13 Mar 2023
Dazed & Confused (& whiny)
13 Mar 2023 11:12 pmThe 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.”
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!”