My mom and brother conspired to buy my dad a flat screen TV for Christmas this year. He responded by digging out the Fawlty Towers (brilliant!), dusting off his copy of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and purchasing American Graffiti and Animal House on DVD. Since then, I've heard the following at least a half dozen times, "American Graffiti was my high school experience and I went to college with the guys in Animal House. I could have written both scripts". Dad is pretty attached to both movies, and I distinctly remember watching John Belushi chug Jack Daniels at a very young age.
Why am I talking about movies made 30+ years ago? I think it's likely that my father's generation left behind more genuine accounts of its existence in fictional movie scripts than mine will in its thousands of hours of reality TV. American Graffiti is a movie that documents the early 1960s in "real America" with incredible ease--cruising on Friday night, drive-up burger joints, and sock hops. He might remember nights like the one chronicled in AG, and my dad has the Delta House (an insitution I know for a fact he identifies with because apparently he once passed out in the front lawn of a fraternity house that wasn't his). Both are fictional accounts of life in America at a time when people didn't have access to the variety of recording devices we have today.
What do we "millenials" have to show for all our technology and our narcissistic desire to live life online? In addition to the thinly-veiled ire from our elders for our arrogant and entitled attitudes, we have the Jersey Shore and the Real World. These shows do an excellent job of videotaping drunk 20-somethings having sloppy sex and getting into bar fights, but are they really going to be timeless artifacts of my generation's youth? We spend hours every day documenting our every move on facebook, twitter, and blogs like this one, but few have taken the time to reflect on the aughts in anything other than top-10 lists. My dad was born in January 1945, and I was born exactly 40 years and 6 days later, which means he spent the 1960s the same way I spent the 2000s--turning 15 the first month and turning 25 the month after their end. The question I ask now is exactly how much cooler were the 1960s than the decade through which we just lived? That's probably a terrible question to ask because it will just depresses me (particularly when I'm in one of my Drug Years Soundtrack phases).
The point is that we should probably start thinking about the legacy of our own youth that we're leaving behind for future generations. Of course there are things about the era my parents grew up in that are less than fabulous to remember--racism, sexism, and reliance on snail mail to name a few, but something tells me I'll never enjoy watching reruns of Jersey Shore with my kids. We can't just leave behind top 10 lists, we have to reflect. Look back on this, our formative decade, and decide what about it made us who we are. Catalog, as a generation-a unit, even-what growing up in the 2000s meant to us. Where is our American Graffiti?
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