{"id":1592,"date":"2023-03-06T17:00:36","date_gmt":"2023-03-06T17:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gregmaxwell.net\/?p=1592"},"modified":"2025-08-21T19:49:15","modified_gmt":"2025-08-21T19:49:15","slug":"boomerz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregmaxwell.net\/index.php\/2023\/03\/06\/boomerz\/","title":{"rendered":"Boomerz"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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..aight …..aight?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It has long been fashionable to hate baby boomers, \u201cAmerica\u2019s noisiest if no longer largest living generation,\u201d as the Times<\/em> critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote<\/a> recently. But I remain on the fence. I believe that you can appreciate the late David Crosby<\/a>\u2019s music, for instance, while not endorsing buckskin jackets, walrus mustaches, and lyrics that address women as \u201cmilady.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I most resent about baby boomers is that, technically, I am one. The baby boom is most often defined as encompassing everyone born from 1946 to 1964, but those nineteen years make for an awfully wide and experientially diverse cohort. I was born in 1958, three years past the generational midpoint of 1955. I graduated from high school in 1976, which means I came of age in a very different world from the earliest boomers, most of whom graduated in 1964. When the first boomers were toddlers, TV was a novelty. We, the late boomers, were weaned on \u201cCaptain Kangaroo\u201d and \u201cRomper Room.\u201d They were old enough to freak out over the Sputnik; we were young enough to grow bored of moon landings. The soundtrack of their senior year in high school was the early Beatles and Motown; ours was \u201cFrampton Comes Alive!<\/a>\u201d Rather than Freedom Summer, peace marches, and Woodstock, we second-half baby boomers enjoyed an adolescence of inflation, gas lines, and Jimmy Carter\u2019s \u201cmalaise\u201d speech<\/a>. We grew up to the background noise of the previous decade, when being young was allegedly more thrilling in every way: the music, the drugs, the clothes, the sense of discovery and the possibility of change, the sense that being young mattered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The idea of generations with well-defined beginnings and endings, like Presidential terms or seasons of \u201cAmerican Horror Story,\u201d is inherently silly<\/a>, of course. Generations are more like sequential schmears, overlapping and messy, and the idea that each one shares essential traits is perhaps a marketer\u2019s version of astrology. Still, these divisions would be slightly less dubious if crafted more artfully, and, with that in mind, I have a proposal: let\u2019s split the baby boom in half and dub those of us born between 1956 and 1964 the \u201cDazed and Confused\u201d generation, after Richard Linklater\u2019s quasi-autobiographical teen movie, which is coming up on its thirtieth anniversary. (The Criterion Collection just released a restored 4K edition, marking the occasion.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teen movies, especially those made using a rearview mirror, have become essential to generational mythology. I can\u2019t speak for how accurately George Lucas\u2019s \u201cAmerican Graffiti<\/a>\u201d captured what it was like to be a teen-ager in the early sixties, nor can I fairly assess the portrait of an early-two-thousands high-school experience provided by Greta Gerwig\u2019s \u201cLady Bird<\/a>.\u201d But I can vouch for \u201cDazed and Confused,\u201d which not only nails the clothes, hair, music, and cars of the period but also the laissez-faire vibe\u2014the way parents and other authority figures, who had divorce and EST<\/em> to deal with, seemed checked out, and kids were left to stumble through adolescence on their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Linklater\u2019s film takes place in 1976, on the last day of school in a small town in Texas. The narrative, such as it is, follows a couple dozen characters, rising seniors plus a few freshmen, through the afternoon and into the night. After some frosh hazing, the kids drive around, get high, look for something to do, hang out at a rec center, and eventually coalesce at a kegger out in the woods by an old light tower. Best embodying the mellow party-hearty ethos is the character played by Matthew McConaughey<\/a>: Wooderson, a genial, if creepy, older guy with a loaded Chevelle, a Ted Nugent tee, and too-carefully coiffed hair. Treading water in life, he is happy to share his weed, beer, and philosophy with teen-agers. (\u201cYou just gotta keep livin\u2019, man. L-i-v-i-n.\u201d) As Anthony Lane put it, in his review for The New Yorker<\/em>, the film has \u201cscarcely any plot and no perceptible moral, apart from the injunction to \u2018Eat More Pussy\u2019 scrawled on a high-school wall.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a scene in the movie that perfectly captures my point about the generational divide. \u201cIt\u2019s like the every-other-decade theory,\u201d one of the film\u2019s more thoughtful young characters says, during an evening spent not analyzing a new Bob Dylan album or plotting to levitate the Pentagon but mostly doing nothing. \u201cThe fifties were boring,\u201d she says. \u201cThe sixties rocked, and the seventies\u2014oh, my God, well, they obviously suck. Maybe the eighties will be radical.\u201d That last line got a big laugh when the movie came out, in 1993. Maybe it still does. But the eighties are Gen X\u2019s problem. For us second-half boomers, it often felt as if we had been seated at a restaurant that was fresh out of the menu\u2019s best dishes. I\u2019m not saying that we had it worse, exactly. I\u2019m grateful that I never had to worry about the draft and that I came of age after Roe v. Wade was decided (and before it was repealed<\/a>). I realize that I could have been listening to Stevie Wonder<\/a> and Joni Mitchell<\/a> instead of Peter Frampton. The point is\u2014we had it different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, as it happens, Richard Linklater<\/a> agrees with me\u2014at least about the idea of shaving off a new generation, if not necessarily my chosen label for it. \u201cI was born in \u201960, graduated in 1979, so I never felt like much of a boomer,\u201d he told me. \u201cI feel a little offended being lumped in with someone who\u2019s born in 1946. I\u2019m, like, Wow, we grew up in a whole different world. What are you talking about?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Video From The New YorkerRichard Brody’s Best Films of 2022<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

These days, boomer resentment is usually credited to Gen X-ers<\/a> and millennials<\/a>, but the ones who had to put up with older boomers first were their younger siblings\u2014a burden that Linklater well remembers. \u201cWeren\u2019t you sick of hearing people that were college-age or whatever in the late sixties talking about how great it was?\u201d he said. \u201cIt was, like, \u2018O.K., you guys, no matter what you do, you\u2019ll never top what we did\u2019\u2014you know, Woodstock and all that shit. So I was, like, \u2018Yeah, guess what? We don\u2019t need to self-mythologize. We don\u2019t even want<\/em> to.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDazed and Confused\u201d underscores this idea in a short scene in which a high-school social-studies teacher boasts that \u201cthe \u201968 Democratic Convention in Chicago is probably the most bitchin\u2019 time\u201d she ever had, while her students struggle to stay awake. I remember a sixth-grade teacher bragging about having been at the March on Washington and getting to hear Martin Luther King, Jr.<\/a>, deliver the \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech, in person. 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. \u201cThe Comet Kohoutek of holidays,\u201d he called it, referencing yet another seventies disappointment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Linklater cautioned that he hadn\u2019t intended to lard \u201cDazed and Confused\u201d with generational freight the way Lucas, for one, clearly meant to do with \u201cAmerican Graffiti,\u201d arguably the quintessential baby-boomer teen movie (though its characters, like Lucas, who was born in 1944, are only on the cusp of boomerhood). Linklater\u2019s film echoes, and even seems to comment on, Lucas\u2019s in key ways: both follow large groups of teen-agers meandering their way through a single evening and into the morning. In \u201cAmerican Graffiti,\u201d it\u2019s not the first night of summer but the last. The setting is Modesto, the small city in California\u2019s Central Valley where Lucas grew up, and the year is 1962, when Lucas graduated high school. Two characters, played by Ron Howard and Richard Dreyfuss, face a decision: Will they leave the next day for college back East or chicken out and stay home? In Linklater\u2019s film, the stakes are suitably lower: Will Randall (Pink) Floyd, the stoner quarterback played by Jason London, sign a pledge not to do drugs, as his hard-ass football coach demands? The pledge is more or less a formality; actual abstention doesn\u2019t seem to be on the table for the quarterback or anyone else on the team. In the end, he tells the coach to stick it, and the movie\u2019s final scene has Pink, Wooderson, and a few other friends driving off into the morning sun to buy Aerosmith tickets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Linklater told me that he had \u201cAmerican Graffiti\u201d in mind only in the way that anyone making a teen movie in its wake would. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of the air you\u2019re breathing,\u201d he said. \u201cI love \u2018American Graffiti,\u2019 but I didn\u2019t have any big statements I felt comfortable making like the way that movie does.\u201d He mentioned its famous where-are-they-now ending, in which a title card explains that one character went missing in action in Vietnam, another was killed by a drunk driver, and a third ended up as \u201ca writer living in Canada,\u201d having presumably dodged the draft. That\u2019s the moment when \u201cAmerican Graffiti\u201d becomes the story of a generation and not just of some goofy, restless teen-agers in Modesto. (Telling, too, is the fact that Lucas gave updates only for his male characters.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat movie says so much,\u201d Linklater continued. \u201cIt\u2019s very poignant. It\u2019s a perfect movie in a lot of ways. I just felt that for anything near what I considered my<\/em> generation, we didn\u2019t want generational statements so much. That\u2019d be reason to roll our eyes. So it just never felt appropriate to say anything other than what it felt like to just be alive experientially, you know, moment to moment. That\u2019s all I was going for.\u201d To that end, he added, \u201cI purposely made the cast of my movie juniors\u2014they don\u2019t have any big questions that night, because they\u2019re coming back for senior year. I purposefully did that to lower the stakes. They just want to have fun and do their thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Linklater mentioned two other favorite teen movies of his: \u201cIf. . . . ,\u201d from 1968, and \u201cOver the Edge,\u201d from 1979. Both films climax with kids waging violent insurrections and destroying their schools. \u201cThat\u2019s pretty great and cathartic,\u201d he said. \u201cBut my whole point was, like, nothing happens in my movie. That\u2019s the difference between the generations. The other generation felt very comfortable making these big statements. They had bigger stakes, bigger things going on\u2014I would say a war in Vietnam\u2019s a pretty good one\u2014where we didn\u2019t have that. Going to get Aerosmith tickets\u2014that felt pitched about right for people of our generation.\u201d In an appropriately low-key way, Linklater\u2019s ending has resonated over the years. The single-season TV series \u201cFreaks and Geeks,\u201d created by Paul Feig (b. 1962) and produced by Judd Apatow (b. 1967) and featuring teens in suburban Detroit during the 1980-81 school year\u2014the older characters are on the tail end of the \u201cDazed and Confused\u201d generation\u2014strikes a similar \u201cfuck it\u201d chord in its finale, with its heroine blowing off an academic conference and getting on a bus to go see the Grateful Dead in Colorado.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDazed and Confused\u201d was a disappointment at the box office but found its audience on home video; a soundtrack CD, boasting bands such as Foghat and Deep Purple that had largely fallen off the cultural radar in the early nineties, went platinum. Linklater confessed surprise at the unironic affection with which younger audiences embraced the movie and its trappings. \u201cYou know the way \u2018Graffiti\u2019 did kick off a nostalgia for the fifties?\u201d he said. \u201cI was thinking, O.K., there\u2019s no way<\/em> this film will ever kick off a nostalgia for the seventies. I\u2019m going to make a film to show how the seventies kind of sucked, believe it or not, how kind of repetitious and boring all of it was\u2014even though I guess I made it look too fun.\u201d He laughed. \u201cIt was funny to realize, Oh, shit, people like<\/em> this!\u201d If that\u2019s a sentiment any genuine honest-to-God baby boomers ever uttered about their own younger days, let me know. ♦<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It has long been fashionable to hate baby boomers, \u201cAmerica\u2019s noisiest if no longer largest living generation,\u201d as the Times […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1594,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/gregmaxwell.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/dazedand-confused-pussy.gif","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregmaxwell.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregmaxwell.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregmaxwell.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregmaxwell.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregmaxwell.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1592"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregmaxwell.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1595,"href":"https:\/\/gregmaxwell.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1592\/revisions\/1595"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregmaxwell.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregmaxwell.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregmaxwell.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregmaxwell.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}