Garden State seems like a Gen X movie to me. It’s from 2004 so it’s a little bit after the films being named, but the main characters are 26 years old so they’re late Gen X-ers.
Yes, Swingers is a good one for this list!
ETA: Oh, Office Space would work, too. Came out in 1999, but definitely has a Gen X vibe to it; the characters are certainly Gen Xers in it, and not Millennials.
I wonder what the record for “most careers launched by a movie” in the Gen X genre is?
I was going to guess Reality Bites, but not really as many as I was expecting; Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke were known before that movie. I don’t think you can say Ben Stiller’s career was really taken off by that movie. So that leaves us with Janeane Garofalo, Renee Zellwegger, and Steve Zahn and, for extra soundtrack points, Lisa Loeb, who wasn’t in the picture but her song sure was. (Note that I am not saying the movie was the FIRST movie for those people – it was not, in the case of the actors - just that it was arguably the performance that really got them going.) Not bad. Can any top that?
The Lost Boys
Um, a lot of us actually weren’t quite teens yet in any part of the 80s. This in mind, my recs are probably most representative of those of us who are from the youngest end of Gen X…though approximately the same age as part of the main cast of Empire Records.
Go
Drive Me Crazy
Clueless
Some Kind of Wonderful (or are the “kids” too old here? 2 of the 3 stars were born in 1961)
Trojan War
American Pie
She’s All That
Dangerous Minds
The Last Supper
The Faculty
Scream
.
.
.
Kids
Nowhere
The Doom Generation
I would consider them Generation Y, but I love your list of movies. Particularly Go.
Millennials/Gen Y didn’t begin until the early 80s by virtually all definitions of both Gen X and Millennials; there is that one guy who thinks the generation is only 12 years long and from 1964-1976, and people who think micro-generations (i.e. Xennials born from 1977-1983) supersede the regular generations, but other than that…
Actually, I would consider many of those right at the very edge of Gen X. For me, the cutoff is around 1981. American Pie just sneaks in. Clueless is definitely fine. Kids is right on the cusp. I considered mentioning it, but it may be more early Millennial that late Xer. I mean, these things don’t have hard cut-offs, anyway. It’s all a continuum, and there’s a new term for the cuspers—what the hell is it-- I have to look this up … Xennials–that’s it. (ETA: Actually, I just had to literally look up, i.e. the post above, to see that, but I missed it as I was typing this reply before it was posted.) Defined as '77 through '85 it looks like. My brother was born in '81, and he’s definitely much more an Xer than a Millennial, at least from my perspective. I was born '75, and always thought of myself as a later Xer. To me, the middle of the generation was born around 1970.
I’ll be flabbergasted if it isn’t Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The movie isn’t great, but the cast list is filled to the brim with future stars.
Friday
Footloose would be another I supose.
Don’t forget that movie culture was extremely vanilla/conformist around this time period. A lot of the films now considered edgy classics were initially drowned out by much more popular movies.
The real buzz around that time centered on … Kevin Costner 3-hour epics, Danny DeVito comedies, generic action films starring Stallone/Schwarzenegger/Seagal, the Lambada, Coppola’s Dracula movie, etc… all stuff that’s been deservedly forgotten by now.
How could I forget the “buddy-cop” comedy … Turner & Hooch or Stop or My Mom Will Shoot could sum up the typical Gen-X movie experience by themselves.
Repo Man
I stand corrected. For whatever reason, I thought “Generation Y” was the generation between Generation X and Millenials, but it appears that “Generation Y” and Millenials refer to the same generation. And Millenials definitely weren’t born in the late 70s, which would be the cutoff of not quite being a teenager at any time in the 80s. (Which is what I responded to with “I would consider those Generation Y.”)
It’s all made up, but for whatever it’s worth, wiki implies the following cutoffs. Each individual generation page lists things like “early 90s” instead of specific years, and they overlap sometimes by more than a decade, but putting them all together yields:
1946 - 1964 Baby Boomers
1964 - 1982 Generation X
1982 - 1996 Millenials / Generation Y
1997 - 2??? Generation Z
It kind of feels like we’re approaching the end of the era where we arbitrarily delimit and name generations. I mean, come on, Generation Z? Really?
There’s also this page that lists the end years as 1964 (boomers), 1979 (Gen X), 1994 (Millenials), 2015 (Gen Z), which is pretty close to the above list.
If Gen X starts in 1964, add 16 years to get to prime teenage year and look at releases from 1980. From a list off IMDb:
- The Shining
- Airplane!
- The Blues Brothers
- Caddyshack
- Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
- The Blue Lagoon
- Friday the 13th
- Cannibal Holocaust
- Flash Gordon
- Raging Bull
1-5 are ones people will remember. 6 … ugh. 7 maybe. 8 & 9 what? 10 should be remembered by old Gen Xers but probably isn’t.
Further down the list are things like Altered States and The Gods Must Be Crazy. No way would those be considered Gen Xer movies.
The goalposts have to be better defined here.
No, it takes some time for there to be a consensus around generation names. The name “Generation X” didn’t really solidify until the early-to-mid-90s (thanks to Douglas Copeland’s book). Most Xers were already in their 20s by then, some knocking on 30s. Before “Generation X,” “Baby Busters” was probably the most popular appellation for us. Also, “13th Gen” (as used by sociologists Strauss and Howe, and defined as the group born from 1961-1981, years I more agree with than other cutoff dates). There was also “MTV Generation” and some other ones I’m forgetting.
Similarly, during that time, once Gen X gained traction and won the popularity contest, the following generation didn’t have a name, so we went with Gen(eration) Y for awhile, until circa the early-mid-2000s or so, media and popular usage began coalescing around the term “Millennials.” Gen Z, I assume, is a similar placeholder for the moment. I expect in the next 10 years, another popular name will fill in. Right now, the most common one I’ve heard is iGeneration; I’ve also heard the Centennials, as well as the Homeland Generation.
What was the name of the generation before Baby Boomers? Not what we call it now, but rather what they called it in the 60s and 70s, after it was well established. (Like Generation X by the mid-90s.)
The Silent Generation
ETA: I don’t know if that’s what they called it that then. I don’t know if they named generations before the Boomers.