This sounds like a job for... NETWORK!

show her that. do it now.

I remember a great deal of what you linked to jmc. I also remember feeling confused, but also somewhat comfortable with the world at large being in a neverending state of SNAFU.

It was the mid Eighties that kicked my ass, existentially. It began with The Day After, was sealed by the Iran-Contra Affair and was punctuated by finally being fed up with my mother's constant, uncontrollable rage and leaving home at 14. I remember finally and fully understanding the phrase "stop the world, I want to get off" and fervently wishing it possible.

I don't understand any of your angst, Jon and Friz. I led a perfectly-normal life growing up, had two loving parents and enjoyed what the world had to off- had to off- had to -off / -ff / -fffffffff

(swallows pill)

I'm sorry, where was I?

I also remember feeling confused, but also somewhat comfortable with the world at large being in a neverending state of SNAFU.

Yeah, I know what you mean. My home life was much more stable than yours, but I kind of always had the impression that chaos was the normal state of affairs for the larger world. I remember when Reagan was shot, thinking 'Isn't that what happens to presidents?' But beginning with Jonestown and Patty Hearst, we were pummelled with the Iranian Hostages, Hinckley, Son Of Sam, Oklahoma City, Columbine, et al all culminating in 9/11. People say Americans (especially those of our demographic) are apathetic, but truthfully, I think we're just numb after all that.

Strangely enough, I just watched that film back to back with "Glengarry Glen Ross" last night. Then I watched "The Rain People". They should never have let hippies near cameras. It screws up my head. Then today I watched "Wedding Crashers" - good film.

I want to scream.

You know what the problem with Hollywood is? They make shit. Unbelievable, unremarkable shit. Now I'm not some grungy wannabe filmmaker that's searching for existentialism through a haze of bong smoke or something. No, it's easy to pick apart bad acting, short-sighted directing, and a purely moronic stringing together of words that many of the studios term as "prose". No, I'm talking about the lack of realism. Realism; not a pervasive element in today's modern American cinematic vision. Take Dog Day Afternoon, for example. Arguably Pacino's best work, short of Scarface and Godfather Part 1, of course. Masterpiece of directing, easily Lumet's best. The cinematography, the acting, the screenplay, all top-notch. But... they didn't push the envelope. Now what if in Dog Day, Sonny REALLY wanted to get away with it? What if - now here's the tricky part - what if he started killing hostages right away? No mercy, no quarter. "Meet our demands or the pretty blonde in the bellbottoms gets it the back of the head." Bam, splat! What, still no bus? Come on! How many innocent victims splattered across a window would it take to have the city reverse its policy on hostage situations? And this is 1976; there's no CNN, there's no CNBC, there's no internet! Now fast forward to today, present time, same situation. How quickly would the modern media make a frenzy over this? In a matter of hours, it'd be biggest story from Boston to Budapest! Ten hostages die, twenty, thirty; bam bam, right after another, all caught in high-def, computer-enhanced, color corrected. You can practically taste the brain matter. All for what? A bus, a plane? A couple of million dollars that's federally insured? I don't think so. Just a thought. I mean, it's not within the realm of conventional cinema... but what if?

I did a post on DDA here a while ago as I thought it was interesting to see what happened to these people afterwards.

I grew up thinking that politicians and presidents normally got shot. (60's youngun.) That, and war was normal.

Great generation-specific observations. It would be hard to be any more skeptical about the aims and ends of government, and the ability of society to rescue itself from free-fall, when one grew up with the 70s and 80s as reference points. We have basically never known a secure world, never had the sense of orderliness that some people who came of age in the 50s and early 60s often speak of.

I second Network, so so much. I actually saw it for the first time last week, and it blew me away. Sadly, however, I think it is even more appropriate to our own time than it was in the 70s. It was a document of warning, but the things it was warning against have indeed come to pass, times 10. Particularly the idea of the global corporation as a more important social organizer than nations or societies.

porpoise:

Dog Day Afternoon is about a real event. With certain emebellishments, what happens in that movie is largely how it went down.

Also: News doesn't usually do much color correction. Have to air too quickly.

I grew up convinced we were all going to die in a nuclear war, or of AIDS.

started paying attention to things around 1980/81, here

shmegegge - in case you didn't see the so-so film, that's a quote from a John Travolta character in Swordfish.

I'm grew up more of a late '80s, early '90s teen;

"old people are ripping us off and the younger people are morons"

Heh. In the early '90's, some friends of mine were interviewed by the local paper for an article about Generation X. My favourite quote? "I honestly thought there'd be a nuclear war before I had to pay back my student loan."

Movies: C.H.U.D. and, of course, Escape from New York.

As a resident youngun, I can honestly say that the first news/politics events I remember are my mother being upset voting for Mondale, my dad being obsessed with Glasnost and Gorbachev, Chernobyl, and Oliver North.

But in terms of trajectories and outlooks, mine was shaped much more by the fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the bizarre unrealness of the first Gulf War, Clinton getting elected, Mandela freed and apartheid ended, the outbreak of the Bosnian war in 1992, the wave of Neonazi violence in Germany in 1992 and the response to it, Srebrenica and Rwanda and Newt Gingrich in 1994.

That all happened as I went from 8 years old to 13 years old. My dad's a journalist, and he worked for RFE/RL from 1990-1995, so I lived in Germany for the first five years of reunification. That whole span from 89-95 had such a huge effect on me.

I dunno if this applies to my entire generation, but I grew up feeling like sometimes amazing things could happen and the whole world could change and it could seem for instant like you could go anywhere and be anything, but just as quickly, the world could turn around on you and descend into an utter nightmare and either way, you'd get swept along. And if you were in the shit, those great people who spoke so eloquently might not have the will or the power to do anything about it.


As far as movies that make me feel like I maybe I could grok the seventies, I second Dog Day and Network, and add: Being There.

Odd sidenote, during my interborough travails yesterday, I carried an old mass market paperback of Hard Times, Studs Terkel's oral history of the Depression. When I think of my grandparents growing up in those years and World War II, I realize that comapred to them, we have only so much to bitch about.

And how could we forget the reigning champeens of dystopia movies, Bladerunner and A Clockwork Orange.

Go elizard! Trivia - Bladerunner was released only one year after Clash of the Titans. (Whoops, I misremembered them as being from the same year) Bladerunner has aged very well.

Deckard is a replicant

For dystopia, there's always 1984 (1984), Brazil (1985), and The Handmaid's Tale (1990).

DDA sounds like an interesting movie to watch. Thanks jon.

Deckard is not a replicant.

porpoise, The Handmaid's tale has writing attributions to both Atwood and Pinter! Wow! I must see this one.

carmina - do see it. It's scary.

I remember from about the mid '70s (when I really became aware of what was happening on a global scale) and well into the '80s that I was afraid the world would end in horror. I don't know that it won't but it doesn't seem quite as a sure thing as it once did.

porpoise:

I completely forgot that speech. weird. sorry for the confusion.

Like deborah, I was sure from the time I was conscious of world events that we would all be killed in some catastrophic but undefined event. When I was in my 20s, I was so utterly convinced that we would not see the year 2000 that I gave little to no regards for the future. Imagine my surprise to find myself arguing over whether the 20th century ends in 1999 or 2000. Now, here I am at 44 wishing I had thought ahead a little more.

I am more convinced now that we will continue to struggle along for some period of time sufficiently long that I will be way long gone before anything significant changes and that the end of the human race as we know it will happen not with a bang, but with a whimper. No great loss anyway, in the whole scheme of things. Unless you happen to be a live human at the time, of course.

Atwood created a new dystopia for Oryx and Crake.

My first conscious memory of reading Time magazine was at seven, when Squeaky Fromme tried to kill president Ford (though my father says I wouldn't let him have the issue with Big Bird on the cover that came to the house when I was two and a half). I remember people talking about Watergate and wondering how a gate could be made of fluid. I remember hearing about Mark Spitz, but no one said anything in front of me about the Israeli athletes. The Soviet Union was portrayed as the enemy, but also as bumbling fools. I think it's much scarier now than when I was a kid, given that the enemy could be anywhere and that the moron in the white house started World War III--don't give us any "long war" bullshit.

no worries shmegegge

Watch "Point Blank."

I remember Evel Knievel but the DC sniper had me ducking and weaving.

I second everything about growing up in the '80s. I remember the news about the Cold War and practicing for air raids at school.

Additionally, I grew up with immigrants so I knew people who had been through almost everything: relatives left behind in war-torn countries, parents murdered by militia or jailed without hope of release (if they were actually still alive), grandparents dead or permanently affected by concentration camps. Not even just in Germany. The Japanese-American camps, too.

Miko:

... never had the sense of orderliness that some people who came of age in the 50s and early 60s often speak of.

I agree. Yet I think there is orderliness in the world which is more subtle and always available to us.