Dazed & Confused (& whiny)

[firecat]

The Dazed and Confused Generation by Bruce Handy in The New Yorker

I haven’t seen the movie this article covers, but the article discusses how some of us who were teens in the 1970s thought “our” decade was incredibly boring, and I remember feeling that way. The article is whiny and I want to say “OK, Boomer” in response even though I agree late Boomers are difervent from early ones. But it was interesting to re-visit that white suburban 70s kid feeling of “born too late, everything cool’s been done already.”

Our generation naturally had no equivalent watershed events, no epochal gatherings worth lying about having attended. Linklater and I reminisced about what a corny, cynical dud the Bicentennial had been. “The Comet Kohoutek of holidays,” he called it.
[…]
Linklater confessed surprise at the unironic affection with which younger audiences embraced the movie and its trappings….”I was thinking, O.K., there’s no way this film will ever kick off a nostalgia for the seventies. I’m going to make a film to show how the seventies kind of sucked….It was funny to realize, Oh, shit, people like this!”

Comments

[bibliofile]

When we went to see that movie, a friend thought that many of the characters seemed like other friends of mine (from fandom, the SCA,et al.) So Linklater certainly captured a thing.

[firecat]

"I thought I was going to see a movie, but I ended up in a friend's basement getting stoned."

[greghousesgf]

I liked that movie a lot and I was in high school in the 70's but as far as I was concerned the decade that REALLY sucked donkey titties was the 80's.

[firecat]

What kind of donkey dicks? Musical ones? Cultural ones? Fashion?

[greghousesgf]

yes. and the politics too.

[firecat]

In retrospect the politics of the 70s look fairly benign. Reaganomics has done the country way worse than Whip Inflation Now.

[greghousesgf]

what baffled me is why so many working class people thought Reagan was Mr. Awesome when he shat all over anyone who wasn't rich!

[firecat]

I‘ve heard various theories for the phenomenon of white working class people voting “conservative” — voting based on your aspirations more than on who would help you most in your current circumstances; or voting based on which party appeals to you more morally; voting for what you perceive as the status quo because your life seems unstable and the status quo is perceived as more stable; voting for whoever points you at a more believable scapegoat to blame your problems on.

[greghousesgf]

You'd have to be an idiot to think some random gay guy is a bigger threat morally than a rich asshole trying to screw over as many poorer people as possible.

[fauxklore]

I'm the same age as Bruce Handy. He needs to google "Generation Jones," a term that has become widely used for us late boomers.

[firecat]

Oh yeah, I think I erased that term out of my head because one of my names is Jones. At one time some folks were using Tweeners, but that word went on to mean something different.

[silveradept]

I'm far too late to have seen the movie or to be part of the generation, but the 70s seems like a pretty good decade compared to the 80s, and much of the 90s. It kind of seems like the thrust of the article is that someone doesn't want to get hit with the same "OK, Boomer" that the earlier generation currently is getting in a well-deserved way.

[firecat]

I agree with your analysis of the thrust of the article. And I don't disagree with your assessment of the 70s vs the 80s and 90s. I'm not sure how I would have felt during those decades if I'd been a teen during them. Looking back on the 90s, I thought there was a lot of exciting stuff going on in tech, but that's I started working in tech in '88, so I would. I think 70s fashion is more iconic than 80s-90s. But maybe fashion doesn't get iconic until more than 40 years after.

[silveradept]

We can say in hindsight that the 70s were better for a lot of people who weren't straight white men, so the 70s will get a bad rap, and the 80s was the backlash that tried to undo all that progress and kill anyone who might have benefited from it, and so it gets idolized as something wonderful. The 90s really were good if you were into technology (as I was), but Reagan's third term and Bill Clinton being a center-rightist made it tough, and then we had to suffer Bush the Younger, so there's a long string there of "for very specific things or people, it was okay, but overall, not great."

I'd say iconic fashion becomes iconic on the second go around with it because by then, it's been decided what the iconic fashion was, rather than everyone trying everything and hoping to become a hit.

[firecat]

All that makes sense except the 70s weren’t better than subsequent decades for people who weren’t straight white men (glam rock notwithstanding). They were differently bad but not better (from my perspective of being 9–18 during them)

[silveradept]

Fair enough. Differently bad can look like better when what came before and after was over hostility.