So, is it possible for a generation defined by the Neverlandish ideal of never, ever growing up to have a midlife crisis?
Ready or not, Gen X is confronting middle age in literature (The Ask) and film (Greenberg, Hot Tub Time Machine), according to the Times. The latter induces particular cognitive dissonance, writes A.O. Scott, because since when did John Cusack — Lloyd Dobbler! — become one of the older guys?
“And what do the rest of us have to show for aging along with them?” he asks. “That we saw Reality Bites or Say Anything when they first opened in theaters?” (Indeed, one of the most jarring things of late was to realise that I had become involved with someone too young to have Say Anything as a cultural touchstone, who did not see Lloyd Dobler, with boombox and shy, crooked smile, as the ne plus ultra of romantic love.)
I’m on the tail end of Gen X, but I was always a precocious child — at six, I favoured New Wave and P.J. O’Rourke’s columns in Rolling Stone — so perhaps I am experiencing this reckoning a decade early. Still, is it possible to revert to adolescence when you never bothered to mature in the first place? Can’t you just be forever young?
I am not sure any adult is too young to recognize Say Anything as a cultural touchstone. Lloyd Dobler is still the teenage girls ideal suitor – just ask them. All the kids just graduating from college talk about Say Anything. It is one of the few things early 20-somethings and 30-somethings can share with vigor. So, I think Say Anything is more a a classic than generational. It is a common touchstone, like Breakfast and Tiffany’s or Love Story or Harold and Maud. One did not have to see those films in the theaters to reference them.
[...] I was never the biggest fan of Ferris; I prefer Say Anything. But the house, I kind of covet. Austere, cantilevered over a ravine, it was designed by David Haid [...]
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