I can't decide if being born in the Seventies has been a curse or a gift. With the Eighties and Nineties it's obvious (cursed and super-cursed, respectively). If you grew up during the time when life could be taped and rewound and taped over again, then the idea of spontaneity and inspiration seem foreign and fairytale-like. Even though your media studies class teacher tells you that TV and movies manufactures the ideal lifestyle, you've been pre-programmed into accepting that fake life is what real life should be like, and so the better part of your day is spent lamenting an existence that you were never going to have in the first place.
But children of the Seventies, like me, are caught in a chasm of time. We're old enough to remember the very first time Fonzie jumped over the shark, and young enough to know where we were when Challenger blew up (in 8th grade English class, Holy Name School, Welland ON, by the way). We wore bell-bottoms in our grade school class pictures and graduated high school in Ralph Lauren polo shirts, with newly de-cellophaned copies of Nevermind cassettes in the tape decks of our parents mid-life crisis cars. We didn't get cell phones until after university and college, but we felt like part of the vanguard the first time we sent each other email across the campus internet network. We can effortlessly quote entires scenes of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but some of us can't be bothered to figure out this whole "Facebook" thing.
We are a generation in a coma. I know, it's serious.
It's also why many of us can identify with the characters that populate the mind of Douglas Coupland, author of last fall's The Gum Thief, Miss Wyoming, All Families are Psychotic, and Generation X. But--and here's the kicker--I believe that, in reality, most of us can't identify with Coupland's cast of callous and catatonic losers... but we think we should, because somewhere deep within us, we want to feel like we were influenced by the Seventies, not just born in the decade. Our formative years really occurred between '80 and '89, and by the time '89 came along, we realized that we were robbed of the innocence of our birth decade by the space time continuum. That's the only explanation why so many of us started flocking to Rolling Stones and Who concerts in the late 80s and early 90s, jumped at a hippie/day-glo revival, and began to reject the pre-packaged, pre-porgrammed glossy pop culture that had been fed to us down cable television lines and magazines "aimed at your average teens." We were grasping to claim something that by rights should be ours, but by chance eluded us, so therefore we co-opted it and idealized it, and tried to make it fit us, or rather make us fit into it, but in reality we had no idea what "it" really was. "The good old days" were gone, and even though we were born right around their demise, we never got to experience their "goodness" long enough or late enough in our lives to remember it. It's the same as what all the millennium babies are going to be saying in about 10 years time: "Who cares that I was born in 2000; I don't remember anything about it. You had all the fun conceiving me, now all I have to show for it is smog alerts, and the remnants of an illegal war."
Was it money? Was it greed? Was it something that we said or didn't do? Or, was it just a matter of co-incidence and happenstance? Will our generation ever find a meaning to our lives that is genuine, and not designed by an ad agency's junior executive project team? Yeah, we probably will, but it's going to take a whole lot of work. By the time we start to make sense of it, we'll be approaching middle age, though, and kicking ourselves for taking so long to realize that all the shit we thought was so important to us ten years ago has become as obsolete as our new HD DVD players.
I've just finished watching Everything's Gone Green, Douglas Coupland's New Order-named first screenplay (if you don't count the documentary Souvenir Of Canada), directed by Paul Fox. It was actually a pretty good film, and a pretty accurate cinematic depiction of Coupland's enigmatic prose and ultramatic world. It also shared a healthy dose of plot development and character study with his second to last novel, JPod. Could it be that even our cultural anthropologist, Douglas Coupland, is finding it hard to make his way in the world today without tripping over his own ideas?
That the movie and novel shared similarities is not a criticism, but it is cause for more head scratching than a case of public school lice infestations. You see, in January of this year, the CBC began airing JPod the TV series. Coupland is one of the TV show's executive producers and writer of some of this season's episodes. I find it interesting that his bio on the CBC's official JPod site states: "2006 marked the premiere of the feature film, Everything's Gone Green, his first story written specifically for the screen and not adapted from any previous work." See, even the guide can get lost in the woods, too.
Suffice to say that Coupland seems to have gained momentum again with The Gum Theif, and if you haven't read it yet, I'd recommend it. I'd also recommend Everything's Gone Green as both a great piece of cinema and a great source of some excellent Canadian music. I'm a little leery about JPod the series; Alan Thicke is great at playing against-type, but some of the other characters are far too two-dimensional, and haven't fully formed yet, but here's hoping time and production values will help flesh it out and add the human touch that its missing (which Everything's Gone Green has in spades). Steph Song is the only actor both the show and movie have in common, and she is stellar in both.
I hope that Coupland takes a lesson from his lottery winning characters in Everything's Gone Green, and resists trading his credibility and talent for the sake of money; commodifying his creation to capitalize on televsion advertising revenue. I doubt it, seeing as how no one gets rich on Canadian TV, but the allure of Hollywood doesn't get stopped and cavity searched at major border crossings. Just ask Alan Thicke, Michael J. Fox, and Mike Myers. If Coupland goes for the green, as it were, then we, the generation formerly known as X--and sometimes Y--won't have anyone to tell us it's okay to still be shallow and insecure at 35, just as long as we drive hybrids and power down our office CPUs when we go home at night.
Do you really think we'll pull through? Do you really think we'll pull through? I know, it's serious.
- J. Di Gioia (02/22/08)
Jason Collett "Hangover Days"
[Idols of Exile, 2005, Arts & Crafts]
[Everything's Gone Greensoundtrack, 2007, Lakeshore Records]
Black Mountain "No Satisfaction"
[Black Mountain, 2005, Jagjaguwar]
[Everything's Gone Greensoundtrack, 2007, Lakeshore Records]
