a rough draft of the "millennial canon"

working on my mac!!!!!!!!

I’ve been writing (gag) a screenplay (double gag) about my senior year of high school (I know!!! the worst) and thinking about the movies that inspired/defined/reflected my generation.

As a kid / teen, I was aware of some quintessentially Gen X movies that weren’t quite my thing but could’ve been if you took fifteen years off my birthday. I appreciated but maybe never fully “got” Reality Bites, Ghost World and Donnie Darko because, I suspected, I didn’t grow up watching old-school MTV. I came to enjoy Scream and Boyz N The Hood and Party Girl and Swingers and High Fidelity, but I was always aware there was a pre-WiFi maturity there I’d never really reach. My age is also an excellent excuse for why I laugh at but can’t quote Wayne’s World or Bill and Ted, why I have no particular opinion on Fight Club, and why I’ve basically ignored the entire filmography of Kevin Smith.

Sometimes a movie can illuminate a cultural moment for future generations: There’s a part in Best In Show where Parker Posey and her character’s husband describe meeting one another after locking eyes from two Starbuckses situated across the street from one another, and then how they buy everything from catalogs, and that scene more than anything else explained to me the Gap-ification of the 90s. “Working on my Mac!”

Not every movie works like this. The Breakfast Club is archetypal; it could take place whenever.

Anyway, I’m trying to figure out the Millennial Canon. Movies that in some way capture the born-from-81-to-96 experience or outlook. It has to do with a vague awareness of life before 9/11 and a childhood offline followed by an adolescence online, and maybe also the recession. It’s not necessarily work made by millennials (though Girls is The Millennial TV Show and that’s just that, apologiez Pen15) — in fact, now that directors my age are a dime a dozen, our sensibility is oversaturated and unspecific. A true Millennial movie is from someone who can see us clearly…from the outside. The way Eighth Grade (and maybe everything Bo Burnham’s been up to lately?) gives us our first inkling of The Gen Z Problem. He’s one of Us, looking at Them. (Depending on how AI goes, Spike Jonze’s Her might be the first Gen Alpha flick, we shall see)

The thought experiment first occurred to me at work, when a cover of “Creep” came on and a co-worker (who is nineteen and perfectly culturally literate for her age) admitted that when she first saw the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie (a franchise usually soundtracked by the best of the Boomers), she thought the song was written for the movie. A friend had to tell her it was by Radiohead. Not a huge oversight; I didn’t grow up on Radiohead, either. But everyone in my generation who didn’t know the original heard a kids choir cover in theaters not while watching GotG but in the trailer for The Social Network. So memorable a trailer that now, there’s this:

@caminorbitWe covered the trailer. #thesocialnetwork

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And also this.

The Social Network is The Millennial Movie. I don’t need to explain— watch it again if you don’t believe me.

As for the rest of the canon…if you Google it, you’ll get lists that are, I think, unevenly insightful. Most of them include The Social Network, Juno, Superbad and Garden State, which are all valid answers for the assignment. American Pie added “MILF” to the lexicon and made “one time at band camp” a thing, but to what extent it influenced my generation’s views on sex is something I just can’t say. I do think 500 Days of Summer temporarily rewired the romantic part of our brains more than we’d all care to admit.

But too many writers confuse “popular” with “particular.” Clueless is a comedy of manners and an adaptation of an Austen novel; it’s not Millennial; it’s for everyone. Same with Titanic — it may have come out in 1998, but it would have worked whenever. For me, Mean Girls is a wait and see. The Broadway musical and now the movie musical prove that the title has staying power, but given how mediocre the reception to both has been, I wonder if it’s best served as a nostalgia artifact.

A surprising number of articles tag the Twilight, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies as Millennial. First of all, Lord of the Rings is about World War One. Yes, a lot of people saw it, but if that’s the metric, why not throw in Pirates of the Caribbean? The original seven Harry Potter books were a Moment (captured by two entries you’ll see later on), but the franchise at large is now Monoculture, like the Beatles or A Christmas Carol. Twilight…every ten years we get a big monster movie and a vampire novel, but the emo soundtracks so hold a special place in the Millennial heart. So, sure. Here’s what I’ll posit: if you’re looking for The Most Millennial Blockbuster Saga, I’m almost certain it’s The Hunger Games.

Many seem to think The Dark Knight was particularly resonant for my generation. Sadly, it is, but not for the reasons you may think. Batman gonna Batman (if you wanna get into the fanboy obsession with taking superhero movies seriously, it obviously started with Watchmen), but death by overdose (Heath Ledger) and mass shooting (Aurora, Colorado) are all too familiar for my peer group.

I have a few ideas of my own! Keeping in mind that I, like everyone else, absorb art through the prism of my own experience, and this list is very white and female.

Boyhood

Harry Potter midnight release parties! Riding his bike to “Soulja Boy!”

Kids born after ‘10 will be able to recreate this on their own from footage found on their parents’ phones, but for this kid, born in ‘94, we needed Linklater.

The Devil Wears Prada

Once again, new Harry Potter book as plot point! Legally Blonde, Miss Congeniality and 13 Going on 30 may have whetted our appetites for the feel-good career girl empowerment trend that would morph into the Girl Boss and its eventual reckoning, but the actual experience of being a Millennial in the job market was predicted by Anne Hathaway’s Andie Sachs: Work your ass off for no money but the promise of a brighter future that doesn’t ever seem to materialize, report to overpaid bosses who find you overly sensitive for wanting a work-life balance, hiring and firing decisions are made seemingly at random, earnestness is sneered at but a “rock star” work ethic is expected, no one takes you seriously but you’re expected to be grateful anyway because you are, never forget, always replaceable, and in conclusion, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

Though I do think we need a quasi-sequel that takes place after publishing collapsed and discretionary budgets disappeared.

Miss Americana

In 2008, Nora Ephron wrote for The Huffington Post:

I'm a woman of a certain age, and this means that part of the pie that passes for my brain contains a large slice called Hillary. I've been thinking about her in a fairly pathological way ever since 1992 and dreaming about her as well. She is me, and then again she's not. I used to love her and I no longer do, but unlike what usually happens when love dies, I still think about her far too much…I'm hooked on Hillary and on the Rorschach process that defines my relationship with her: she does something, I spend far too much time thinking about it, I superimpose my life and my choices onto hers, I decide how I feel about what she's done, I bore friends witless with my theories, and then, instead of moving on, I'm confronted with yet another episode of her behavior and am forced to devote more hours to developing new theories about her behavior. I don't have time for this.

My friend Liz P introduced me to this quote and the idea that our Hillary Clinton is Taylor Swift. So, sorry not sorry I write about her (Taylor, not Liz P…though they’re both important to me) a lot.

There are a number of movies about what being online does to a person. Not Okay and Ingrid Goes West are both solid satires about The Instagram Problem. But in Miss Americana, online-driven character and career assassination collides directly with questions of feminism…during the aftermath of the 2016 election. Pure Millennialimania.

The Bling Ring

Anyone who says Emma Watson can’t act should try delivering the line “your butt looks awesome in those jeans” with half her conviction. Sofia Coppola’s first comedy, and first work shot on digital, captures the early 2000s not just in spirit but in mood: lazily superficial, entitled and bored. Based on the book by Nancy Jo Sales, this movie blah blah YOU KNOW WHAT IT’S ABOUT.

Teens will always be teens, and no amount of video games or Facebooks will distract them from their aims: getting high and doing crime. Once upon a time, the Manson acolytes prowled through Hollywood on a murder spree. Decades later, is a little shoplifting so bad? The teens are under-parented but not abused, their targets innocent but privileged. It’s not like Paris Hilton isn’t rich anymore. It’s a Greek tragedy, really. These kids covet luxury, which they get at the expense of their futures, and idolize the famous, which they then become, at great cost.

Consider that The Bling Ring unfolded against the backdrop of the 2008 financial kerfuffle; across the country at almost the exact same time, there was another Girl Crime Gang that became a movie: Hustlers (it’s soOoOo good). But The Bling Ring is also about a specific moment in the history of LA nightlife, the reality TV-produced boom of quasi-celebs.

And it has one of the best posters of all time.

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Honorary Mentions: the second sexual awakenings triggered by Atonement and Call Me By Your Name, post-grad dilly-dallying in Tiny Furniture and Frances Ha, Cameron Diaz’s butt-centric dancing in Charlie’s Angels which, not Cam’s fault, gave an entire generation of men a very unrealistic expectation of how goofy, childlike and carefree a model-hot woman should be.

Any suggestions, drop em in the comments.

Millennially,

Lizzie

PS- currently obsessed with the love affair between Dave Grohl and ABBA. Dave Grohl says ABBA rocks. You think you have better taste in music than Dave Grohl? Fuck off.