The Force Awakens - Initial

The recently released "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is turning out to be a good example for this generational analysis, for reasons beyond its massive popularity. Since it's science fiction - set neither in our current time period nor our planet - we can use the generational model to see how it works in unfamiliar settings. It has new characters which we can compare with generational attributes, and old characters to serve as a cross check. And it can be categorized using the Four Stories model, as well.

First, which of the Four Stories does it follow? Let's try using this not-too-spoilery synopsis as a starting point (although this analysis will definitely in SPOILER status before the end):

Former Stormtrooper Finn and scavenger Rey join together with Resistance pilot Poe to find Luke Skywalker and save the Republic from Kylo Ren and the New Order. 

Of the characters named, Poe is out for half of the movie, and Luke doesn't show up until the very end. The main characters are Finn and Rey, with Kylo Ren as the antagonist - the face of the New Order. These are all that might be considered as protagonists, even if other new and old characters show up. We should probably consider the Story in terms of Finn and Rey.

Is it a story of Doom and Damnation? While the good guys don't completely triumph - the New Order is still around at the end -  the bad guys take a beating, and there's no moral ambiguity in the results. Definitely not this one.

Is there any Redemption going on - any bad characters turning good? The only person who might fit is Finn, and about the first thing we see him do is NOT shoot at captured civilians. There's nobody who starts from a morally compromised position that gets Good by the end - certainly none of the main or supporting characters. Keep looking.

There are a number of Millennial actors in the main roles, and it was released in 2015, when the real world was in a Crisis period - perhaps it's a Hero story? The good guys do win, and there is a notable loss along the way. However, they don't really win because of their teamwork - not the way the Avengers win against the Chitauri, say, or Captain Miller's squad saves Private Ryan. Even after leaving the New Order, Finn initially doesn't consider joining the Resistance to be a compelling alternative. Poe shows up in the final battle as a Resistance pilot, but his orders are less about "let's keep it tight, stay on target," and more "Shoot more stuff!" While Rey doesn't join the final battle willingly - she was captured by Kylo Ren.

Considering Rey in particular, though, we see her starting out good, but ignorant of important truths about herself - for example, that she is strong with the Force. Not only does she have to find that out along the way, much of the story is about how that happens. The primary conflict is spiritual in form, between the Light and Dark sides of the Force. The climatic battle  - the one which continues even after Starkiller Base has been mortally damaged - is between Rey (in white, representing Light) and Kylo Ren (in black, for Dark). The final image is of her encounter with a religious (in all but name) hermit, living high above a ruined Temple. Finn's arc, too,  is based on a moral choice - he abandons his training and his uniform because it's the right thing to do. (It seems clear this is his real reason, even if he helps Poe because he needs a pilot, too.) It's the Prophet story that fits best.

This makes it an interesting mirror of the original Star Wars movie, now sub-titled A New Hope. Writer/Director George Lucas (born 1944) was  of the Boom generation, the post-World War II Prophet archetype, as were Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher.   (Harrison Ford, born 1942, is of the next-eldest Silent generation, missing the Boomer cutoff by five and a half months.) That story, though, fits well with the Hero archetype, with Luke being brought into a fight for freedom from tyranny, with winning as a result of teamwork and sacrifice. While Luke makes the final shot that destroys the Death Star, it's only after previous attempts by other units revealed how it might be done, and the support of his wingmen, plus a big helping hand from Han and Chewie. It all came together - working as a team, that is, with losses along the way - in such a way that allowed success.

Which means that the saga started with a Hero story told by Prophets, and now continues with a Prophet story being told by Heroes. Perhaps it will continue that way - there's still more to say about it, here.

Star Wars and Jaws, Boomers and Prophets

As I was finishing up the previous Four Stories post, I could hear it already: What about Star Wars? What about Jaws? If they were the reason for the recognized change to the Boomer filmmakers, why aren't they in there - in fact,  aren't they Boomer stories?

Well, the short answer is that they don't work with the Prophet Story, at least not as simply as Rocky and others do. Jaws matches better with the Hero Story: Brody succeeds, but only with the help of others and the loss of Quint and the Orca.

Fun note: the generations of our Orca team are GI ("We delivered the bomb") Quint, Silent ("...she's wrong.""No, she's not.") Brody, and Boomer ("This was no boating accident!") Hooper, and it's Brody who helps get the naturally antagonistic Hero and Prophet to work together. 

Star Wars, on the other hand, can be seen as either a) Luke learning about the mystical Force and using it to go after the corrupt and evil Empire, or b) Luke and friends working together to take out the Death Star, losing Obi-Wan and Alderaan along the way. The sequels head much more in the Prophet Story direction, with a case to be made that the military part of the Battle of Endor was less important than Luke standing up to the Emperor and declaring himself a Jedi. In any case, while the Prophet Story is strong, these entanglements made it an inferior initial example. 

(I have not seen The Force Awakens as of this writing - It should make a better case yet for where the Galaxy was around the Battle of Yavin. A year ago, I suspected that it would support that as a Crisis period, and I've seen nothing yet to change my mind, there.)

When I started looking at this, I did expect that Prophets would prefer Prophet Stories, and similarly for the others. It's often the case, but not every time, nor even for all the significant ones (those that make money, win awards, or become cultural touchstones). Divergent, written by a young Millennial, is a full Prophet story, all about Tris taking on a corrupt system by the power of her own personal superiority. 

I have some thoughts on why this happens, and understanding that is part of what I hope to work out, here.

Four Stories

If history can by analyzed according to generational attributes....

And if the events of the present day can be analyzed similarly....

Then what might be seen upon applying similar analysis to narrative artworks, such as literature, film, television, and theater?

One might find that they can be categorized as one of four Stories, which can be summarized as:

1. Stories of Heroic Struggle

2. Stories of Doom and Damnation

3. Stories of Moral Certainty

4. Stories of Personal Redemption

each matching with a particular generational archetype. Each Story has a heyday as their associated archetype matures, then fades away with them as well. While that doesn’t mean a particular Story doesn’t happen at other times, it probably will happen less, and be appreciated less.

So, as the Hero archetype grows up, Stories of Heroic Struggle become common. These can be identified by the following attributes:

* The good guys win.

* Winning is achieved through teamwork.

* There is a sacrifice required as the price of winning.

* Change is possible, but not without real costs.

While we can expect that the main characters are from Hero generations, such as G.I.s (born 1901-1925), we might see this Story happening with other archetypes as well. It is likely to go out of style as the realities of war and the disappointments of the eventual peace make Heroes and their Heroics seem a naive concept.

Examples: The Lord of the Rings; The Hunger Games; Harry Potter; Captain America: The First Avenger; How to Train Your Dragon

The fall of the Heroes will bring forth a darker and much less hopeful sort of story. This Story is not not about winners or losers: There are victims who are Doomed and perpetrators who are Damned.

* The winner  - if any - is probably not a good person.

* What victories exist are for nefarious purposes.

* Those who aren’t victorious are likely dead or otherwise doomed

* Change is futile - the universe resists it.

Here, the usual focus is on Artists, those born too late to be heroic in the previous Crisis. From an early age, they have to acknowledge their imperfection compared to those who, though only a few years older, are seen as the world's saviors. The works themselves are often well-crafted and adored by critics. Still, they have an inherently negative and tragic tone, which may be the reason they seem active only for a fairly short period. 

Examples: The Godfather; Bonnie and Clyde; Chinatown; Dr. Strangelove; Annie Hall

A desire for optimism and hope may be the birthplace of the Stories of Moral Certainty, where

* The good guy wins, often in a spiritual or religious context.

* Winning is due to personal, intrinsic moral superiority, often in opposition to corrupt or evil societal structures.

* The story is about becoming the (moral and superior) person you’re meant to be. 

* Change comes from within, and depends on knowing yourself.

This Story is likely to be focused on the Prophet archetype, and taking on the corruption of the system in support of spiritual and religious objectives. At some point, though, the simplicity of their success - through being a better person or wanting it more or other completely inherent character attributes - is insufficient, and more is desired. 

Examples: Forrest Gump; Rocky; Close Encounters of the Third Kind; Tron; Almost Famous

The Story of Personal Redemption comes to the fore with the Nomad generation, the one that is mostly marked as “Bad” from the start.

* The main character starts with clear faults to be resolved, often morally ambiguous, or just Bad.

* Placed in a situation where he has to grow, the flawed main character moves away from Bad and towards Good

* Victory comes from doing the right thing, that Bad person succeeding in moving beyond flawed beginnings.

* Change consists of self-improvement, and overcoming your faults.

Redemption stories start being made as the fairy tales of the Prophets lose their drawing power, seen as too simple and unrealistic to be interesting. It's more appealing than self-actualization to Nomad generations, who have to work through being told that they are Bad early on. It’s not unusual to see the two paired up, though, with the moral purity of the Prophet becoming the source of the Nomad's redemption. As the Nomads grow up,  expectations for the latest generation improve, and the Heroic Story takes hold again. 

Examples: Pulp Fiction; Groundhog Day; A Christmas Carol; Iron Man; Lost (TV series); The Kid (Charlie Chaplin)

Needless to say, these broad strokes leave room for plenty of exceptions, alternatives, and loopholes. The line between self-improvements that makes you Not Bad and that which makes you Even Better is not always going to be clear. If there are multiple storylines, they may use different Stories. Some bad films will follow these precisely, while there are probably good films that don't. . 

It still should be a useful starting point. 

Synthesis

I didn't really try to put together a generational model of stories. It started taking shape, though, after I had read through Generations and The Fourth Turning, and was understanding the larger model. I started seeing patterns visible in works from Harry Potter to Hamlet, from Buffy to Gatsby. Some of it was - and probably still is - confirmation bias and apophenia. There still seems to be something there, though, and that's what I'll be digging into here.

This is is a synthesis of observations, like the generations of filmmakers, with expectations from the model, like the personality traits. There are parts that start from the books, such as Luke, Han and Obi-Wan being Hero, Nomad, and Prophet. Others were observations that appeared unasked, probably because they follow easily -  that the 75th Hunger Games, and the Crisis they unleash, are right about when we expect it (~80 years after the Dark Days, clearly the previous Crisis). Still others are attempts to fit observations, hopefully without forcing them. One of these would be what happens with the generations of filmmakers - why there is this perceived change with new generations.

 There are three particular interactions with the generational model that will be considered:

First are the characters themselves and what archetypes they fit.   Are they intensely moral and pure of purpose? Are they misfits and criminals? Are they trying to follow the rules, or is the story about breaking them? Do they match with the attributes predicted by Strauss & Howe, and does that affect how the story works? 

Second is the question of where the characters fit in an historical context. Is there a major war going on, suggesting it's a Crisis period? Or do people talk about a war in the recent past, and what they did there? Are there strong religious or spiritual implications for what is happening, suggesting an Awakening? 

For stories set in the present day, this may not be immediately useful, since we should already know what's happening, now. Eventually, though, signposts to the past become helpful - that The Best Years of Our Lives is immediately after a Crisis war is an important item to know, for a trivial example. It's even more helpful with historical, speculative, or science fiction, where there may be hints we can glean from noting, say, that there sure are a lot of soldiers around the Bennet sisters.

Finally, there appear to be particular kinds of stories that break well along generational lines. The relatively recent GenX films aren't quite the same as the Boomer stories before them, or the (presumably) Artist stories before that.  It's as if particular generations want to create narratives that fit a more general narrative structure that is comfortable to them. We might expect, for example, that Heroes write Hero stories, ones that hew closer to Joseph Campbell. Does the story match the creator, or are there other influences?

That third one is what's up next. It's more than simply an attempt to explain what distinguished the mid-90s Xer filmmakers from the mid-70s Boomers. It suggests what different stories there are for different generations to tell.

Previously on ...

The story-specific model I'm proposing here has been worked out based on stories that I've seen and read, and sometimes I've blogged about them before.

Here are some previous posts on stories viewed from a generational perspective.

Captain America and The Winter Soldier

Tammy (The Melissa McCarthy movie, a not-quite-Redemption story.)

The Hunger Games (And more Games.)

Coriolanus (about the play, but also considering President Coriolanus Snow.)

Walter Mitty (With bonus references to Falling Down.)

Edge of Tomorrow

Heroics (Looking across several films and such)

Guardians of the Galaxy (Which turned out to be Nomad characters, Hero story)

Lego

The Force Awakens (what we know so far, anyway. And by so far, I mean as of a year ago.)

The Shadow (1995 film)

Chef

Influences (An extended look at when Generation X began making a difference in films.)

Stories. (No really)

Children (As in "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" or treating fictional characters as "real")

Rosencrantz

Ahab

King Lear

Bodhi (How to remake Point Break, if you really think that's a good idea.)

Compare and contrast The Apartment and Wall*E

Now (as in Spectacular)

Maleficent (Even female Nomads end up as bad guys.)

Bad (Because that's the easy way to find Nomads in stories.)

A New Generation of Filmmakers

I've been going on for a bit on the generational model because having a shared vocabulary is necessary for my ultimate goals here. When I start going off about how Katniss is a Hero or why Willy Loman is like Polonius because they are both clearly post-Crisis foolish Nomads, it's reasonable to explain the terms up front. 

What has come before should be sufficient, though, to get started. So let's take a look at this idea began, that different generations view stories differently. 

Strauss & Howe go into it a bit themselves. In The Fourth Turning in particular, they spend several pages (my copy has it on pages 75-79,  in the chapter Seasons) aligning the proposed archetypes with myths. They point out that stories are often about young heroes with old and wise mentors (like the first Star Wars movie), or about youngsters taking on entrenched institutions (The Emperor's New Clothes, say). Corresponding Artist and Nomad myths are suggested, although (no surprise) they are not considered as significant. In Generations, contrasting narratives of the GI generation are presented, between the mid-1940s repayment of George Bailey's debt by his grateful neighbors, and the elders in Cocoon (1985) who are seen "draining the strength of unborn aliens, and then flying off to immortality while leaving their own children behind." The impact of narrative and myth on archetype, and on how we internalize the world around us through story, has evidently been a natural match with generational models.

It was a couple of years after Generations was published that there was a notable turning point in how different generations saw film, in particular.  In 1994, the Best Picture Academy Award was seen as a competition between Boomer mash note Forrest Gump, and Pulp Fiction from voice-of-a-new-generation Quentin Tarantino. The same year, New Jersey convenience store worker Kevin Smith filmed Clerks, about being a convenience store worker, at the convenience store where he worked. A year after that, aspiring actor Jon Favreau worked with aspiring director Doug Liman and some of his aspiring actor friends to pull together Swingers, based on Favreau's experiences as an aspiring actor in Los Angeles.

Even if one did not like these films, it was clear that they weren't quite the same as what had gone before. They aggressively reference other films, talking about how they were made, lifting camera  shots, and discussing specific plot points. They examined unexpected topics, like what hit men discuss before a job, or the subtleties of acceptable encounters with the opposite sex. They are profane - all three of their entries in IMDB have a count of how much profanity is used, and Clerks nearly received an NC-17 rating purely on language and descriptions (not portrayals) of sexual acts. And all of them were created by members of Generation X, a Nomad generation comprising those born from 1961 through 1981. 

Both Swingers and Clerks reference two movies that were twenty years old at the time: Star Wars and Jaws. At least one person thinks Pulp Fiction has a reference to Rocky, which I'm going to run with, too... These three films had also been indicators of a change in Hollywood - not only the start of blockbusters but of a different sort of movie, ones unlike those that had been recently popular. Again, whether you liked the change doesn't reduce that the change happened. And that time, the creators - Lucas, Spielberg, and Stallone (who famously wrote the script for Rocky, then made being cast in the lead a point of its sale) - were of the Prophet archetype Boom generation,  born between 1942 and 1960. 

Speaking of what was popular before Jaws, Star Wars and Rocky: people such as William Goldman will refer to 1967's Bonnie and Clyde as a watershed moment in film. Classic films from the next few years include the Godfather I and II, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider, M*A*S*H, Chinatown... But clearly something happened that made THEM seem different, too. Why is it Bonnie and Clyde that gets the notice - and why does it mark such an explosion of notable films? These do have a different feel from, say, the grand scope and magnificent vistas of David Lean films, or the Biblical epics produced over the previous decade. We might want to consider 1941's Citizen Kane (directed by GI Generation Orson Welles, born 1915) another point of significant change - although there's a case to be made for the biggest selling film of all time as of 1938: Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,

As with the Crisis and Awakening periods previously discussed, noticeable changes appear to happen in film on a recurring basis. With that twenty year period, not to mention explicit mentions of "new generations of filmmakers," we can reasonably suggest that the reason for the differences - the "Why" - is generational. 

Less certain, though, is "What?" What is different, what (if anything) can be used to define the change?

Crisis and Awakening

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

As Abraham Lincoln noted, the American Civil War occurred about 90 years after the Revolutionary War. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was 81 years after the Secession Winter.  88 years before the Declaration of Independence was the Glorious Revolution.  Major wars like these seem to repeat quite regularly. Predictably, even. 

Less obviously, the Progressive Era of the late 1800s was about halfway between the Civil War and The Great Depression. The Great American Awakening was about 40 years before the American Revolution. Spiritual upheavals like these, too, recur on some predictable schedule, one that has been observed at least as far as the early 1500s, with the Protestant Reformation. 

Taken together, there is a recurring cycle comprising major conflicts every 80-100 years, and spiritual upheavals  about halfway between them. Different mechanisms have been proposed for how this is so consistent over a period of centuries. In the Strauss & Howe model, this cycle is driven by those generational archetypes  - and vice versa. As mentioned, the archetypes are dependent on what happens during childhood and young adulthood:

* Artists are born during a secular Crisis (like World War II)

* Prophets are raised after the Crisis, becoming young adults who drive and support the Awakening. 

* Nomads are born during a spiritual Awakening (like the Great Awakening in the 1730s)

* Heroes are brought up after the Awakening, becoming young adults who unite to take on enemies during the Crisis.  

The particular group of archetypes active at any point in time influences the kind of period that it is.  During periods of major secular conflict, the Hero archetype - who were brought up to work together and taught that they were Special -- are  young adults. They bring a unified front against outstanding problems, which problems are often pointed out by the older Prophet generation. Meanwhile, the practical and cynical Nomad generation can temper extremes and set up executable plans for victory, however it is defined. In World War II, goals were set under the leadership of FDR, a Prophet of the Missionary generation. Mid-level management was by Nomads from the Lost generation, such as Eisenhower and Patton. Young Heroes from the GI generation - JFK, Glen Miller, Ronald Reagan - battled together on air, land, sea, and elsewhere, to win whatever the cost. 

For the spiritual upheavals, on the other hand, the influence of the practical (and cynical) Nomads is mostly absent. The young adults at this time are passionate Prophets, raised in a postwar period that was safe and confined and perhaps  self-righteous, as defined by the formerly triumphant - now older - Hero generation. Rather than taking on management roles, the middle-aged Artists (raised and carefully protected during the crisis period) instead help guide the Prophet generation's passion, identifying areas where justice is yet to be served.  With this group of generations, the result is a wave that assaults existing societal structures,