Les Enfants Terribles

Scott Hardie | April 15, 2018
I recently saw this trailer. When the title came up at the end, I was shocked that it wasn't related to the X-Men. Between The New Mutants and The Gifted and Runaways and Logan, the recent X-Men productions have leaned heavily on the persecution of teens by government agents or other institutions, who hunt the kids and try to lock them up. Fox is apparently so eager for more of this sort of thing that they're making non-X-Men movies with the same concept.

What I can't figure out is, what is it about this cultural moment we're living in that has sparked this fad? Teens with super-powers is an old genre, and it continues to be done without the persecution. But so many productions at once focusing on the persecution angle makes me wonder if there's something new and particular about the teenaged experience these days that prompted this. Metal detectors and zero-tolerance policies in schools? Government crackdowns on free speech? Teen-bashing intensifying? I can't put my finger on it.

Erik Bates | April 19, 2018
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Scott Hardie | April 21, 2018
Yeah, anyone who starts bashing millennials immediately loses credibility to me. Besides the fact that generational labels are pointless and wrong and their boundaries are arbitrary, I don't find it useful to lump together tens of millions of people as though they all have one personality. Plus, people often talk about millennials like they're still teenagers; most millennials are well into their twenties and thirties by now. Amy Schumer, Tom Hiddleston, and Eli Manning are all millennials, for crying out loud.

Erik Bates | April 21, 2018
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Scott Hardie | April 22, 2018
We didn't even group people into generations until these jerks came along. There were the Baby Boomers, because the sheer size of the baby boom gave them such disproportionate clout, but otherwise there was no need to group people arbitrarily by birth year until we all latched onto Strauss and Howe's idea in the early 1990s.

I was born in 1978, supposedly at the tail end of Generation X. Who's to say that you Erik, and me, and other people born around the same time as us, aren't a "generation" unto ourselves? You could pick any 20-year span and declare that the people born in it are likely to possess certain traits because of certain historical events or cultural movements that happened during their lives. I call bullshit on the legitimacy of the commonly-accepted "generations," and thus on the whole idea of "generations." You can arbitrarily pick any trait and say that people who have it must have similar personalities because of their shared experience, but that doesn't make it true. Red-haired people are either "feisty" or are sick of being called "feisty" or are sick of being called "gingers," right? Or maybe they're all individuals who have their own personalities and identities, and it would be pointless and irrational and disrespectful to treat them monolithically.

Kelly and I grew up only a year apart and a neighborhood apart, but we have found that we have almost entirely different pop-culture memories from childhood. It wasn't even a gender thing; we legitimately watched different shows and played different games and remember different events. I don't want to say that our experience is universal, just to say that counter-examples are readily available.

I got into a disagreement with my boss about this. While I was at an industry conference, one of the keynotes was about communication, and it turned into a breakdown of generations and how we should modify our manner of communication with people based on their birth year. (An example of how dumb it was: On the chart of generations, there was a column of "heroes," and for Generation X the only item was Michael Jordan. I had no idea that every single American born in the 1960s and 1970s considered Michael Jordan their personal hero!) Overall the conference was good and I said so to my boss, but when I mocked this one speech for its uselessness, he rebuked me, saying that talking to people differently based on who they are, such as people in different departments at the company, is an essential communication skill. Well, no shit! You're kidding! Obviously if I'm talking to someone in Development or someone in Sales or someone in Accounting, they're going to have different knowledge sets and I'm going to have to explain certain things to provide context. But the universal way to approach them all is with polite manners and respect for their intelligence, not to play sorting games and talk down to them because they fall into an arbitrary category. (Example from the conference keynote: "Millennials want to make the world better, so to get them to agree to your request, frame it as a way to improve things for other people." Gag me.) Putting people into a box and talking down to them accordingly causes resentment, and is just plain wrong.

Sorry for the rant. Apparently this is a sore subject for me. :-)

Erik Bates | April 23, 2018
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Scott Hardie | July 6, 2018
NPR has a good story about dystopian fiction and why teens like it. It's close enough to persecution fiction to answer my question, I think.

Samir Mehta | July 6, 2018
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Scott Hardie | July 6, 2018
Because we live in a very deeply fucked-up time and place?

Scott Hardie | June 24, 2020
Here's a small sign that the next generation of kids will fantasize about a utopia instead, because they're actually living through some dark dystopian stuff already. :-(

Samir Mehta | June 24, 2020
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