I am both a Gen-Xer and a middle child, so that’s a whole bundle of insecurity and abandonment issues. Are we the first generation being reported to the authorities for attempting to raise our children with the independence we ourselves had as children? It’s possible. And super frustrating. Still, what’s definitely true is that we are, for the most part, a generation completely invisible to pop culture, which focuses on the conflict between our parents and our children or our younger siblings, depending where in Gen X we fall and how young we had kids.
In the early days of their existence, Millennials were actually called Gen-Y, as the generation that followed X. Still, the “X” was as much because no one at the time knew how to define us as anything else, and that never changed. We were a generation with unexplored potential, and no one knew what would happen with us. And they still don’t; I think most of us are now resigned to the idea that the Boomers will have to die before people notice us, and then it will be to blame us for things. Which will remain the Boomers’ fault, because while it’s true that they didn’t start the fire, they do have this tendency to pour gasoline on it.
When the Simpson children were still Gen-X—remember those days?—the word “meh” was developed to describe our feelings toward things. We developed cynical detachment in part to deal with the fact that we already felt neglected. It’s not their fault both our parents were starting to need to work to keep roofs over our heads; it’s certainly not wrong that they were able to divorce and end bad marriages. But of course these things shaped us. Pop culture throwbacks appealed to us because it returned us to a time when we actually felt safe and cared for.
A show I loved was literally canceled for appealing primarily to my demographic, because they didn’t want our viewership. They were hoping for a younger audience, so they made a different show. It was about high school students, so why didn’t it appeal more to high school students? Why did it appeal to middle-aged women who were being reminded of their own happier days surrounded by their friend groups and also, if I’m any judge—and if I’m not, what am I even doing here—of My So-Called Life? I mean, it’s not as though most of my generation has any money anyway, I guess.
We did produce Kevin Smith, it’s true, and so there is a certain Gen-X voice involved in film. There are definitely prominent people in the industry from our generation. But mostly they are making either Big Budget Hollywood Movies that don’t really have a generational voice or else they are, well, calling back in pop culture. In case you’re curious, Quentin Tarantino was born in 1963 and is therefore, technically at least, a Boomer. Jordan Peele was born in 1979 and therefore is one of us, but he’s in that weird cusp area where how you identify tells people a lot about where you lived as a kid. Kevin Smith specifically speaks to Gen-X; Michael Bay very much does not.
We grew up watching Saturday-morning cartoons and drinking from the hose and riding our bikes in the streets. We also grew up letting ourselves into empty houses and watching TV because there was no one there to stop us. We grew up at least in part on the pop culture of our elders in a way that I think is foreign to every other generation—early cable didn’t so much have paid programming as syndicated shows, so while I did watch a ton of Darkwing Duck, I also watched a ton of Gilligan’s Island. In the early days, Nickelodeon played Lassie in the middle of the day, not new shows they’d made themselves. Our pop culture voice sounds a lot like the Boomers’ because we grew up consuming their media. But we’re still here.
