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?