The movies we watched when we were young and impressionable echo through the rest of our lives.
When I was a teenager there were three types of movies that resonated with me.
One was about getting very rich, very quickly. Movies like “Wall Street”, “The Secret of My Success”, “Trading Places” and “Bad Influence” were all about great success, albeit at great cost. The most interesting bits were, of course, when the character has some huge apartment and all that stuff. As a teenager, I blew right past the moral of the story, which fortunately only took up a minute or two at the end. I think I felt about this bit something like how Homer Simpson regards his neighbor Ned Flanders.
The second type were similar to the first in that they showed great success and wealth, but were about the lives of how seemingly normal but actually very well off people lived. If you go back and watch something like “Ferris Buehler’s Day Off” you’ll see what I mean. As a kid in the UK I genuinely thought that Ferris’ family were ‘normal’, and accordingly aspired to live that way myself one day. Of course, we didn’t have the Ferrari in the garage but my best friend’s dad did. Duh.
The third type I’ll loosely group together as “us vs the world”. Here I’m thinking about pretty much any Viet Nam movie, the Die Hard series, Rambo, Aliens, Top Gun, etc. These kind of movies helped folks like me feel more comfortable with he idea that, inevitably, one day we were going to have to fight the Russians in World War III. They focused on a remarkable individual who, poor thing, went through immense hardship and somehow won the day, the girl and the battle.
Now all these movies were made by the generation ahead of us. I’m a Gen-X’er so by this I mean made by the Boomers. The generation that created the Hippies & Free Love, settled down to have families in the 70s and voted Reagan in the 80s to help reduce their taxes now they actually had something to tax. These were the people who wrote, directed, acted in and financed these movies.
If you compare these films with those made by the generation before, there’s a big theme that shifted. The movies I watched in the 70s were completely different in one regard: across a wide gamut, from “The Wizard of Oz” through pretty much any Disney movie and ending with any World War 2 movie, there was something that disappeared around 1980: the idea of personal sacrifice in the duty of a common good. Before, the heroes didn’t always win. Bambi’s mother died. The crew in the Wizard of Oz didn’t get what they set out to get. The guys in “The Great Escape” got recaptured, and many of them were shot. In “The Dam Busters” half of the crew were shot down. “A Bridge Too Far” was, literally, a bridge too far. Star Wars, released in 1977, is on the cusp, with the rebels on the back foot but somehow holding out. The collateral damage is considerable and the Empire still has the upper hand three episodes later.
Looking back from 40 years later, I see a generational shift, where the moral of these movies shifted subtly but powerfully, from public service to self service.
Today we are seeing a similar shift. And while we read so much about how the Boomers still run the place, and the power of Zoomers, it’s going to fall to Gen X to do something for the next decade or so. You could say we were dazzled by the riches and self pity our parents laid in front of us, to encourage us to support their view of the world. You could also say it’s much easier to stand up to your grandparents than your mom and dad. Well, those may both be true but it’s time for Gen X to shake that off and demonstrate, finally, how the generations who follow us should behave.
Which brings me to “Do The Right Thing”, a movie by Spike Lee. You should go watch it, or at least read the wikipedia plot summary. It would be easy to think this movie was made in 2020 as the story still resonates so strongly today, but in fact it was made in 1989. (If anyone needs any persuading the kind of thing which ended in Georg’e Floyd’s death has been going on for a while needs to watch this movie.)
The movie was critically acclaimed when it came out, and got some Oscar attention even, but then quickly receded into obscurity. I’ve not seen a single press mention of the remarkable parallels between the movie and what we have seen recently, the movie is that forgotten. It was an uncommon movie for it’s time, one written and directed by a radical young talent way ahead of his time when you think about what folks wanted to hear.
Coming back to the present day, Gen X’ers have a stark choice. We can continue to propagate what our Boomer parents told us to pursue, how the world is and how we can ignore or forget about the cost of that. Or, we can sit with the awkwardness that great change brings, and make sure that we also Do The Right Thing. The choice is ours and we need to make it now. I for one am an optimist, and hope that we will seize the opportunity.
Do The Right Thing. Today.
