I’m well aware that we GenXers seem to complain a bit, yet I think we have reason to. We’re truly stuck in the middle: younger people mistakenly call us Boomers, and the Boomers themselves often look down on us as slackers or the “first generation that didn’t do better than their parents”. What’s worse is that in the nineties we had to endure television and film depictions of us that perpetuated these stereotypes.
Well, maybe not all movies. There were two movies in particular that could be tagged as GenX touchstones, namely Singles from 1991 and Reality Bites, released in 1994. One flick was rather sympathetic to the plight of our demographic while the other seemed to be a bit like a Boomer’s interpretation of “what these kids want.” Oddly enough, the “bad guy” in one film drove a car very similar to the one the “good guy” did in the other. Go figure.
I liked Reality Bites at the time, but in retrospect the characters are a bit insufferable. The writers have pegged GenXers as having a pervasive need to “not sell out” in the film to the evil people that want money cash and the trappings of it. Winona Ryder’s leading lady is even annoyed that she is gifted her dad’s flashy old car upon graduation: a dope-ass early E23 7 series on black Ronals. She’ll get little sympathy from us Autopians:
The ”good guy” in the film, played by Ethan Hawke, is kind of a please-punch-him-in-the-face too-cool-for-school asshole by any measure. Naturally, you’re supposed to root for him and not the employed Ben Stiller character trying to gain Winona’s affection. This so-called “bad guy” is an entertainment exec that seems like a pretty damn nice bloke, his only crime being his well-paying job and a yuppie-mobile in the form of a Saab 900 Convertible. It’s possible that the makers of the film, for whatever reason, thought that it was well-suited as an “obnoxious rich person” car.
To me, Singles captures the GenX zeitgeist in a more appealing way. The soundtrack is good, even featuring the actual members of Pearl Jam as the musicians of Matt Dillon’s character’s band, Citizen Dick. Like Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites, Dillon has similar relationship issues with the main female character, but he comes across as a far more appealing, loveable schlub. You might remember him installing a stereo into his on-again/off-again love’s Gen 1 1978 Scirocco (and blowing out the glass):
Dillon is not the lead character in Singles; Steve Dunne is, played by Campbell Scott, actually does have a reasonable job and very reasonable car even if it is, by the time of the movie’s filming, over ten years old. Actually, it’s an ultra-cool car: an early Saab 99 Turbo in faded Cardinal Red with the slick “Darth Vader wheels” (actually called “Inca” by the factory) similar to the one for sale shown below.
It seems so strange that this “good guy” drives something that is nearly the same car under this skin as Ben Stiller’s in Reality Bites. The 900 is a very, very similar car to the 99; the nose is longer but from the firewall back to the average observer there isn’t a huge difference.
There aren’t that many cars that can be portrayed as a symbol of ill-gotten gain while at the same time being shown as the chariots of the environmentally-conscious such as Steve was in Singles with his ill-fated “supertrain” concept.
Honestly, the plight of us GenXers isn’t that different from that Saab. You can paint us as slackers disavowing materialism while at the same time grabbing the cast-offs of Boomers, or you can see us as innovators trying to make a difference but not afraid of money. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter to us.
Isn’t that what Anthony Micheal Hall said at the end of The Breakfast Club?