From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: Slacker and Generation-X Define a Generation
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: University of Missouri
Date: Sun, 5 Apr 1992 13:38:04 GMT

From: PENN@MITLNS.MIT.EDU (steve penn 26-567, 253-1521 Remember Our Humanity; Science is Not Neutral; MIT War Research Kills.)

Included below is an article from the New Liberation News Service
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NLNS  Packet 2.7  -  1 March 1992
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Slacker and Generation-X Define a Generation

Cosner, The Student Insurgent

Slacker: 97 min., Not Rated.  A film by Richard Linklater.

Generation X: Tales For an Accelerated Culture  by Douglas Coupland; 
St. Martin's Press, 183 pp.  $12.95.

	During 1990, when both Slacker and Generation X were being 
created, pundits scrambled to herald a new generation's coming of 
age: "Twentysomething", proclaimed a profound-looking cover of 
Time magazine, while sister glossy Fortune vowed to disclose the 
management style of "The 25 Year Olds."  With each new study, the 
writers (generally the older siblings or the parents of the subjects) 
began to sound suspiciously alike.  The die was cast by a piece in 
Working Woman magazine,in which the exasperated author starts 
out bemoaning the attitudes of the young whelps who have no 
patience for hierarchy, no loyalty to the corporate structure.  
Eventually (and predictably) a grudging admiration emerges for their 
talent, fresh perspective, and flexibility.  Only occasionally, though, 
would this damning with faint praise evolve into a serious critique of 
the "real world" that these newest grown-ups were confronting: a 
cultural stampede that squelched imagination and destroyed 
community in the name of goals and forces only dimly grasped by its 
own apologists.
	Once this demographic valley of 25-and-unders--until now 
obscured by the media-saturated baby boom--was "discovered" (in 
the best Christopher Columbian sense of the word), tradition dictated 
that it be labeled.  The most elegant (derivative, but elegant) 
candidate was "the baby bust".  But now that the fuss has down 
down and we "busters" have been returned to anonymity, Coupland's 
term--"Generation X"--seems all the more appropriate.
	I was born July third, 1965--a spare six months into the 
statistical baby bust.  Pundits, who live to draw cultural borders, 
roped off the baby boom between 1946 and 1964 and created 
generational roles for each of us to live out.  It's been startling for me 
to observe, over the course of the past decade, the widening gulf 
between my values and those of my older friends--even those only a 
year or two older than me--as we unconsciously play out those roles.
	Generation X's characters range throughout their twenties, but 
early on they adopt baby buster values.  Andy, our narrator 
throughout the book, is nearing the end of his twenties.  A deeply 
disturbing work experience has driven home to him the words of 
Rilke, the French poet: "...we are all of us born with a letter inside us, 
and...only if we are true to ourselves may we be allowed to read it 
before we die."  Dropping out of the career track, he comes to live in 
a desert bungalow, tending bar and uncomplicating his life--shedding 
the possessions and assumptions that weigh him down.  "I came 
down here," he muses, "to breathe dust and walk with the dogs...and 
to try to read the letter inside me."
	Before long Andy meets up with fellow contrarians Claire and 
Dag, and together they set off on a journey of values reassessment.  
Their vehicle is a strange and archaic one: storytelling.  The reader is 
invited, in the manner of Jung, to extract the essential truths of our 
cultural history through the new mythology that these three co-
create.
	In the vein of the book's subtitle--Tales For an Accelerated 
Culture--the elements of societal decline and apocalyptic vision loom 
large, but always playful and ironic, in these stories.  Older 
generations, Coupland recognizes, simply aren't programmed to grasp 
the implications behind the past twenty years of declining personal 
economic power.  Busters, on the other hand, have abandoned the 
illusions of limitless and harmless growth and many have even 
embraced the heresy that downward mobility could actually be life-
affirming.
	"Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts 
for very very long", Andy reflects amid a chapter of Zen-like brief 
memories, "I wake up and it's maybe 5:30 or so in the morning.  The 
three of us are sprawled on top of the bed where we fell asleep.  The 
dogs snooze on the floor next to the near-dead embers.  Outside there 
is only a hint of light, the breathlessness of oleanders and no cooing 
of doves....These creatures here in this room with me--these are the 
creatures I love and who love me. Together I feel like we are a 
strange and forbidden garden...If I could have it thus, I would like 
this moment to continue forever."
	Coupland contrasts this moment with Dag's recollections of his 
former life.  "I...achieved no small thrill of power", he confesses to the 
others, "to think that most manufacturers of lifestyle accessories in 
the Western world considered me their most desirable target market. 
But at the slightest provocation I'd have been willing to apologize 
for...working...from eight til five in front of a sperm-dissolving VDT 
performing abstract tasks that indirectly enslave the Third World. 
But then, hey! Come five o' clock, I'd go nuts! I'd streak my hair and 
drink beer brewed in Kenya. I'd wear bow ties and listen to 
alternative rock and slum in the arty part of town."
	Coupland briefly touches on the next generational attitude gap. 
A few of the characters in Generation X are members of the baby 
boomlet--born after 1972. Coupland refers to them as "Global Teens" 
after the (hugely effective) We-Are-All-One media-saturation 
directed toward them, "the pseudo-globalism and ersatz racial 
harmony of ad campaigns engineered by the makers of soft drinks 
and computer-inventoried sweaters." If you fit into this later 
category, then you're the subjects of Coupland's next book, Planet 
Shampoo.
	Richard Linklater's Slacker, like Generation X, is a psychic 
travelogue. In the manner of many of the figures it captures, 
Linklater's camera refuses to commit to any one person or 
conversation it encounters. We are led by this fickle camera on a 24-
hour walking tour of the U-town neighborhood of Austin, home of 
the University of Texas and satellite stronghold of the Dallas-based 
Church of the Subgenius (whose adherents strive toward a nirvana-
like state of "slack"). Our tour guides are the eternal students, 
irascible radicals, street people and cafe philosophers of the urban 
landscape. One of the unlikely creatures spawned by the University 
community is the ex-student who is half classical learning, half pop 
culture. Both Slacker and Generation X give full vent to the mind of 
this beast. In a riotous and far-too-short scene from Slacker, two 
kindred souls spend a beer-soaked evening constructing an ethical 
paradigm that integrates the Bhagavad Gita and the Smurfs. Even the 
genre of the movie itself refuses to limit itself to either mannerist 
comedy or satirical anti-documentary (unlike the equally anarchic 
Spinal Tap, Slacker was surprisingly tightly scripted by Linklater).
	Slacker's early sense of disorientation eventually gives way to 
anticipation of the next otherworldly distraction. We are passed from 
character to character like a hot potato in a countercultural relay 
race. "Hi, I'm sorry I'm late," calls one character as she meets her 
friend, a found-objects sculptress. Speaking not just for herself but 
for the tenor of the film, the artist responds, "Oh, that's okay--time 
doesn't exist!"
	Rootlessness, like timelessness, is an article of faith for a 
slacker. Coupland coins the term "poverty jet set" to refer to those 
souls for whom travel is an approach, not an escape. "The difference 
between a tourist and a traveller," explain the protagonists of 
Bernado Bertolucci's film The Sheltering Sky, "is that the traveller 
doesn't care if he ever comes back." At the close of Generation X, our 
hero Andy is on the move again, ambivalent about his motives, 
conscious of the dangers of the unknown, but increasingly open to 
the subtle joys reaped from a lifeway of surrendering control.
	By no means are all baby-busters slackers, as Coupland points 
out. "The most common X generation subgroup," he notes, are 
"Squires...recognizable by their frantic attempts to recreate a 
semblance of Eisenhower-era plentitude...in the face of exorbitant 
housing prices and two-job lifestyles." And indeed slackers are 
constantly misunderstood by their peers. A young go-getter critic for 
U magazine recently reviewed Slacker. Blinded to all aesthetic, 
intellectual, and narrative qualities of the movie, he spent two 
columns in a rant of the misguidedness of anyone who wouldn't 
spend their healthiest and most unencumbered years scrambling for 
their personal piece of the pie [Fuck U Magazine--nlns ed.].
	The slacker argument is that there are other pies out there, 
perhaps even tastier ones, that the "traditional" one magnified and 
color-corrected in every schoolkid's Civics textbook. Only when we 
dare look at the American Dream dispassionately and from all sides 
can we weigh the cost of pursuing it against the likely benefits.
	The new Less is More ethic explored in Generation X contains 
many of the elements of 19th century Transcendentalism, but is 
more grounded in cynicism and apocalyptic resignation. As the 
holidays approach, a frustrated Dag bemoans the communication gap 
between him and his parents to Andy: "I want to tell them that I 
envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. 
And I want to throttle them for blithely handing over the world to us 
like so much skid-marked underwear."
	Attacked by their go-getter peers and dismissed by their 
burned-out activist elders, slackers after a while tend to opt out of 
the debate. "You are fed up with words, and I don't blame you," 
sounds a voice on their behalf, that of theologian Thomas Merton, "It 
is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in 
the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning 
left in it. And then the temptation to yell louder than ever in order to 
make meaning be there again by magic."
	The new breed of refusenicks are the true inheritors of the 60's 
counterculture whose members, rather than fighting the 
establishment they were confronted with, simply refused to 
participate. The establishment, in return, argues that slackers are 
hypocritical--that by hitchhiking, pad crashing, and bootlegging 
music, they leach off the societal fruits whose value they publicly 
shrug off.
	Nowadays, though, it's virtually impossible and generally 
pointless to try to live in a vacuum. Any theologian less rabid than 
Phyllis Schlafly recognizes that Jesus himself spent the bulk of his 
ministry bumming off his establishment compadres. What's more, his 
affluent buddies were happy to share their material comforts for an 
evening's worth of enlightenment. They in fact recognized the far 
lesser value of what they had to offer. "Such a deal!" they must have 
crowded, as the Slacker Foretold BY The Prophets went out from 
their homes.
	A few of the characters in Slacker are passive--nay, 
phlegmatic--to the point of absurdity. It would be as much of a 
mistake, however, to confuse slacking with passivity as to confuse 
the frenetic and unreflective 80's boomer lifestyle with activism. An 
old folk tale is told of the lumberjack who took an hour to cut down a 
tree with his dull saw because he didn't have time to sharpen it. In 
contrast Madeleine L'Engle, in her book Walking on Water, comes to 
the defense of saw-sharpening time: "Being time is never wasted 
time. When we are being, not only are we collaborating with 
chronological time, but we are touching on kairos, and are freed from 
the normal restrictions of time... The saint in contemplation, lost 
(discovered) to self in the mind of God is in kairos. The artist at 
work...the child at play...[are] in kairos." The slacker is at home in the 
timeless.
	Both Slacker and Generation X are the first released works for 
their respective creators. The playfulness of Linklater and Coupland, 
along with their ambivalence toward the disciplines of their art 
forms, is inescapable. In Generation X, it's evident in the carefree 
disregard for proofreading; in Slacker, the joyous choreographed 
anarchy in the final scene. Without a traditional sense of closure, 
Slacker's audience is sent forth from the theater (with a rude "Hey, it 
was only a movie" benediction) to create their own story with a little 
greater awareness of the possibilities.

The Student Insurgent can be reached at University of Oregon, EMU 
Suite 1, Eugene, OR 97403; (503) 346-3716.

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