Have you ever noticed that characters in movies and TV tend to follow the zeitgeist of their times more closely than any real person? Everyone in college during the 60s was a hippie, as an example. As a thought experiment, I’ve tried to imagine the most clichéd life I could, without going all Forest Gump.
We start with a white male, born in a suburb of New York City, West Chester maybe.
Born: 1949. His father is a World War Two veteran who works at a big advertising agency in the city. His mother is a housewife who wears pearls while vacuuming. His childhood is straight “Leave it to Beaver” suburbia.
At age 14, in 1963 he watches the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, and starts playing guitar.
At age 18, he leaves for college- Berkley, just in time for the 1967 Summer of Love. He becomes a Hippie.
In 1969, he’s back home in New York and attends Woodstock.
By the early 70s, he’s graduated, living in New York City and has an entry level job at a financial firm. At night, he goes to clubs, and soon is heavily into Disco.
His career progresses, and by the go-go 80s he’s wearing suits with suspenders and power ties, doing big deals with the Japanese- until Black Monday, 1987. He’s 38, and wiped out. Time to head west and get in touch with an old friend in the computer business.
Silicon Valley, he’s not technical, so he works on the business side of various software firms, until the dotcom bubble bursts in 2001.
So that’s what I’ve got so far. Leave it to Beaver, Hippie, Disco, Yuppie, Dotcom. Anything else that should go in there? Any alternative life paths?
That’s one of the many possible such lives. Changing the starting conditions - he’s born on a farm, or he’s black, or she’s a girl, would each generate their own sets of clichés.
That’s what you get for skimming Wikipedia. Sullivan apparently saw a mob of Beatles fans in London in 63, which led to their appearance on his show in 64.
In terms of substance abuse, he smoked weed in the 60’s and 70’s switched to cocaine in the 80’s, but got involved with some sort of popular self-help thing in the late 80’s/early 90’s
If he didn’t get killed in 9/11, I would say he becomes a hyper-paranoid Bush voter afterwards, but gets disillusioned as the war in Iraq starts to resemble Vietnam.
