The Nihilism of Generation X is an Artifact of Privilege
Only a generation that was promised the “end of history” could care about so little
“I wonder if he’ll give her AIDS when he date rapes her,” says Enid, disgusted by her former classmates’ relationship in Terry Zwigoff’s film Ghost World. The line is an amalgam of quips from Daniel Clowes’s 1997 book Ghost World, a collection of his comics on which the movie is loosely based. The line made me stop for a second and look at my wife, who had also registered its ugliness. “That shit doesn’t really fly anymore,” she said. “That’s a really ’90s kind of joke.”
The joke lands poorly in the wake of #MeToo. But when the movie was released in 2001, the AIDS epidemic was a fresh trauma and people weren’t unaware of rampant sexual assault. Only the detached nihilism of what is broadly called “Generation X” could render such a joke amusing.
Gen X culture is often caricatured by the “slacker” meme: young people, over-educated but under-valued by society, spending their days in coffee shops and nights in underground clubs, flipping social norms on their head. Gen X birthed a certain kind of “cool nerd,” the awkward guy celebrated for his hip lack of hipness, arcane knowledge of art and music, embracing “alt” for alt’s sake. In 1994’s Reality Bites, a tedious…
