Maybe someday, in some perfect future utopia where I am long dead, the vaunted generation known as “millennials” will finally experience self-awareness. Maybe they will finally uncover the reason why they are so vehemently despised by literally everyone who came before them.
Millennials are despised because of what they say online.
You know what’s a safer bet than millennials ever figuring this out, in a million generations? A sun hat filled with dog shit winning the Nobel Peace Prize. That’ll happen twice before they do.
For almost my entire life, all I ever really cared about was the movies. I was a kid in the late 1970s, when the best movies were made. When I produced my own movie in 2008, it was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. I used to fantasize in high school about seeing my name in scrolling film credits more often than I fantasized about banging any nubile you could name.
By the time I was twenty I had seen hundreds, maybe thousands of movies. Horror, sci-fi, drama, comedy, you name it. It was a point of pride for me. I wanted to know all there was to know about the medium of cinema. I couldn’t get enough.
I’m forty-seven now. I’ve seen roughly ten new movies in as many years. I don’t give a fuck about movies anymore.
I waste a lot of my time trying to understand why I want to die so badly. Why am I so eager to give up? What is this indefinable feeling I once loved about living, that’s gone now, with a howling void in its place?
Simple. A common positive experience of my early existence has been murdered. Odds are you were the one holding the knife. You pulled the trigger of the smoking gun.
Here’s what I’m talking about.
- In 1981, I attended three different birthday parties where we celebrated by going to a theater and seeing Time Bandits. Every one of us adored it and couldn’t wait to see it again. And again. And again.
- My father introduced me to Alien and The Shining when I was too young for either, for which I am eternally grateful to him. He also introduced me to Life of Brian, Caddyshack, Watership Down, and after I bugged him enough, 10.
- In the 1980s, having a VHS copy of any Star Wars or Indiana Jones movie made you more popular than having a swimming pool. I possessed a time-coded bootleg tape of Ghostbusters II, which attracted many new friends.
- In 1990, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas was my true graduation into real cinema and film. Every single person I knew had seen it, loved it, and quoted it incessantly.
You know what else came out in 1990? Steve Barron’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles adaptation. Let me guess- you’ve got an opinion on that one.
In the 1990s, superhero movies were a joke. Tim Burton’s Batman was buoyed by Jack Nicholson’s Joker and Burton’s past successes. Beyond that, it wrecked Michael Keaton’s career for over a decade. Jack Palance was in it because he couldn’t care less what he got paid to do. Keaton returned to the cowl for a sequel, then hung it up. Probably because classic Batman rogue “The Penguin” had been mutated into Danny DeVito in a revolting sponge suit.
Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy premiered in 1990, too. While Batman‘s production design had the late great Anton Furst, Dick Tracy had Richard Sylbert, making the adaptation a prestigious visual smorgasbord. Everything Batman did, Dick Tracy did better. (It didn’t have music by Prince, although the Sondheim tunes are wonderful.)
So right off the bat (sorry) you can see that the 1990s were the high point of comic book movies. Because there were only so many. They were special events. Not a fucking monopolistic industry run by people who don’t belong within ten miles of a movie theater.
Imagine if I were so ignorant and stupid that I backed up every opinion on this site with “I’m part of Generation X, after all.” Imagine if I was so dull and boring as a person that I had to constantly attach myself to a legion of strangers born roughly at the same time as I was. Why would you visit this site at all?
If I tell you my age or “generation”, it’s because I’m emphasizing that I was a child during these amazing moments in cinematic history. I was pliable and not at all cynical. I was lucky. And I was raised well enough by my parents that I want to share this joy, rather than selfishly keep it to myself until it dies with me.
That’s where I get the idea that I’m better than most people. Because I can demonstrate as much with no effort.
I’m doing it right now.
“Outrage culture” has validated anyone who vents their spleen on the Internet. Merit is an outdated, even disparaged value. It’s all about getting someone to click your link and expose themselves to your fevered id. Providing anything of actual substance is unnecessary. Just try to get people’s goat. That’s all that matters.
I cannot fathom the stupidity required to type out a thousand words claiming Marvel superhero movies are cinema. I don’t know how someone who considers Avengers: Endgame superior to Raging Bull operates a home computer. My impression of anyone who voices an opinion like that is of a shitting orangutan. If the writer is a “millennial”, how would they know? Calendar years are four-digit numbers. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for a dumbfuck.
Sometimes, when I am short on money, I consider walking into the path of a speeding train. It isn’t just that these so-called “millennials” are stupid; they are paid to write these astonishingly addlepated screeds about all the classics of cinema they find “problematic”. Why? Why should these opinions be monetarily legitimized?
So the millennials don’t kill themselves, because they can’t take even the slightest criticism or disagreement? Because they were never taught to deal with the very real possibility that they don’t matter? That in truth, no one does?
Get a load of this, folks. I am a lifelong expert on Star Wars. I am telling you, in my considered opinion, that every single Disney Star Wars movie is insulting garbage. Objectively bad. If you disagree with me, you are wrong. I am right. Tough tits.
Not only that- I have a right to be angry about what’s been done to Star Wars. I devoted almost my entire life to that fucking franchise. Disney took the heroes I idolized as a child and systematically humiliated and destroyed them. If you can’t create new ideas without annihilating the old ones, you goddamn don’t belong in Hollywood, or any form of gainful employment. You’re a bad person. You’re so devoid of imagination that all you can do is spite.
At this point, every single money-making movie franchise has been ruined by political correctness. If you disagree, then you don’t care. I don’t care about tampons (because I am a man and do not menstruate), but this doesn’t mean I’ll fight my way to the top of the tampon industry just so I can fuck with what works, and make women miserable just because I can.
Every single profitable franchise has been ruined by political
correctness. Every single one. Are you cool with that? Then drop dead.
Star Wars was the most profitable movie franchise in world history, and it was destroyed in less than a year. There was a trailer for the third part of Disney’s “trilogy”, and nobody cared except the dumb nerd who’s paid to cry about it. (No points for guessing which generation said nerd hails from.)
I don’t have words for the hatred I feel towards Disney. I don’t know how to make it go away. Almost everything that brought me joy as a child has been violated by these savage pieces of inhuman shit. They didn’t just ruin Star Wars for me; they made me embarrassed to have ever liked it in the first place. I think about it and feel ashamed. It hurts me.
And on top of this comes the recent revelation that nearly every single personality in Tinseltown is a rapist, pedophile, or has been previously raped. If not, they’re in the midst of an ugly public breakdown over Donald Trump, whom they would eagerly murder in cold blood. These are the kind of people who tell me I’m stupid for taking Star Wars so seriously.
Why should any of this occupy a place in my life anymore?
I don’t go see movies, alone or with friends. No one I know really bothers. Everyone has a negative experience that keeps them far away from a theater. Time was, the worst thing you had to deal with was someone talking or eating popcorn too loudly during the movie. Now you can be mowed down by gunfire. Or raped, I’m sure; after all, we live in a “rape culture”, don’t we? That’s what the articles written by millennials all claim. I can’t remember the last time I went to the grocery store where I wasn’t raped, while every woman visible in daylight was being raped at the same time. Gee whiz, this “rape culture”, amirite? It’s a real strain on the ol’ poop chute. Imagine if we lived in Saudi Arabia!
If you are a millennial, by all means, continue to inform the rest of the world. Remind us all that you’re too young to have the experiences we’ve had, and that you’re too young to have developed any wisdom. Then prove it by writing posts and articles about how everyone else is dumber than you. Be sure and rave about how you got your jollies watching a man in a superhero suit flop around in front of a green screen for three hours. Tell us all how wrong we are about James Gunn’s incessant and inappropriate pedophile jokes. Tell us how we just don’t get it.
I’m older than you, I’m smarter than you, and I’m telling you this; the one who doesn’t “get it” is you.
Don’t forget to turn out the lights before you leave. The rest of us have already left the building, long, long ago.
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