While American cinema was being revolutionized, however, some of us were safely ensconced in its prelapsarian past. My movie memories of 1968 are of my grandmother taking me to a theater in downtown Des Moines to see “Oliver!,” whose portrayal of Dickensian poverty and Fagin-esque corruption pierced my 8-year-old innocence while my elders were flocking to “Planet of the Apes” or honing their indie connoisseurship on John Cassavetes’ “Faces” or grooving to underground cult classics like “Head,” I was having my own psychedelic - if slightly tamer - experience at the exquisitely staged big-screen musical “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” for my age group as radical a portrait of unfettered self-expression and anarchic freedom as “Easy Rider,” which would be released six months later. The scary, grown-up stuff was for parents and babysitters on something they called “dates” for in-betweeners like me, 1968 was defined by the wholesome family comedies that, despite the changing tastes of the time period, still appealed to mass audiences. (With the exception of a “My Brilliant Career” here and an Eric Rohmer film there, the films that I internalized skewed heavily to the American women I reflexively identified with as I was growing up.) My generational touchstones don’t form a cinematic canon as much as a crazy quilt of vibes, impulses, bat signals and dog whistles that - randomly, digressively, but somehow coherently - define the arc of a random, digressive, somehow coherent life. Why should I care? These movies have penetrated my consciousness in ways that have proved inexplicably potent and permanent, instantly recalling the time and place and emotional state I saw them in. It’s just that many of them aren’t approved or acknowledged as such, because I don’t fit their “target demographic.” Or because they aren’t considered classics - or even any good. Which isn’t to say I don’t have my own generational touchstones. I was too young to see the debuts of “The Graduate” or “Easy Rider,” too old to relate to “Slacker” and “Reality Bites.” I was born in 1960, at the tail end of the boom and the first inklings of Gen X. (Or not: In 1955, some parents surely recoiled in distaste from James Dean’s “You’re tearing me apart!” in “Rebel Without a Cause,” just as their own children would do around 30 years later when Mookie threw the garbage can through Sal’s window in “Do the Right Thing,” just as their children would do around 30 years later when Michelle Yeoh fights off butt-plugging time travelers in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Kids these days!) These are movies that don’t just capture the zeitgeist but, in today’s parlance, make people feel seen - and in so doing serve as crucial vehicles to explain one generation to another. But, unlike “The Godfather,” “Star Wars” and “Titanic,” which were box-office benchmarks, “Get Out,” “Lady Bird,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and now “Barbie” are all movies that work on two levels simultaneously, appealing to general viewers but serving as urtexts for their specific audiences: speaking their vernacular, normalizing their evolving morés, embracing their taste in music and fashion, winking at the same meta-humor. Granted, those filmmakers have all made big hits. But, just when film critics were ready to pronounce generational touchstones relics of a vanished age, Gen-Z has found its voice in filmmakers like Gerwig, Jordan Peele and the Daniels.
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