Now, I realize The Empire Strikes Back was not the first movie all future Gen Xers saw. I was eight when I saw Empire, and I distinctly remember that a lot of my classmates had already seen Star Wars (or at least its first theatrical rerelease) and of course they all loved it, mostly because little kids are stupid. But Empire was the first movie that people born in the early seventies could understand in a way that went outside of its rudimentary plot-line. And that’s why a movie about the good guys losing—both politically and romantically—is so integral to how people my age look at life.
When sociologists and journalists started writing about the sensibilities that drove Gen Xers, they inevitably used words like angst-ridden and disenfranchised and lost. As of late, it’s become popular to suggest that this was a flawed stereotype, perpetuated by an aging media who didn’t understand the emerging underclass.
Actually, everyone was right the first time.
All those original pundits were dead-on; for once, the media managed to define an entire demographic of Americans with absolute accuracy. Everything said about Gen Xers—both positive and negative—was completely true. Twenty-somethings in the nineties rejected the traditional working-class American lifestyle because (a) they were smart enough to realize those values were unsatisfying, and (b) they were totally fucking lazy. Twenty-somethings in the nineties embraced a record like Nirvana’s Nevermind because (a) it was a sociocultural affront to the vapidity of the Reagan-era paradigm, and (b) it fucking rocked. Twenty-somethings in the nineties were by and large depressed about the future, mostly because (a) they knew there was very little to look forward to, and (b) they were obsessed with staring into the eyes of their own self-absorbed sadness. There are no myths about Generation X. It’s all true.
This being the case, it’s clear that Luke Skywalker was the original Gen Xer. For one thing, he was incessantly whiny. For another, he was exhaustively educated—via Yoda—about things that had little practical value (i.e., how to stand on one’s head while lifting a rock telekinetically). Essentially, Luke went to the University of Dagobah with a major in Buddhist philosophy and a minor in physical education. There’s not a lot of career opportunities for that kind of schooling; that’s probably why he dropped out in the middle of the semester. Meanwhile, Luke’s only romantic aspirations are directed toward a woman who (literally) looks at him like a brother. His dad is on his case to join the family business. Most significantly, all the problems in his life can be directly blamed on the generation that came before him, and specifically on his father’s views about what to believe (i.e., respect authority, dress conservatively, annihilate innocent planets, etc.).
Studied objectively, Luke Skywalker was not very cool. But for kids who saw Empire, Luke was The Man. He was the guy we wanted to be. Retrospectively, we’d like to claim Han Solo was the single-most desirable character—and he was, in theory. But Solo’s brand of badass cool is something you can’t understand until you’re old enough to realize that being an arrogant jerk is an attractive male quality. Third-graders didn’t want to be gritty and misunderstood; third-graders wanted to be Mark Hamill. And even though obsessive thirty-year-old fans of the trilogy hate to admit it, these were always kids’ movies. Lucas is not a Coppola or a Scorsese or even a De Palma—he makes movies that a sleepy eight-year-old can appreciate.[53] That’s his gift, and he completely admits it. “I wanted to make a kids’ film that would … introduce a kind of basic morality,” Lucas told author David Sheff. And because the Star Wars movies were children’s movies, Hamill had to be the center of the story. Any normal child was going to be drawn to Skywalker more than Solo. That’s the personality we swallowed. So when all the eight-year-olds from 1980 turned twenty-one in 1993, we couldn’t evolve. We were just old enough to be warped by childhood and just young enough not to realize it. Suddenly, we all wanted to be Han Solo. But we were stuck with Skywalker problems.
There’s a scene late in The Empire Strikes Back where Luke and Vader are having their epic light-saber duel, and one particular shot is filmed from behind Mark Hamill. Within the context of this shot, Darth Vader is roughly twice the physical size of Luke; obviously, the filmmakers are trying to illustrate a point about the massive size of the Empire and the relative impotence of the fledgling Jedi. Not surprisingly, they all go a bit overboard: Vader’s head appears larger than Luke’s entire torso, which sort of overextends any suspension of disbelief a rational adult might harbor. But to a wide-eyed youngster, that image looked completely reasonable: If Vader is Luke’s father (as we would learn minutes later), then Vader should seem as big as your dad.
As the scene continues, Luke is driven out onto a catwalk, where he loses his right hand and is informed that he’s the heir to the intergalactic Osama bin Laden. He more or less tries to commit suicide. Now, Luke is saved from this fate (of course), and since this is a movie, logic tells us that (of course) Vader will fall in the next installment of the series, even though it will take three years to get there. This is all understood. But that understanding is an adult understanding. As an eight-year-old, the final message of The Empire Strikes Back felt remarkably hopeless: Luke’s a good person, but Luke still lost. And it wasn’t like the end of Rocky, where Apollo Creed wins the split decision but Rocky wins a larger victory for the human spirit; Darth Vader beats Luke the way Ike used to beat Tina. A psychologist once told me that—over the span of her entire career—she had never known a man who didn’t have some kind of creepy, unresolved issue with his father. She told me that’s just an inherent part of being male. And here we have a movie where the hero is fighting every ideology he hates, gets his ass kicked, and is then informed, “Oh, and by the way: I’m your dad. But you knew that all along.”
In this same scene, Darth Vader tells Skywalker he has to make a decision: He can keep fighting a war he will probably lose, or he can compromise his ethics and succeed wildly. Many young adults face a similar decision after college, and those seen as “responsible” inevitably choose the latter path. However, an eight-year-old would never sell out. Little kids will always take the righteous option. And what’s intriguing about Gen Xers is they never really wavered from that decision. Luke’s quandary in The Empire Strikes Back is exactly like the situation facing Winona Ryder in 1994’s Reality Bites: Should she stick with the nice, sensible guy who treats her well (Ben Stiller), or should she roll the dice with the frustrating boho bozo who treats her like crap (Ethan Hawke)? For a detached adult, that answer seems obvious; for people who were twenty-one when this move came out, the answer was just as obvious but completely different. As we all know, Winona went with Hawke. She had to. When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed Reality Bites, I recall them complaining that Ryder picked the wrong guy; as far as I could tell, choosing the wrong guy was the whole point.
You don’t often see Reality Bites mentioned as an important (or even as a particularly good) film, but it grows more seminal with every passing year. When it was originally released, all its Gap jokes and AIDS fears and Lisa Loeb songs merely seemed like marketing strategies and ephemeral stabs at insight. However, it’s amazing how one film so completely captured every hyper-conventional ideal of such a short-lived era; Reality Bites is a period piece in the best sense of the term. And in the same way I have a special place in my heart for the first film I saw inside a movie house, I reserve a special place in my consciousness for the first film so unabashedly directed toward the condition of my own life. I was graduating from college the spring Reality Bites was released, and—though it didn’t necessarily seem like a movie about me—it was clearly a movie for me. Eighteen months earlier, everyone I knew had seen Cameron Crowe’s Singles, which we initially viewed as a youth movie. When we went back and rented Singles in the summer of 1994, I was suddenly struck by how old its cast seemed. I mean, they had full-time jobs and wanted to get married and have babies. Singles was just a normal romantic comedy that happened to have Soundgarden on the soundtrack. Reality Bites was an equally mediocre movie, but it validated a lot of mediocre lives, most notably my own. As I stated earlier, all the clichés about Gen Xers were true—but the point everyone failed to make was that our whole demographic was comprised of cynical optimists. Whenever my circa-1993 friends and I would sit around and discuss the future, there was always the omnipresent sentiment that the world was on the decline, but we were somehow destined to succeed individually. Everyone felt they would somehow be the exception within an otherwise grim universe. This is why Ryder had to pick Hawke. Winona made the kind of romantic decision most people my age would have made in 1994: She pursued a path that was difficult and depressing, and she did so because it showed the slightest potential for transcendence. Not coincidentally, this is also the Jedi’s path. Adventure? Excitement? The Jedi craves not these things. However, he does crave something greater than the bloodless existence of his father. Quite simply, Winona Ryder is Luke Skywalker, only with a better haircut and a killer rack.
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2. Case in point: When