We Can't Even: Millenials on Film

Last week, the Brooklyn Academy of Music wrapped up its two-week series, We Can’t Even: Millennials on Film — a retrospective that chronicled the experiences of young people in films released over the last sixteen years. According to programmer Ashley Clark, the series’ aim was “to complicate one-dimensional narratives of a complex generation,” and featured a wide-ranging set of movies covering subjects from various socioeconomic and international backgrounds.

To this reviewer’s knowledge, this is the first time a New York-based film organization has hazarded to represent my generation through an official series, and — from a certain perspective — it’s a bit overdue. Defined as having been born between 1981 and 1996, millennials have been part of the American workforce for two decades; today, the oldest of us is thirty-eight while the youngest is only twenty-two. That age discrepancy reveals the limits of generational classifications (some millennials have only been able to vote for four years and were toddlers at the time of Clinton’s impeachment), but given how frequently we speak of them/ourselves, it’s only appropriate that the term “millennial” be given a chance to stand on its own two feet.

I feel that the significance of this series can’t be underestimated: it affords us young folk an opportunity to evaluate our origins, to address the sociocultural narrative attached to us and consider the story we are writing for ourselves. It is a touchstone; we can’t even, perhaps, but we sure ought to try.

Given its generational bent, the most conspicuous titles of We Can’t Even are those which imply a definitive portrait of early life: i.e., Boyhood and Girlhood (2014). Released the same year, these movies are burdened with an almost unfair disadvantage — I say “almost,” because anyone who evokes childhood as a generic experience deserves some measure of grief. (The titles also feel increasingly regressive in light of current cultural efforts to dismantle gender binaries). However, the vastly different worlds these films replicate — that of a white boy (Ellar Coltrane) in suburban Austin, and a black girl (Karidja Touré) in working class Paris — nicely illustrate the inclusive mindset of not only this series but this generation in general.

Still, Boyhood and Girlhood are contrived ideas of youth, based upon what their non-millennial filmmakers have lived or read; and though their historic or cultural reference points are time-accurate, these movies don’t feature the applied perspective of children who were raised during the era. The same can be said of Mean Girls (2004), which remains a pop culture staple for American millennials even as it works from a genre — the teen comedy — that was specifically a product of the 1980s.

Mean Girls starred Lindsay Lohan, whose work is further represented in this series by I Know Who Killed Me (2007) — her critically-lambasted attempt to take on more “mature” roles. Both these movies were made by filmmakers who imposed their cinematic visions or fantasies onto a younger generation; they could have been made at any time, with any child. The lasting tragedy of Lindsay Lohan is that of the sacrificial lamb: she flailed and floundered so the rest of us could claim a martyr and sail on.

Of course, some filmmakers in this series were not projecting personal fetishes onto millennial bodies but were responding to issues grounded in our lived reality: in Elephant (2003), Gus Van Sant cracked open the Columbine shooting and created an existential panorama of the American middle class; Beach Rats (‘17) is Eliza Hittman’s exposé of the intersection between queer sexuality and toxic masculinity; and with The Bling Ring (‘13), Sophia Coppola offered a languid glance into the vacuous ennui that fuels celebrity culture and material obsession.

The most nuanced and meaningful example of this kind of movie is Margaret, written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan. Filmed fourteen years ago yet not released until 2011, it stars Anna Paquin as a self-centered New York high schooler who witnesses a terrible traffic accident and ultimately feels responsible for it. Drawing from the trauma of 9/11, Lonergan’s film stands as a gorgeous allegory for millennials’ relationship to the first major international crisis of their lives. Margaret depicts a world of people too caught up in their own business to adequately negotiate loss, or to lead one another to healing. High school doesn’t end, kids, Lonergan seems to say. No one out here knows what they’re doing.

Part in parcel with representing millennials has come the elevation of typically marginalized identities. One of the great political coups in Hollywood of the last ten years was the Best Picture win for Moonlight (2016), a movie that not only centered on a queer black man but permitted his surrounding world to be defined exclusively by other black people. It was programmed for this series alongside other LGBTQ+ works like Tangerine (‘15), Wildness and Mosquita y Mari (both 2012); perhaps the most meaningful accomplishment of this generation so far has been our readiness to declare and embrace queer points of view.

It’s a change that has closely mirrored the rise of social media: if millennials are emerging as a politically active generation, it’s because of the revolutionary influence of digital technology. I remember believing, at the start of this decade, that The Social Network (2010) would be our definitive movie; that opinion still stands, though I now think its concern over the potentially antisocial nature of Facebook has been offset by the far more vital threat to personal privacy. On that note, Citizenfour (‘14) — Laura Poitras’ real-time documentation of Edward Snowden’s unveiling of NSA wiretapping — is the most invigorating and urgent film in this series. It, along with Whose Streets (‘17) — Sabaah Folayan’s galvanizing time capsule of the Ferguson protests — inspires the conviction that cinema’s future lies not in fictional narrative but documentary.

Narrative features can still pack a punch, though. That’s certainly true of Personal Shopper (2016), my favorite movie so far this century: a genre-defiant ghost story/psychological thriller that doubles as an ode to the transcendent discomfort and aching grief that accompanies any process of self-discovery. It stars Kristen Stewart — a person who, along with Lohan, Coltrane, Paquin and Emma Watson, has literally grown up before her contemporaries’ eyes. Seeing her go from Panic Room (‘02) to Twilight (‘08) to Personal Shopper has been to see ourselves step into maturity and adulthood. Stewart’s onscreen presence has offered more than mere entertainment: it’s served as a cultural enigma of our collective becoming. The inclusion of all these actors’ work in this series is critical and sacred.

So far, this essay has focused on the depiction of millennials onscreen; it must be acknowledged, though, that a cinema which is merely about a generation cannot be fully representative of that generation — not til the youngins have taken matters into their own hands. So let’s tip our hats to Greta Gerwig, who, as an actor, gave us le millénaire ultime in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2013) and then, more recently, wrote and directed Lady Bird (‘17): a warm, zippy reflection on young adulthood in G.W. Bush-era Sacramento. It’s a portrait of one millennial’s experience from someone who was actually there to live it.

Gerwig’s work is paralleled by Folayan’s documentary, along with Bing Liu’s beautiful Minding the Gap (‘18): these works represent millennials’ efforts to comprehend their pasts; they shape our understanding of where we’ve come from by demonstrating an emotional mastery of what we’ve known.

Self-definition is an evident theme in many other millennial-created films in this series — whether those efforts are constructive (e.g., Rebirth is Necessary [2017] and Jinn [‘18]), destructive (I Killed My Mother [‘09]; Good Time [‘17]), or shrouded in ambiguity (The Human Surge [‘16]; and The Plagiarists [‘19]). And then there’s Vox Lux (2018), the culmination of everything discussed so far:

Written and directed by Brady Corbet, it’s the story of Celeste (played by Raffey Cassidy and Natalie Portman, at different moments in life), whose newsworthy survival of a school shooting facilitates her path to pop superstardom — not to mention depression and brash self-destruction. As a child of violence and consumerist media, Celeste embodies the geopolitical-corporate burden shouldered by millennials as no character has before. She is swamped by sensation, handicapped by her world’s boundless rush toward the phenomenal; Vox Lux chronicles her unmoored odyssey like an incisive, drippingly ironic elegy. “That’s what I love about pop music,” Celeste muses. “I don’t want people to have to think too hard. I just want them to feel good.”

If there’s anything to be learned from We Can’t Even, it’s that millennials are thinking — about our place in the world, the challenges we face and just what it is we intend to do about them. If you missed this series, please take the time to watch a few of the movies mentioned here. In this blissful age of instant streaming and insurmountable woes, watching great movies really is the least we can do.