Like what film would you show an alien to really capture the essence of boomer? Grease was the movie that prompted this question, but I think we can find boomier

  • Optimus_Subprime [he/him, they/them]
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    1 year ago

    The Big Chill IIRC, Liberal Boomers went nuts for this movie in the 80s and it spawned a TV show called Thirtysomething which was basically "First World Problems: The Series".

    When considering what it means to “sell out”, it’s useful to look to the classic 1983 film The Big Chill. Fifteen years after graduating from college, a group of friends and former radicals come together to mourn the suicide of one who used to be in their clique. To a t, each character has given up on progressive aspirations to focus on him or herself in various ways—drugs, money, babies, etc. In fact, the one person who was still trying to act for the higher good is Nick, the guy who killed himself. Nick’s descent from radicalism to academe to social work and then complete and total absence is powerfully symbolic of the erasure of progressive ideals, the transition into the eighties, and the coming of Yuppie. The film is like a home birth movie, in which a group of insufferable Baby Boomers midwife a neoliberal fever-dream about the moral sacrifices that adulthood should entail.

    • Oxbinder [any]
      ·
      1 year ago

      TBC is an excellent choice. Speaking as a boomer. I make a point of watching it every ten years or so, and like all of the best movies, it's different every time. Which is to say it's a good yardstick to measure how my response to its messages change over the years. Of course, younger people have lived in a world that was altered by this movie. At the time, using the Stones "You Can't Always Get What You Want" as the soundtrack while showing close ups of the dressing of a corpse was edgy and cool in a way that big movies hadn't been for a while. Ditto the entrepreneur giving out free pairs of his brand of running shoes for everyone. Lots of eye rolling at the time, but, to be real, it was at his house and on his dime.
      Selling out may be the overt theme of TBC, but self-regard is the powerful subtext. That makes it the best boomer movie, because the characters are tormented by their compulsion to constantly regard their self-regard. They mostly haven't found any way out of the trap, which, as the movie sells us, is love. And rock and roll, of course. The Baffler article concludes: "Along with the shrinking of the middle class came the neoliberal reforms that seamlessly blended every aspect of culture with an overly privatized civil society and an anemic economy. In an Orwellian turn, the word “reform” has come to mean privatization. We create content for Twitter for free. We’re saddled with almost incomprehensible levels of debt from school. Ideas are “branded” before their umbilical cords are even cut. To sell out or not sell out isn’t a choice that we get to make. We’re forced to sell out, without even really getting to cash in." Such innocent times.