Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

by Chuck Klosterman

  12 Sulking with Lisa Loeb on the Ice Planet Hoth 1:41

  It’s become cool to like Star Wars, which actually means it’s totally uncool to like Star Wars. I think you know what I mean by this: There was a time in our very recent history when it was “interestin g” to be a Star Wars fan. It was sort of like admitting you masturbate twice a day, or that your favorite band was They Might Be Giants. Star Wars was something everyone of a certain age secretly loved but never openly recognized; I don’t recall anyone talking about Star Wars in 1990, except for that select class of über geeks who consciously embraced their sublime nerdiness four years before the advent of Weezer (you may recall that these were also the first people who told you about the Internet). But that era has passed; suddenly it seems like everyone born between 1963 and 1975 will gleefully tell you how mind-blowingly important the Star Wars trilogy was to their youth, and it’s slowly become acceptable to make Wookie jokes without the fear of alienation. This is probably Kevin Smith’s fault.

  What’s interesting about this evolution is that the value of a movie like Star Wars was vastly underrated at the time of its release and is now vastly overrated in retrospect. In 1977, few people realized this film would completely change the culture of filmmaking, inasmuch as this was the genesis of all those blockbuster movies that everyone gets tricked into seeing summer after summer after summer. Star Wars changed the social perception of what a movie was supposed to be; George Lucas, along with Steven Spielberg, managed to kill the best era of American filmmaking in less than five years. Yet—over time—Star Wars has become one of the most overrated films of all time, inasmuch as it’s pretty fucking terrible when you actually try to watch it. Star Wars’s greatest asset is that it’s inevitably compared to 1983’s Return of the Jedi, quite possibly the least-watchable major film of the last twenty-five years. I once knew a girl who claimed to have a recurring dream about a polar bear that mauled Ewoks; it made me love her.

  However, the middle film in the Star Wars trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back, remains a legitimately great picture—but not for any cinematic reason. It’s great for thematic, social reasons. It’s now completely obvious that The Empire Strikes Back was the seminal foundation for what became “Generation X.”1 In a roundabout way, Boba Fett created Pearl Jam. While movies like Easy Rider and Saturday Night Fever painted living portraits for generations they represented in the present tense, The Empire Strikes Back might be the only example of a movie that set the social aesthetic for a generation coming in the future. The narrative extension to The Empire Strikes Back was not the Endor-saturated stupidity of Return of the Jedi; it was Reality Bites.

  I concede that part of my bias toward Empire probably comes from the fact that it was the first movie I ever saw in a theater. This is a seminal experience for anyone, and I suppose it unconsciously shapes the way a person looks at cinema (I initially assumed all theatrical releases were prefaced by an expository text block that was virtually incomprehensible). The film was set in three static locations: The ice planet Hoth (which looked like North Dakota), the jungle system Dagobah (which was sort of like the final twenty minutes of Apocalypse Now), and the mining community of Cloud City (apparently a cross between Las Vegas and Birmingham, Alabama). It’s often noted by critics that this is the only Star Wars film that ends on a stridently depressing note: Han Solo is frozen in carbonite and torn away from Princess Leia, Luke gets his paw hacked off, and Darth Vader has the universe by the jugular. The Empire Strikes Back is the only blockbuster of the modern era to celebrate the abysmal failure of its protagonists. This is important; this is why The Empire Strikes Back set the philosophical template for all the slackers who would come of age ten years later. George Lucas built the army of clones that would eventually be led by Richard Linklater.

  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.2 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 massiv
e 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.

  Part of the reason so many critics think The Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars movie is just a product of how theater works: Empire is the second act of a three-act production, and the second act is usually the best part. The second act contains the conflict. And as someone born in the summer of 1972, I’ve sort of come to realize I’m part of a second-act generation. The most popular three-act play of the twentieth century is obvious: The Depression (Act I), World War II (Act II), and the sock-hop serenity of Richie Cunningham’s 1950s (Act III). The narrative arc is clear. But the play containing my life is a little more amorphous and a little less exciting, and test audiences are mixed: The first act started in 1962 and has a lot of good music and weird costumes, but the second act was poorly choreographed. Half the cast ran in place while the other half just sat around in coffee-houses, and we all tried to figure out what we were supposed to do with a society that had more media than intellect (and more irony than personality). Maybe the curtain on Act II fell with the World Trade Center. And as I look back at the best years of my life, I find myself wondering if maybe I wasn’t unconsciously conditioned to exist somewhere in the middle of two better stories, caught between the invention of the recent past and the valor of the coming future. Personally, I don’t think I truly understand invention or valor; they seem like pursuits that would require a light saber.

  Within the circuits of my mind, the moments in The Empire Strikes Back I most adore are whenever Yoda gives his little Vince Lombardi speeches, often explaining that—in life—there is no inherent value to effort. “Do, or do not,” says the greenish Muggsy Bogues. “There is no try.” And that’s an inspiring sentiment. It’s the kind of logic that drives the world. But in my heart of hearts, the part of the film I can’t shake is when Luke Skywalker and Han Solo are riding around Hoth on tauntans, which are (for all practical purposes) bipedal space horses. When things get rough, Han Solo cuts open the belly of a tauntan and stuffs Luke inside the carcass; he saves him from a raging blizzard by encasing him in a cocoon of guts. I assume we’re supposed to find this clever and disgusting (or maybe even inventive and heroic). But I just know I’d rather be inside the belly of the beast.

  1. I know nobody uses the term Generation X anymore, and I know all the people it supposedly describes supposedly hate the supposed designation. But I like it. It’s simply the easiest way to categorize a genre of people who were born between 1965 and 1977 and therefore share a similar cultural experience. It’s not pejorative or complimentary; it’s factual. I’m a “Gen Xer,” okay? And I buy shit marketed to “Gen Xers.” And I use air quotes when I talk, and I sigh a lot, and I own a Human League cassette. Get over it.

  2. Case in point: When Episode I—The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, all the adults who waited in line for seventy-two hours to buy opening-night tickets were profoundly upset at the inclusion of Jar Jar Binks. “He’s annoying,” they said. Well, how annoying would R2D2 have seemed if you hadn’t been in the third fucking grade? Viewed objectively, R2D2 is like a dwarf holding a Simon.

  So I’m eating supper in a Kentucky Fried Chicken, and this crazy old woman who looks like a disheveled version of Minnie Pearl taps me on the shoulder and asks, “Can you buy me some chicken?” I, of course, say, “What?” Be
cause this does not seem like an appropriate question. She asks again, “Can you buy me some chicken?” This time I flatly say no. Then she changes her query and asks, “Can I have a dollar to buy me some chicken?” I again decline, and she skulks away, exiting the establishment and camping out in front of the KFC sign on the sidewalk.

  Ten minutes later, I finish the last nibble of my buttermilk biscuit, all the while watching this old woman through the window. She continues to unsuccessfully panhandle. As I leave the restaurant and begin walking home, I pass this woman and she stops me again. “Can you buy me some chicken?” she asks. Again I say, “What?” She proceeds to repeat her question, and—upon my silence—asks if she can instead have a dollar to buy some chicken for herself.

  To me, this just seems like a poor business philosophy. I realize street people don’t really provide a “service,” per se, but—if you had to quantify what they do contribute into some kind of discernible social role—the most flattering description might be that they make us feel like we’re part of a civilization. They are part of the urban landscape, they are reminders of how life is wicked, and they are profiles in courage.

  Or at least they could be profiles in courage, if they weren’t so goddamn inconsiderate. How can you not remember talking to me, old woman? It’s not like you’re haunted by career responsibilities and bombarded by stimuli; in the past ten minutes, you’ve merely asked random strangers for free chicken. Is recalling that I’ve already declined to give you my charity too much to ask? Must you treat me like a complete stranger? As members of the same civilization, can I not expect the courtesy of a knowing glance when you beg for chicken a second time?