The First Rule of Gen X Is: Don’t Play It Safe

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

One of the finest lines in any film, which is why it slightly jars that The Usual Suspects is missing from Andrew J. Rausch’s Generation Tarantino: The Last Wave of Young Turks in Hollywood. Bryan Singer’s debut film fell in the timeframe of the nineties and Usual Suspects helped define the decade, yet Singer is not mentioned. Allegations against him have eclipsed his career. The work remains majestic but all respect has gone.

Still, The Usual Suspects is a Gen X movie. Cynical and contemptuous of authority, the characters have built their lives on irony and deceit. A band of outsiders only succeed because they know the rules are fixed. If that doesn’t typify the attitude of Generation X, I don’t know what does. Drenched in pop culture, we trusted no institution.

Rausch turns to directors like Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro, Kevin Smith, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, Darren Aronofsky, and Noah Baumbach. Their films, Slacker, Clerks, Pulp Fiction, Se7en, Fight Club, Boogie Nights, Rushmore, Memento and Pi all broke away from Hollywood formulas. The directors hustled, improvised to get their works out and they created insurgent cinema.

What bound them was an ethos not a style. Each took a familiar genre, twisted it and made it personal. Fight Club dressed itself as a bare-knuckle brawler but it was really a cry against consumerism and a satire on masculinity. Cronos looked like a vampire movie but became a study on ageing and love between a grandfather and granddaughter. These directors didn’t conform to genre rules, they bent them to their own obsessions.

Now the same generation is edging towards retirement. “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time,” Tyler Durden once warned us. Back then, it was provocation. Now it feels like advice. Don’t give away your time. Don’t follow the script. Gen X cinema showed us how to resist.