like exactly when I would have been old enough to like watch those things and enjoy them, right? Because I think he's just very slightly older than me, essentially.
Speaker: I think in a way, Bo Burnham is kind of what David Foster Wallace was reacting against. Because my issue with that whole fucking inside thing is it presents itself as being extraordinarily earnest. Like that is its goal, right? It's like...
Speaker: I'm being honest about my feelings. I'm depressed. I'm stuck inside, which BS. He lives in a mansion with you know literally the Simpsons joke. like I sleep in a big bed with my wife. like That was him during COVID. He you know sets everything up with like crazy lighting and artifice to really like emphasize his loneliness.
Speaker: Which again, I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying it's dishonest and evil. right that like Artistically, it's fine. But But the thing is, it's all this like self-recursive BS that doesn't actually go anywhere or do anything.
Speaker: So I remember a lot of people being really impressed and being like, oh, wow, I really appreciate his honesty and the self-reflexivity he's demonstrating. But that self-reflexivity doesn't go anywhere. like He's still just a rich guy in his house pretending that being a rich guy in his house is the worst thing that could possibly exist. And he always wants to stay one step ahead of you.
Speaker: The classic... I don't know if I brought this up on the podcast before, but I think about it at least once a week. The American kids cartoon, Hey Arnold, where he's about to get the crap beaten out of him by a bully. And his way of dealing with this is taking a garbage can lid, smashing himself in the head over and over again and going, don't hit me, I'll hit me. And then basically like Nixon, Nixon madman theory style, the bully is like too freaked out and runs away.
Speaker: and like, that's kind of Bo Burnham's whole shtick is sort of like, I'm going to so recursively attack myself that you're never going to be able to get a punch in edgewise to like indicate how inauthentic and ridiculous all of this is. Because at the end of the day, I'm going to go lay down with my girlfriend in my big bed that probably is shaped like a car because why not? And combining the two. And like that, I think is what Foster Wallace was coming in at this kind of like ironized attack on like consumerism on corporations and but that very often wasn't tied into any actual criticism of anything. It's like the difference between Fresh Kill, which like is actually an attempt to make like an anti-capitalist movie, and like Reality Bites, which is just like, can you believe these fucking posers? And it's like, what what are you talking about? like You are the poser. Yeah, it's... I feel like this was reified the millennial generation in like the land let's stuff like the land acknowledgement, right?
Speaker: It's like... well, if you care that much about it, give the fucking land back. Which, ironically, Republican... One of our Republican Supreme Court justices seems to be the biggest fan of Neil Gorsuch, for whatever reason, because they're... Well, he's just basically like, if you're going to carry on doing land acknowledgments, at some point, you are just going to give the land back. Well, there's like weird American right-wing thing where they really, really love Native Americans. Because I think it has to do with growing up on cowboy movies or something. I don't really understand it, but there is like...
Speaker: And I think part of it is also that those parts of the country are completely ruled by, like, Republicans. So if you're, like, a Native American who wants to get involved in politics... a lot of the time you're going to go through the Republican route as well. That makes sense.
Speaker: yeah There's a certain you know organization we've both been involved with, Sam, where I've literally seen applications that are from like... It's the ma it's is it's the Masons. yeah Yeah, it's the ah it's it's the the the Holy and Blessed Order of the ah Shriners. um But put out our little fezes. But I mean, driving the little cars. But no, like i it would literally be like I work on a... I'm applying for this and I work on like a...
Speaker: I'm a Native American who works on like a circuit court in like Oklahoma, and I'm a Republican. you know like That's just a kind of guy. But um I think that's what that kind of like earnestness, cynicism binary, i think defined a lot of Gen X's self-conception.
Speaker: Either you were like, no, we need to return to earnestness and a sincerity, or you embraced the cynicism And I don't know that they ever quite like worked out what to do with that. And I think that led to... um That kind of got exploded by the internet, basically.
Speaker: But we were kind of like stuck in that binary until the internet just destroyed any meaning to that by just making everyone into a persona who wears a mask all day online. You know? Hmm.
Speaker: Yeah, it's ah I don't know how to pass the contradiction of sort of simultaneously it being a generation that is very against selling out, is very against inauthenticity, but then also is I feel extremely self-infantilizing. It's simultaneously the generation that is sort of going, maybe these things are have some comity to them, but that it's a generation that goes, uh, you know, I want to be authentic to myself or authentic to reality or authentic to the society I grew up in or was or some specific, um, particularity, but then it's also like fuck tradition.
Speaker: Right. And it's like, well, surely there is some innate inseparability to tradition and authenticity, right? That, they're not so easily separable. um And I, yeah, it's, it's, it's a sort of individualistic authenticity, which, and then it's strange then when you get to the sort of like millennial 2015 discourse around cultural appropriation, there's more of a move to a kind of humanitarian or collective ah sort of authenticity, which is an interesting move, I think.
Speaker: um Cause you know, I think Gen Xs are going to be the ones who are perhaps the most resistant to that discourse. Yeah. in a way that, you know, it's fine. um But also it makes them more like right-wing coded in a lot of ways. I mean, because we talked a lot about that in the middle of the season, that that kind of like... Yeah, it's like being authentic to myself.
Speaker: Whereas, I don't know with manuals, it's kind of, some of that is retained, right? In the sense of therapy culture, self-affirmation, self-love, but it's less framed as um authenticity so much as acceptance.
Speaker: Yes, I think it's um it's more about... the The self is like a work in progress, basically, that you sort of find various modes of of kind of working on and through.
Speaker: Whereas what we saw in the the the sort of Gen X version that we're thinking about here is more like a um a kind of belief in like a fully formed version of the self that just needs to be given proper expression.
Speaker: And I think, if I may return to the Dirty Girls thing, I think that that does help explain how you get from, again, being like, we're going to have a competition to see like who can be like the stinkiest punk in like the most expensive, the highest income bracket, public high school in Los Angeles. um How you get there to the Patagonia thing. And I think part of the answer might just be both of those are modes of individualistic self-expression.
Speaker: that are coded as authentic. Like, one of them is countercultural because you're dealing with a teen and punk has a certain cachet at that time. And, you know, sometimes people affirm themselves by being different specifically.
Speaker: But by the time that person is, you know, 48 years old or 50 years old and has the opportunity to vote for Kamala Harris, it's like, well... I am an individual, and the thing that I like now is expressing myself through like doing yoga on a cliff face and like having a tech job that pays $250,000 a year.
Speaker: And as bizarre as that might sound to us, there's a reason... like Literally yesterday, Rick Rubin said that AI-generated music was the new punk rock. And like I think you can only... think That is the same idea as like the individual affirmation...
Speaker: at the heart doesn't have to have anything to do with yeah actual creativity or actual anything. It's just about that assertion of individuality regardless of means. And I think that has a lot to do with it. Yeah, go ahead I think Gen X are the first generation. Like that the sort of common retort that, you know, only 10 people actually experienced the 60s as we retrospectively understand it, right? Yes. the and You know, it was like there's only a maybe 10 people.
Speaker: 2% of the US actually experienced the sixty s as the acid wave, as the Port Huron statement, as Joan Didion, as whatever, XXX, you can keep going, as the angry brigade, whatever.
Speaker: and they Everyone else is basically still living in the 50s. And I do think that in some ways Gen X were the... If they're kind of like... counterculture and yeah of the new left and all of these things, where a minority position for the boomers actually, maybe at 25% of the population or something, probably less than that, um it gets sort of defanged, neutered, and that defanging and that neutering allows it to become actually in much more of a majority position for Gen X. By the time you get to Gen X, you actually have a majority of the population
Speaker: That has actually internalized a lot more of these um things that developed in the 60s in a sort of denatured way. and I do think, this is only anecdotal, i I don't know if this plays out in aggregate, but I think about my own parents' generation and like you know thousands of years of Christianity in my family, and it ends with my parents.
Speaker: Basically, it the ends with my parents. ah You know, taken to such a serious extent that my grandparents were literally ordained ministers, and my parents were just sort of like, no, no. Thousands of years of Freemason, not thousands of years, but hundreds years of Freemason. Sam believes it goes back to the Second Temple. can't
Speaker: Hundreds of years of Freemasonry that again just like ends with my parents. So like so religion and so all these like structures actually I think at least I can see in my family don't dissolve. Well, we there are no boobers in my family, weirdly, but They don't dissolve the boomers, they dissolve with Gen X, um who's the first generation to really go, well, what do I want? And that's more like a bad that's not necessarily a bad thing, right? like Those structures can be incredibly constraining, authoritarian, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But like I think perhaps Gen X took us too far in the opposite direction.
Speaker: um that that almost They've just so dismantled almost all of the scaffolding. you know And to to sort of yeah <unk> recall Anton Yeager, Yeager's book, Hyperpolitics, right? If Gen Z are the hyper-political generation, I do think in some ways it was Gen X that really built the the sort of foundation for that by just sort of like going, yeah, I'm not going to be a member of trade union anymore, I'm not going Freemason, I'm not going to be religious, I'm not going to be a member of that club or that party or whatever.
Speaker: And I do think they are in some ways the most radically individualistic and free-floating generation um in history. Which is odd because often it's the boomers that get cast as the selfish generation in a way that Gen X don't.
Speaker: and i Yeah, so maybe you get so far down the line of individualism that it... it doesn't code as selfish anymore because, gosh, I don't know Yeah. I just think Gen X individualism different beast to Boomer individualism. Well, I think these things are always interpreted by their social conditions, right? So it's like the boomers may make the first sort of like larger scale demographic break with these kinds of traditions. Obviously, again, we're speaking in aggregate here. We're speaking about like groups. Individuals can go any number of ways.
Speaker: um But, It is the Xers who I think are are sort of alienated from the failure of that parent promise. So like as we discussed in the season, various points in various movies, Gen X, a lot of those kids are like, well, so our parents did it. you know like ah like We live in the American century.
Speaker: We have a welfare state that's like for the most part pretty functional. But then our parents have decided that Reagan is good. um The welfare fair state is like going away.
Speaker: And our parents are all wearing like business suits. like Again, watch a show like Daria from the 90s and you will see this in spades. The whole conceit of that show is basically, I'm like an elder millennial young Gen Xer.
Speaker: My parents are totally individualistic, but also like corporate chills who are like barely around. And I now need to like seek out a way in the world that is like the fulfillment of their promise.
Speaker: And I think that that is a largely defining decision for Gen X. And it's probably so why that like sincere authenticity feels so important to them, I would wager. Because if your parents betrayed this promise that like you know is supposed to be the promise of American life in the 20th century, which is...
Speaker: you know, we get we get to have house and money and self-actualization and um therapy, and right? But now our parents are like not doing that. Well, we need to figure out what else can I assert that might actually allow me full independence from that set of mistakes. Yes. Just thinking about Daria, it's very obvious that I think that the sort of desire for social mobility or for like kind of like secure the family one, run up the chain to sort of be, you know,
Speaker: have that cumulative effect. Sort of skips Gen X in a weird way. And Dari is a good example of that with the, I can't remember the name of the character, the African-American girl. um He's like super bright. Oh, I don't remember. because i'm thinking I think Jane is her best friend. i can look it up.
Speaker: Yeah, Jane's the art kid. um There's an African-American girl who's high-price. She's got like the classic 1980s, 1990s black bourgeois parents. You know like Dr. Hibbert style from The Simpsons.
Speaker: And her parents want her to go to a a Princeton or Harvard it or whatever. And she could she can get it, and she's clearly good enough for that. It's Jody. um It's Jody. Yeah, and at the end of the last season, she chooses to go to like a... They're called HBU, right? Historically Black Colleges. HBCU, yep. Historically Black Colleges and Universities. So she goes to the the top...
Speaker: The girl one. Spellman. Spellman, yeah. So she uses a Spellman instead. And it's like this it's framed as this yeah like very like yeah ah knowing and authentic rejection of her parents' social climbing for this thing that's like truly authentic. um And yeah, it's interesting that that is sort of made out at that point in time in the sense that I think the Gen Z...
Speaker: ah don't I don't know that that would be framed in quite the same way. I think the tension would be pulled on more in the sense that it would be like, yes, that desire for author-like racial authenticity is a good thing in a United States that is historically a white supremacist or whatever.
Speaker: I think that strand would be there if the program would men now. But it would also be like, I think Gen Z are much more pragmatic and sort of ruthless. ah So she probably would have still ended up going to Harvard. Yeah, or or it's like, I need to do well at Spellman so I can go to Harvard Law or something. You know, like sort of how do i like tie these together? Yeah, there might have been a fudge in there.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. But I think the wholesale rejection... I.e., yeah, like if it was made now, it might be those those two things are sort of having to be balanced out. Whereas for Gen X, it was like very um a very uncomplicated rejection of that, and that was fine. Well, and i will say that's part of, i think that it's why I always come back to punk when I'm talking about Gen X, which, to be clear, again, is not really a Gen X phenomenon, at least not initially, because it's a late 70s, early 80s phenomenon, right? But,
Speaker: they seem to be the first generation for whom it enjoys something like status. Like, again, I think about um how often in the early internet there were discourses about whether or not something was punk rock.
Speaker: Like, I don't know if you remember this. It's like Ben Shapiro, Ben Shapiro being like, conservatism is new rock. And like, punk rock was like the unambiguously good thing, like that everyone had to accept as like, it is good. And listen, I love punk, like as a musical genre, you know, I commonly am listening to, you know, I don't know, Black Flag, Minor Threat, whatever, Minutemen.
Speaker: But it's not... Those are bands. Like what Ben Shapiro is talking about there is not a type of music, right? Like he's talking about some sort of like ideological concept known as punk rock.
Speaker: I remember this from like the early like Catholic internet, where it would be like, oh, there's nothing more punk rock than like not masturbating. You know, like, I don't know. I thought you were going to say like St. Francis Assisi. No, well, but then there's also, Sam, do you know about Death to the World? Yeah.
Speaker: No. Death to the world. that No. It's a... um I mean, I don't want to get too into this. It's... I'll put it this way. It is a movement where an ex-punk in California basically became orthodox and shacked up with Seraphim Rose and other crazy right-wing Russian guys and published punk-style zines about how like the most punk thing you could do is become like a hero monk and... ah you know like pray for the czars to be resurrected on the last day. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because I know a Gen X academic who is literally currently working on like a valorizing edited collection or book on Death to the World.
Speaker: because like he is an Orthodox convert who's 52 years old. And I would love to argue with him about this, but like I know I would never get anywhere because for that kind of Gen X guy, nothing could be cooler than the idea that like Orthodox Christianity and punk rock are the same thing. Literally, it's it literally like that is like the Neoplatonic monad for that kind of guy, to be able to have those two things coincide. Even though it's like if you scratch the surface for a second, it's like,
Speaker: ah Let's just say a lot of bad stuff that, um you know, not to attempt to make the Catholic Church look good, but let's just say some of those guys were doing some bad things. Might want to look into it. Father Herman specifically co-founded the monastery with Sarah from Rose. Bad man.
Speaker: Anyway, my point is that it's, the punk rock attains that like identity of individualization and like in self-actualization that gets applied to everything. And so, of course, the Dirty Girls are going to be punks and Kamala supporters that many years later because punk is just a word for what is unambiguously good.
Speaker: and it's It's the Aristotelian good, yeah. Or the platonic good. Yeah. Transmorgrified into the early 20th century. I'm just looking up this guy, Serafin Rose. I'm going have to say that. Oh, you don't. Yeah. His buddy, Father Herman, got up to some bad things that you can read about on your own. I'm just saying, I'm looking at the website. It's pretty cool. Pretty cool aesthetics. But... I know what you mean. I mean, like, there's a guy called Paul Kingsnorth, who I probably feel less strongly in the negative way about than you do about this. This guy started from Rose. Paul Kingsnorth, he's a good writer.
Speaker: um So 1972 is the classic Genexa. And he was a, you know, and still is a very strong sort of um conservationist, environmentalist, environmental activist. But he's, yeah, like, converted to, I think, Bulgarian orthodoxy or something. After like five years of like trying to embrace like neopaganism and just like not really finding that it was doing enough for him.
Speaker: I do have to point out on his Wikipedia page, it calls his dad a passionate Thatcherite, which is just a very funny description for like anyone. Like, oh, my dad, yeah he was a passionate Thatcherite. And like Kings North is very much like a kind of post-liberal communitarian environmentalist. So...
Speaker: There you go, right? like it's Again, like we we were talking about genetics and the aggregate as being super individualistic, but actually some of them, you know especially if you have a super thatch right dad, you can go in different directions um to to do weird things like this guy.
Speaker: It's about rebelling against your parents. I mean, that's a major... We we kind of skirted around it because of how much like received wisdom it is. but that like so much of Gen X's self-conception is just, how do I make my parents mad? Which admittedly is like classic teenage move, but I don't think you can ignore it. And the other thing that we've never brought up, because I do think this is a little cheap, like I'm i'm just not a,
Speaker: I don't mean to out myself as like not a materialist because I do consider myself a materialist in sort of a different sense. But people love being like, oh, it's the lead paint. Everything wrong with Gen X is just because... And like I'm sure that there is a degree of truth to that, but I just...
Speaker: I'm always just a little suspicious of the overly biological explanation for action. It's one of the reasons I've not watched A Field in England, which I like Ben Wheatley. It's probably an excellent movie, but I just get mad whenever anything historical is just like, oh, it's because they ate mushrooms. And I'm like, give might like get give them some agency. Jesus Christ, man. That's a very Gen X retorted itself, isn't it? It's like the Iraq war. It's just all about the oil, man.
Speaker: It's just the oil. And I'm not saying they were wrong, right? Like I did people on the opposite end who were like, no, it's about freedom and democracy and nation building, but also full of shit. And like the people who are like, it's all about the oil man are less full of shit than the people who are like, it's about freedom of and democracy. that's true.
Speaker: But it's, I think, a very, yeah, um Gen X sort of retort, isn't it? to To sort of reduce everything to a sort of very materialistic take like that. Which is, you know, I might prefer over the kind of airy-fairy, sort of rootless, disconnected cultural discourse of some millennials. Oh, yeah. That predominated in the But it's, you know, I think like that Gen X cynicism of like, it's just oil by the oil, man. Like, it's annoying, but it's kind of better than, you know, I knew people, very woke, sort of like 27, 28-year-olds, so kind of like millennials now, who, you know,
Speaker: you just call anything like a a movement for democracy. And this is, you know, like people who are like any sort of like anti-Castro movement in Cuba, they'll be like straight on board with it.
Speaker: And I'm not saying I'm pro-Castro, obviously. But like, there's just no like cynical moat around. like and like They're just like, oh, these are good guys because I feel good.
Speaker: I'm not saying that I wouldn't support i like a a democracy movement in in Cuba or Venezuela. I'm just saying that like there are certain millennials who lack any like kind of um antibodies to be like, well, we should maybe look into this and, you is there a CIA involvement in it? Again, like I'm not saying that every single opposition movement to a left-wing government is illegitimate because they're not.
Speaker: um That's obviously not my position. I'm just saying that there is, I think, something in the millennial system of kind of like... Like Kony 2012. Do you remember Kony? Oh, hell yes. all Right, this is what I'm saying, right? Like, I remember like my brother being like...
Speaker: yeah he must have been so young, like nine years old. I was about 14 and he was like, there's this guy, Coney, we've got to take him out. And I was like, oh my God. I was just like, well, there's this thing like, you know, like a history of Western intervention in Africa that hasn't gone so well. And like, maybe, and like, it seems like the guys who are running this are like Christian evangelicals. yeah Maybe we should, you I'm not saying Coney's a good guy. He's not, but like, maybe we should be a bit more cynical about this.
Speaker: And um yeah, I think Gen X, They annoy me, but that that cynicism is a useful tool. um You know, either when Russia invaded Ukraine and a girl I knew who was very involved in BLM, like rushed out to like do charity work for this Ukrainian organization, which turned out to be linked to the Azov-Fatariah. It's just that's kind of, yeah, it's just kind of like maybe check like but the millennial sort of thing of like good politics is the thing that makes you feel good.
Speaker: Do you know what mean? As a shorthand? Like, if it makes me feel good, it's good politics. And I'm like, well, maybe you need to feel bad. i hate to hand it to Gen X, but you do have to in some ways. Like, we started this little hour or whatever by kind of making fun of Tom Morello to a certain extent. But like, some of those Gen X charities, like Food Not Bombs, are like more legitimate than like an Azov-backed, like, you know, you Ukrainian thing, you know?
Speaker: Because I do think that the Gen X skepticism about structure, like about, like, there is like an intrinsic anarchism to the kind of Gen X left that is just kind of inescapable, right?
Speaker: And it might not always call itself anarchism, but it, you know, very often functionally is, right? Like, when you watch Fresh Kill, you're not like, oh, this this is a Leninist film, you know like yeah like if No, know and and I think that I don't like that anarchism. ah As Lenin said, it's ah childish. what's What's the quote? A childish affliction or something? Or is that about council feminists? Well, yeah, I'm looking at a food, not bombs thing that is literally a Warhol banana on top of a tank that says food, not bombs. Government spend billions in weapons while people starve. like
Speaker: But the thing is, as goofy as that is, and as stupid as all of that is, like they're doing more important work than buying, i don't know, AK-47s for a guy in right sector or whatever. you know Not that that's what the charity was doing. But like no I approve of Food Not Bombs more than I approve of that.
Speaker: Yes. But what I'm saying, I think i it's like... um there's This a critique that runs through hyperpolitics, but also Vincent Bevan's If We Burn, right? is that the I think Gen X kind of know that they have this libertarian streak, this anarchistic, anti-organisational streak.
Speaker: And no matter what you think of that, whether it's good or bad, I generally think it's bad, they at least kind of know that that's there and that's kind of part of the orientation. Whereas when you get to the millennials and you get to the big millennial movements of...
Speaker: starting in 2010 to the Arab Spring. um It's a big one, obviously. Euromaidan in Ukraine, Occupy Wall Street, ah the student tuition to the protests in the UK 2010. Podemos, what was that called in Spain? it was m Podemos, yeah.
Speaker: No, but they had a a street movement before, which was called, ah it was like the Pissed Off or something. And it wasn't, the, someone will have to write in and tell us what the street movement in Spain was called. Beppe Grillo's five-star movement ah in, well, I think that's unfair to them because they did actually end up forming a party.
Speaker: And Podemos, I think it's actually sort unfair onto the Spanish movement there because they did also end up forming a party. So maybe it's more of an anglic ah Anglophone problem than an Arab problem, weirdly. But what I'm saying is that the critique of like,
Speaker: that there was this kind of horizontalism, this prefiguration. Well, we've got to manifest a society that we want in 200 years' time now, so we couldn't possibly have any structures or like build a party or anything like that.
Speaker: The DSA's refusal to actually ever launch a proper party is quite millennial in my opinion. Well, but they're doing like Trotskyist entryism of the like momentum variety or whatever, which... Yeah, which is very Gen X and millennial to me. Which is very funny. I just have to say, when Burnham came to power, he said that his idol was Neil Kinnick, which I think is very funny since it wasn't his whole thing being like, we got to get these Trotskyites out of the party. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: But I think you're onto something there, Sam, and that is also a legacy of this thing with the parents. Because at the end of the day, like their parents tried Maoism, their parents tried like maybe not Soviet communism, but a very Marx-inflected version of what it means to be the political left. And as we saw with Goodbye Lenin, on the eastern but in the Eastern Bloc, that can lead to a certain degree of nostalgia, right? But outside of the Eastern Bloc, all of that stuff had been thoroughly demonized um you know by literally everybody left and right. you know Unless you're, again, one of these like guys who's literally still in the CPUSA in the 80s, which is like there aren't that many of those guys. You're like the last Peruvian holdout of The Shining Path. Yeah, exactly. And the Shining Path not doing many favors for the image of that movement, right? Nice. So they had to get something else. And I think that tied in very well with their with that kind of individualism that was already in place. Because then they could go for the horizontalist thing. And even on the right, you see this to an extent. like
Speaker: The Gen X conservatives... are and And there aren't that many of them that are that famous. It seems like it almost skipped the Xers on the conservative end of things. like They went from boomer to millennial. But they do tend to be these very like...
Speaker: libertarian kind of guys. There's a reason that Ron Paul attained such fame at the moment when like millennials were just becoming old enough to vote basically, like or a little bit after that. Yeah. Or yeah, at that point, millennials could vote for a while if they were the oldest, oldest.
Speaker: But when like Gen X is really coming into its own politically, right? um Where it's like, oh, you can love weed and think we should end the Fed? Holy shit. like This rocks, you know?
Speaker: I want transsexuals to defend their weed farms of AK-47s. That is a very 2012 mode of thinking in just about every conceivable way. yeah Yes, and it's interesting that on the right, it's also been in the US, less so in Europe. I think the the kind of Gen X, millennial, populist right have had to do entryism and yeah didn't build their own party.
Speaker: and They just took over the Republican Party in the US. It's an interesting phenomenon. yeah ah Yeah, and it's weird that that hasn't played it out so much um in the uk in the UK and Europe, where they very much are building their own parties. So maybe maybe the populist right, gen x the Gen X and millennial populist right, are crypto-Leninists in that sense, I don't know.
Speaker: But i I do, to return to, like, there's no way that this wrap-up could ever, like, actually attempt to cover what was, at the like, 50 episodes or something insane. Like, you know, there's no there's no way we could actually do that. I should just quickly say that fight club ah Fight Club is a good rebuttal to the the that accusation that Gen Xs are against organization, right? Yeah.
Speaker: Because that's a pure Leninist sect. The Dirt Knights. Yeah. the yeah ah Lenin, ah Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Dirt and Thought, basically. but i um I do think, you know, if I attempt to answer the question we set out for, which, again, is not actually answerable by a podcast of 50 episodes with like an hour-long recap, I do think the core here that that I've come away with is that you can't get away from...
Speaker: the failure of the 60s, the failure of the Soviet Union, Reaganism, um and the kinds of discourses about individuality and authenticity that those generate, and specifically the way in which certain cultural phenomena of the late boomer period like punk,
Speaker: end up capturing the imagination of these kids who like left alone by their parents who then need to discover like a mode of action in the world. And the problem is, a lot of that stuff is not very woke. So in some cases, there's kind of, I think, like a Gen X bifurcation where like a guy who in 2008 was probably like a libertarian who was cool with like gay marriage and you know probably even maybe voted for like Barack Obama because he's not self-conceiving as a racist,
Speaker: By the time it's like 2017 he's, I don't know, being asked to like not make a joke that's like, well, I gave AIDS to Greta Thunberg. When that becomes like an... own I guess she wasn't around in 2016, but you get what I'm saying.
Speaker: like you know This kind of like early internet humor that was very like vulgar and stupid and kind of... you know the It was all about just... kind like just weird, like kind of punching down a lot of the time. If you watch like any of these comedies from like 2005, you'll know what I'm talking about.
Speaker: Like once they got told they couldn't do that, they just, some of them I think went insane, but for reasons that are kind of like internally consistent to what, like they were then able to be like, no, but it is punk rock to be willing to attack anybody. And they're not wrong because if you go back and watch Penelope Spiros' documentary, The Decline of Western Civilization,
Speaker: part one, they're doing Nazi symbolism. They're doing whatever pisses people off. You know, like, it is at that stage divorced from a real politics of any kind. Yeah, and we do seem to be in this endless, ti like, sort of tiring, dialectic back and forth between, somewhat between generations of kind of know Gen X being kind of punk rock, pro-offense, sort of anti-PC cult. And again, this is so simplified because obviously, actually, there was a big strain of Gen X PC in the late 90s Academy.
Speaker: um I mean, literally, Philip Roth wrote an entire novel complaining about how woke Gen X was. But also, just briefly, this is where you can also think about um the Dirty Girls kids. Because like yeah they were conceiving of themselves as like feminist punks. And it's not that they ever stopped being like feminist in that sense. It just got channeled into Kamala Harris. Right? Like that's...
Speaker: yeah And I do think there's a kind of of tireless sort of the kind of reactions and counter-reactions that might have taken 50, 60 years in the 90s. So you have the romantic counter-reaction to enlightenment, right? But that takes 100 years to sort of really manifest itself.
Speaker: Whereas it does seem now that it's it's sort of like we have these like micro sort of cycles, which last like 10 years, 20 years. And and it's tiring in the sense that, yeah, obviously Gen X. And again, like I said, we're talking broad aggregates because obviously there are exceptions to the rule.
Speaker: But that if Gen X was a generation of kind of punky, kinder, free-speechy, say-anything, and then the millennials would see just tight-ass, puritanical, you know of humorless, grey blobs, and then Gen Z have returned to a more ironic, irisaturated piercing of millennials. The veil. Yeah, the veil, sure. Why not that? The theory of justice. really hate the theory of justice by John Rawls. The veil of ignorance.
Speaker: Yeah. ah and no No, but it did it's it's just, I just find all of it to be sort of tiring and the cycles have become so quick and so iterative that I'm just incredibly bored by the whole thing.
Speaker: Well, I do want to just touch on two other quick things that are interrelated and just to make explicit. I think Gen X also gives us, for reasons we've discussed before, the rise of like the man-child as a reasonable category of being, part of which is about a valorization of the individual, part of which is about a breakdown in the economy, part of which is just about that Gen X is like almost directly responsible for the infusion of like comic books into popular culture as like a thing that...
Speaker: could be really um financially successful. It's like the superhero comes back in the 90s with the Tim Burton Batman movies, with The Crow, with ah The Punisher, I think, as a movie in the 90s, Judge Dredd as a movie in the 90s, Demolition Man. Obviously, we watched Army of Darkness, which is very much in the vein of this sort of cartoonishness.
Speaker: um And on the other hand, it gives us the rise of the like sci-fi soy guys. Joss Whedon is born in 1964, and he is obviously reared on these like comics and things that are not really... like pop cultural. Like, if you think about, like, the cool comics of the 60s, it's R. Crumb. These are, like, horrific, you know, sort of, like, sexually explicit, like, um bizarre things that are genuinely the outgrowth of a disturbed imagination. Whereas, by the time we're at Gen X, it, and God, I love some of these things, like The Simpsons, it's this valorization of, kind of, like, the slacker stereotype that is itself another,
Speaker: another way of putting forth that kind of punkish individuality of being the Big Lebowski. It's a kind of anti-hierarchy, right? I do remember a period when I was maybe 10 to 14 when Gen X were in the Ascendant where there was a strong discourse like, well, graphic novels are you know just as ah literary and important as vanity. That's still happening. ah yeah It's still happening.
Speaker: I just feel like I don't have those guys anymore, so I don't have to deal with it. But yeah, I remember being urged to like read Watchmen and like V for Vendetta, which again, like as a 14-year-old boy, are fun things to read, but...
Speaker: and they're good. It's nothing against them. It's just like also grow up. It's just like that can't be the only thing in your palate, right? Yeah. In your diet. Make it part of the feast. Make part of the feast. Not one thing. It's an hors d'oeuvre to be had once a year rather than regular. It's like drinking. If you never drink water and you're drinking Coca-Cola every single day, that's bad for you.
Speaker: Well, and and you know what's funny is this fits into... um the internet guys as I mentioned earlier, like the Nostalgia Critic or um ah what's the other guy? The Angry Video Game Nerd. These kinds of guys.
Speaker: The Last True Geek, I think, was another one of these guys. you know like Who their whole thing was like, no, I very openly and self-professedly am like going to establish myself as like an expert from within the world of B-tier entertainment. like i'm On my account, you are not going to hear about, i don't know, like what's a what's an art house. You're not going to find out about Repulsion on my channel. Maybe even Repulsion would be Beau Travai. I'm not going to talk about Beau Travai on this account, but i am going to tell you about every single fucking arc in every single Superman comic you can imagine Or I'm going to talk to you about every 80s, like, kind of crappy movie that has been valorized by my generation that you can imagine, all of which have the most, like, storybook plots imaginable.
Speaker: And that became, like, a culturally salient discourse for, like, 10 years, which is crazy. Yeah. Like, that was a guy. And that's a result of this man-child stuff.
Speaker: and as sort of anti-snobbery politics that Gen X has, right? um That is in its own way, in a sort of circular fashion, its own snobbery? Yes, very much.
Speaker: yeah Yeah, like my grandparents' generation had like Proust on the bookshelves and Shakespeare and Walter Scott and Michael, don't know, Harold Pinter. and I did have very cultural grandparents, but you know, like, and my parents like...
Speaker: Sorry, that's so mean, but it is true. Like, we're like, oh, I want to read paula Paulo Coelho, you know? though Don't even fucking get me started on him. Don't even introduce that name into this podcast. And I think it was like a rebellion, like, almost like that.
Speaker: I guess like being one generation removed from the silent generation, my grandparents' generation, that... what it must have felt like as a 14 year old Gen Xer to grow up in a house where like, you know, Brahms was on the radio constantly, you know, ah Chopin was on the radio constantly, you know, complete works for Shakespeare available to you. um That this was sort of culture of the weight of all of that tradition could feel oppressive.
Speaker: and I think maybe the recuperation of some of that stuff by younger generations. and i don't know whether it's oversold, right? like And whether it's self-selection mechanism ah that your magazines sort of talk about Gen z converting to Catholicism and you know getting really into Dostoevsky or whatever.
Speaker: Whether that is wishful thinking on the part of journalists to recover that stuff that's been lost in a Gen X anti-snobbery-snobbery dynamic, or whether there is a real movement to, I think, reverse quite a lot of this damage that Gen X did around certain things, like association.
Speaker: ah you know that there seems to be more of a desire to sort of I mean you're actually someone i think about a lot Chase who you're a big joiner in it you know you're an associational man i I don't feel like one, but I appreciate that. Oh, my God. I feel like you're youre you're the... The most joined man on earth. You're a joiner, isn't man? like We won't reveal all of Chase's multiple organizations. I feel like Abe Simpson. heres I'm a communist. I'm the president of the Gay and Lesbian Association. I'm a Republican. I'm a freebie. Oh, yes, and I'm a stonecutter.
Speaker: I do feel like that's you sometimes. I appreciate that. i do I want to talk about one last kind of Gen X guy, and then i I have to go because my job actually calls. I'm already almost 15 minutes late to my other call.
Speaker: You're also, just quickly, you're a wife guy as well, which I feel like is very anti-Gen X. That is, well, and there's a lot to unpack there about like boomer psychology around like wife comedy that I think, you know, might ah yeah might have a lot to do with that. But I was just going to say that there is a kind of guy, and ah Sam, you might know these guys are not, because I think if you're not If you're not involved in like Christian circles of one kind or another, or you don't watch those kinds of people, then this could miss you.
Speaker: But there is a kind of like Gen X Christian guy. i of course, know the Catholic variant, but there are many variants of this. Rod Dreher is probably the most famous. like Our listeners would probably... know yeah. Yeah, a Gen X Catholic turned to Orthodox. These are guys who are kind of like fighting within their own generation against what Sam is talking about.
Speaker: and so are trying to be communitarian but are very bad at it because they're so Gen X. And so their only way of doing it is they genuinely seem to believe that like every single person should only read C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, and like a couple of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Bellic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they are they're very into like pipes and sort of like...
Speaker: and And they've passed this on to millennials and stuff. like It's not just Gen X, but I think they're the progenitor of this type. Yes. and like oh and In terms of decent authors, they'll allow in maybe if they're like more developed, like Evil and Juan, Graham Greene. Those are the actually like good. I mean, i like Tolkien, so whatever. But like those are the good authors they'll allow in. But like genuinely, they are Harry Potter people. like Read another book.
Speaker: Like, I'm sorry, read another book. Yes, it's like Giorgio Maloney being obsessed with Tolkien. Well, although that's, the Italians have a very weird relationship to Tolkien that is, I think, its own, yeah, bizarre thing.
Speaker: I just wanted to highlight those guys because I think within these generations, you see rebellions against the dominant type. And I do think the sort of like guys who love to read Wendell Berry and... um Yeah, i mean, you had the old fogey movement in Oxford in the 80s as well, which was... And then the photography of Daffod Jones, that kind of stuff, which if you listen, as you go look up Daffod Jones and his photography um of Oxford in the 80s, yeah, there was definitely a Gen X group who were...
Speaker: really trying to not do the kind of integrate any of the values of like singles. yeah They were like, let's try and get as far away from the universe of singles as possible. Well, Whit Stillman and Metropolitan. like That would be the the cinematic, I think, equivalent here, you know which we didn't watch for this season, but I think is a quite well-known film. And very funnily, very popular, maybe not so much with the um kind of tweed guys I just mentioned, but with the millennial generation beneath them, where like,
Speaker: a little bit more able to think outside this box of like, there are eight authors you can read if you're a Christian. and it's important because I think they also think of themselves as very punk rock. They're kind of the equivalent of the like, death to the world guys I talked about earlier, but within a different religious tradition. Yeah. yeah Well, i I'll leave it off and say that the first time I had drinks with my Cambridge postgraduate cohort in like 2019, Metropolitan came up within about the first five minutes and everyone had seen it.
Speaker: there go There it is. What I will say for now is that is, formally speaking, anyway, a wrap-up for Gen X. We have something, I think, quite exciting in the pipeline for our um sort of in-between this and the next season. something that yeah i'm subjecting I'm subjecting Chase to the Boomer epic of Gilgamesh, that's how i' described it. But it's something I've wanted to actually watch for like most of my life. so this kind of um Well, it's going to take most your life to watch it.
Speaker: And you know what? i Honestly, I can't wait to come home from a long day at work and watch like the the British 1950s play out. That's going to be good. In a four-hour film eight times. But I do think it's going to do a it's going to act as an interesting um kind of reflection on the Gen X season and on like the end of history as a theme very broadly. um And i'm I'm pretty stoked. So I just want to thank...
Speaker: everybody for listening in on this season. ah We know that the wrap-up is, you know, again, to some extent inadequate, but we hope it's clarified some of the reasoning and thoughts behind all this. I think we should we should end with maybe... trace what's ah what's your favorite film of the season?
Speaker: oh Oh, boy, that's tough. Yeah, um like in terms of for actual like in terms of new movies I got to watch or just in terms of ah the general sense of of things I enjoyed?
Speaker: I think you can pick two. You can pick one that maybe was like formerly you would have gone, if I was watching this outside of the season, I'd have hated it, but it was interesting as like an exercise in one film you actually generally liked. So... I would say... i will give... For a movie I was introduced to via this that I really enjoyed, I would say Brother, which you brought to for the the Russian movie. I very, very much enjoyed that. I think it is one of those few movies that is both like a phenomenal social exploration, but also just like fun to watch. like It's in no way boring.
Speaker: um It really captures the time. I mean, I think the easy grab for movies that we watch that... um I can't think of all of them, but some of the ones that come to mind for like, I would rather drive a nail into my head than have to watch these again. Singles rose like a little bit in my estimation, but remains a movie that I do not particularly love and find very, very annoying. And then also a movie like that, that spiritually we watched this season, even though we didn't technically watch it, is Reality Bites. that like I think i would rather like I would rather continue to not be able to walk properly for like a month than have to watch Reality Bites once.
Speaker: yeah The great black shadow behind behind the season. Exactly. It's the absent cause for the whole season. What about you Um... I think in terms of films, I wouldn't have watched otherwise and probably wouldn't have enjoyed outside of the confines and structure of the season, but still like appreciated having got the chance to watch Freddy Got Fingered. i wouldn't i would I don't think I'd have come across that if if it hadn't been for this. um It's fun.
Speaker: Yeah, the father-son relationship in it is still, I think, one of the strongest elements of the film. I just keep thinking thing about keep thinking about the proud...
Speaker: proud And as someone who, like I think, in the back of his head worries sometimes that he's going to turn into... I can't remember the name of the main character in it. It's not Freddy, obviously. Gordon. Gord.
Speaker: Yes. Who often wonders whether... I think all men should, at some point in their in their life, stop and think, gosh, am I turning into Gordon? Yeah, it's a good film in that sense. It's got a kind of trans-historical element to it that's not specific to Gen X in the sense of just like... i think as a man in your late 20s, early 30s, being like, oh, Jesus Christ.
Speaker: ah how do I like sort of properly pull myself into adulthood? I think that's just an interesting sort of yeah thing to think about. And then in terms of films that I just like fell on loved, ah actually Fresh Kill. I'll say Fresh killll but Kill that sort of ticks off both of them in the sense that don't think I would have ever seen it if it hadn't been for doing this.
Speaker: I wasn't massively enamoured of your description it. um And then when I watched it, actually came to sort of yeah i really enjoy it as a kind of very odd piece of kind of Gen X sort of what that video art.
Speaker: Well, what's the one you hated? Oh, what do I hate? Oh, Singles. Well, you've already said Singles, but i'm sorry. Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I think, for you, or 16 Candles. Yeah, Fast Times Ridgemont High, actually. I i i quite like 16 Candles. Oh, right, right, right. I didn't like love it, but it I thought it was it was good. um Yeah, Fast Times, because, and then anything with Cameron Crowe's hands on it.
Speaker: LAUGHTER He's into that fucking vampire in Jake. He really is like the recurring villain of this season because he comes up at fast times, singles.
Speaker: I think the reason I hated it so much was that i I'm not like, there are lots of like high school movies. I don't like particularly enjoy watching high school movies now, but um yeah, i've did with some of them were very important to me as a kind of late teen, early twenties person.
Speaker: um And films like Dazed and Confused, which obviously is set in the 60s, but it's kind of a Gen X film in the sense that it came out in the ninety s you know, it was really impactful on me. And um Rules of Attraction, the Brett Easton Ellis one about Bennington College, was very sort of important to me as a sort of 20-year-old. And I just found this film to be incredibly diffuse. I was sort of sitting there the entire time going so what? like what? and so what? what's the point? yeah and I love so I love Skins you know as a teenager as well um so I don't think I'm a immune to the the lure of this kind of film but I just it felt I don't know like yeah the stakes are too low
Speaker: I do remember you saying that at the time, um that it kind of wasn't going anywhere. But that you know that's that's the mad the crow touch, as we call it. ah With that, I think we can officially close the Gen X season, as I have another one of my associations to jump on to.
Speaker: I give my my most earnest and sincere thanks to our listeners ah for putting up with us, for listening, for dealing with this little hiatus that we're coming off of, and just for being there. We encourage you to get involved, comment, email us at deathphotopod at gmail.com.
Speaker: Subscribe, ah either at paid or for free at patreon.com slash deathphotopod. And generally, just let us know how you're liking the episodes, blah, blah. blah um Yeah. Yeah. With that...
Speaker: We bid you adieu. Bye-bye.
