Today’s post is going to wander a little. I’m going to let my words stretch their legs.
The pic up above is from the movie Cabin in the Woods. I was thinking about it just now as I sat down to write, and as I cued up my 90s station “Zero” started. It all fits so perfectly with what I wanted to write about tonight.
I’ve been thinking about generation gaps lately. I have really been considering what it means that I’m not young anymore. “Adult” seems like a weird distinction to me; I was dealing with “adult” stuff when I was very, very young. But for a long time I was the young guy everywhere I went (even in school I usually spent more time with the older students). I’m 40 now, and my students are over half-my-lifetime younger than me in some cases. I’m not the young guy anymore.
That’s made me start thinking about how generational thinking really does shape people. There are large number of people in Indiana, where I’m from, who are Christian and Conservative. But those labels are arbitrary, really. They mean a very specific coded thing that neither of those words really encompass: they are deeply socialized to the morality of a southern Baptist ethic, fear anything that is different, think rich white people are the gold standard for life and hence support them politically even when it is clearly not in their best interest, and generally extremely image obsessed, to the degree that they will define entire separate lives for themselves where they behave the way their morality expects them to even when their real lives contradict that.
That mentality comes from a generation that is older than my parents. Not quite their parents– it’s the one in-between (I know that the theory of a generation is that it is the linage of a family, but it hasn’t really fallen that way in terms of the swells of change in the “typical” attitude). Let me trace it for you. My grandparents: the “greatest” generation (their label). Between them and my parents… did they call them the “lost” generation? My parents were Vietnam era hippies (flower power), and their younger siblings, the generation before me, were the tail end of free love and the strangeness of disco. I’m a Gen Xer. The generation after mine gets all sorts of weird names, but I like calling them Gen Y because– and I know this is perspective– I feel like they tried to be a better version of us. Then come the millennials.
The running sort of overarching political tone of the time seemed to go like this (and yes, this is me talking about a generalization– I know not every person from every one of these generations acted the same way):
The Great Patriotic Saviors for Mom Pie and Flag
All their kids, the conflicted but non-defiant
Their kids, the defiant bra-burners and draft dodgers
Their siblings and some of their kids, the free-loving drug experimenting hippie-posers
The “oh crap AIDS and Reagan” War on Druggers
Sarcastic Angst in a Bottle (this was us)
Smart Emo Kids 4 Life
The Children of the Battle of Who Could Care Less
So to flesh that out ever so slightly, the oldest generation I knew while I was alive, the WWIIers, were extremely patriotic and very xenophobic, usually racist, and super homophobic. They thought the government was a religion but not THE religion because that came from Jesus’ book. They would yell at you if you were loud while the President was on TV.
Then the generation just after them seemed to hold those folks in some sort of pantheon-of-confusion esteem, so while they wanted to be like them, they weren’t as vital. Some of them saw that maybe unilateral rah rah America was bad. Most of them just had a chip on their shoulder and wanted to be “great.” They might have, perhaps, wanted to make America great again or something like that.
The next group is where my parents fell, and my parents were the yin and yang of that era. My father tried to build himself into a soldier, then a police officer, and he hid all his “weaknesses” until he fell to a pile of shit. My mom was a hippie, a free spirit, and she lived a life of peace and understanding– and people stepped on her for it.
Their younger siblings– or the oldest of the “kids” I knew growing up– were sort of this bizarre form of the hippies of the 60s. Late 60s-Early 70s kids seemed like they got the free love and the peace and the drugs cuz drugs were cool (so much weed and angel dust) but they didn’t really seem to stand for anything.
The next group, the kids who were my elders going through school, were the kids who reaffirmed the WWIIers by embracing Reagan and the war on drugs and the limp version of the Cold War. It was a whole generation of Alex P. Keatons and humorless Elle Woods.
Then came my generation. And I can and will talk much more about us here in a second since I was there, but we were confused, then mad, then ultimately we were furious. We just didn’t have the real reason to be.
The generation after us–who I saw and mentored in high schools as I went to college, and my first students, thought we were cool and tried to be like us, but they couldn’t find the same anger and they wanted to be better than us. It made them sort of awesome and also sort of… bland.
The generation after them is apolitical and– I know this is going to sound judgmental– but it’s terribly selfish. I think the generations before my parents and the 80s generation were, too, but the selfishness and Truman-Show-is-me nature of their most generic form (again– I am generalizing generations here– this is not all inclusive but if you need a poster-person for the generation). They’re smart when they try, but they don’t usually try.
So why do I feel like I can say all of this? Because it’s my fucking blog, reader. But seriously, there’s a thing about being from Generation X. If you understand episodes of Family Guy, you probably get it. Our understanding of the world is sticky-sweet with pop culture (as are the generations after us, though I don’t think anyone before us was as bad about it). You can learn as much as you need to about our iconic stereotypical GenXer by watching two movies: Fight Club and Clerks.
Here’s what we were, warts and all. We were mad, because our parents told us about how they fought the power and changed the world and brought about better race relations (shhh, don’t tell the police) and how they protested the war and didn’t think we should be blind patriots. And so… we wanted to rebel, too. But we didn’t have a war worth protesting. Our war– the first gulf war–was more like an ass kicking set to music, reported on the classroom network Channel 1 like a commercial for the ROTC. Our parents had to both work, so we had to go home to empty houses. We had to entertain ourselves. Most of us were a little awkward, maybe a little dark. We lashed out. And when we had nothing to really lash out at, we lashed out at the pointlessness of our lives. We were all a little bit Dante Hicks and a little bit Tyler Durden (ladies, too– sorry I picked gender male characters– Daria and… IDK… Courtney Love?). Some of our favorite celebs killed themselves. We feared something like Columbine, but it hadn’t happened, so we imagined it being like the end of the world and not like something we’d write a song like “Pumped Up Kicks” about later.
One of the things I think to this day people didn’t get about us is that those of us who were the most prototypical GenX is that we weren’t selfish or self-absorbed. We couldn’t figure out a reason to be selfish. So when we speak in ways that people think are judgmental (like me putting other generations “on blast” here), we didn’t see it that way because we considered ourselves the most broken and bizarre and worthless of the bunch. We never thought we were cool, we never tried to be cool, and we never thought we were better than anyone. We wanted meaning, and we had trouble finding it because the people who had all the power didn’t give a shit what we thought and the people with no power, or with limited power, thought we were trying to be trendy.
I have never, for one second in my life, thought I was cool. When I was young– like up to 14 or so– I wanted to be. But for most of high school and all of my adult life I just wanted to be me. I don’t want to impress you, and while I hope you like me, if you don’t like me as I am, don’t expect me to bend over to please you. Because who are you, anyway? What’d you do? Nothing? That’s what we did. That’s what we are. I’m a Zero.
So now, then, back to Cabin in the Woods. I love that movie. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it. It’s amazing. It’s like game design in movie form. But it’s also a cool inversion on a morality tale.But as I was thinking about it today, I saw for the first time something that I hadn’t mentally parsed before.
The “heroes” of the story are actually the biggest monsters of all.
So I’ll explain. Spoilers coming.
Spoiler time.
It’s an old movie, like I’m spoiling anything.
The basic premise of the movie is that every country, once a year, has to put five young people through a “trial” that goes like a game. They have roles, and they have to die in a certain order to complete a blood ritual to the old gods. If the ritual fails, the old gods end the world. In the movie’s year of competition, it comes down to the protagonists of the movie, and due to some crazy happenstance, they survive but end up seeing the whole thing laid bare (which they shouldn’t have) then they get to choose. Three of them are dead. One of them can kill the other and save the world, or not kill him and the world ends.
She drops the gun and sits down next to her friend. They talk, briefly, about how messed up it is.
And the world ends.
It feels delicious in the moment; the puppets of the system defy the system.
But what if we look at it another way. What if it’s the mentality of the new generation, what wrestler Bobby Roode once coined “the Selfish Generation.”
What if the message is that one person’s hubris and need to do what that one person wants, even if it clearly isn’t best for everyone, or noble, or even right, is what guides the fate of all of us. What if holding the gun that can end the world is the job left to the most egocentric among us, the ones with the most need to be validated? What if that power corrupts?
What if it’s a story where a selfish child holds the power to end the world and we’re all culpable for putting that child in the situation that child is in, but now we’re helpless.
If that was a pair of GenXers– if it were me, with the gun– I’d have shot any of my best friends from high school dead.
Not because I’m a terrible person. I’d have hated myself for it. I’d have sacrificed myself to finish the “bonus points” of the ritual.
But one life vs. the world?
I wouldn’t let the world end because upon finally seeing that someone gave me responsibility I couldn’t take it. I’m not that selfish.
And the other person, in most cases, would have tried to get me to shoot. Because we wanted meaning, and we wanted to have something to contribute. If I’d been the one without the gun I’d have offered to kill myself. I’d have understood what it meant. We never got to sacrifice the way some others did, but we wanted it, we could feel it. We wanted to be able to say we did something that mattered.
I worry that the cycle is rolling back to the group that just wants to be cool, who just wants the others to respect and love them, and who thinks power is the way there. And if that’s who controls our destiny, we are all at risk, staying at a cabin in the woods just waiting to pick up the item that seals our fate.
I hope it’s the merman. What can’t it ever be a merman?
Or a walking Cheeto?