Lost in the Movies: SEVEN AMERICAN GENERATIONS: zoomers, millennials, X, boomers, silent, greatest, and lost

SEVEN AMERICAN GENERATIONS: zoomers, millennials, X, boomers, silent, greatest, and lost


An illustrated guide to the living American generations (excluding those born after 2013) and the unique periods of the past century they experienced at different ages

INTRODUCTION

Although intended as a useful reference going forward, I'm publishing this entry in the particular context of December 2019. Between the "ok boomer" meme, Xers fretting over their "forgotten middle child" status, questions about where the millennial generation actually begins, and uncertainty about what to call post-millennials, there's been a lot of talk about generations in the past few months. No wonder: the 2020 presidential campaign has sharpened divisions between different age groups, with majorities of boomers and millennials not only supporting different parties, but different candidates within the Democratic primary (ironically, the oldest candidate has overwhelming youth support while the youngest is disproportionately popular with an aging crowd). We're also reaching the end of a decade defined by millennials, while in the past few years an even younger tech-savvy, politically activated generation has begun to come of age.

Meanwhile, dramatic demographic changes hover on the horizon. By the end of the 2020s, the last of the lost generation will probably pass away; the entire greatest cohort will cross their century mark and the first silent will turn one hundred; the oldest boomers will hit eighty while the youngest boomers and oldest Xers become senior citizens; millennials will enter middle age as zoomers constitute the majority of young adults; and an even newer generation will emerge onto the scene (the oldest of them are already five, but most haven't been born yet so I'm leaving them out of this analysis). This is an especially dramatic turn for my own generation since the Age of the Thinkpiece has made the terms "millennial" and "young" synonymous - often negatively so. As I once joked, around 2032 a thirtysomething will write a "damn millennial kids are ruining ______" essay, only to be informed that they're actually younger than the youngest millennial. Indeed, by my own admittedly controversial calculations, the first millenial will turn forty in a few weeks; with all of this in mind, December 2019 seems like a good time to take stock, try to lock some of this down and ponder the phenomenon both visually and statistically. Please note, as the title suggests, I am focusing exclusively on a U.S. context especially when it comes to defining the different eras.

The following entry is the result of a year's worth of off-and-on pondering and about a week's worth of hunting and gathering images to illustrate these ideas - as well as a lifetime of being inordinately obsessed with eras, generations, and the process of aging, and how these stack up against each other in a kind of historical grid. I think it's mostly self-explanatory and don't want to further clog up this introduction, but if you're confused I offer an "explanation of process" at the end of this entry. This is not academic work for which I've been trained to follow certain procedures, it's purely the result of my own curiosity and speculation, so take it as you will! Hopefully it's as helpful and absorbing to peruse as it was to assemble.



Current Age: 6 - 22 (children/adolescents/young)
Education: since 2002 (high school majority since 2013)
Workforce: since 2015

RISING YOUTH (oldest are 18 - 22)
since 2015

Parents: mostly X & older millennials


OLDEST OVERLAPPING GENERATION




Current Age: 23 - 39 (young/mature)
Education: 1985 - 2019 (high school majority 1996 - 2013)
Workforce: since 1998

RISING YOUTH (oldest were 18 - 25)
from 1998 to 2005

DOMINANT YOUTH (18 - 34)
majority of young adults are millennials since 2006

Parents: mostly boomers & older X
Children: mostly younger zoomers


OLDEST OVERLAPPING GENERATION




Current Age: 40 - 56 (middle-aged)
Education: 1968 - 2002 (high school majority 1979 - 1996)
Workforce: since 1981 (peak since 2011)

RISING YOUTH (oldest were 18 - 25)
from 1981 to 1988

DOMINANT YOUTH (18 - 34)
majority of young adults were X from 1989 to 2005

DECLINING YOUTH (youngest were 26 - 34)
from 2006 to 2014

Parents: mostly silent & older boomers
Children: mostly zoomers & younger millennials


OLDEST OVERLAPPING GENERATION




Current Age: 57 - 73 (middle-aged/aging/old)
Education: 1951 - 1985 (high school majority 1962 - 1979)
Workforce: since 1964 (peak 1994 - 2010)

RISING YOUTH (oldest were 18 - 25)
from 1964 to 1971

DOMINANT YOUTH (18 - 34)
majority of young adults were boomers from 1972 to 1988

DECLINING YOUTH (youngest were 26 - 34)
from 1989 to 1997

Parents: mostly greatest & older silent
Children: mostly millennials & younger X


OLDEST OVERLAPPING GENERATION




Current Age: 74 - 90 (old/very old)
Education: 1934 - 1968 (high school majority 1945 - 1962)
Workforce: 1947 - 2010 (peak 1977 - 1993)

RISING YOUTH (oldest were 18 - 25)
from 1947 to 1954

DOMINANT YOUTH (18 - 34)
majority of young adults were silent from 1955 to 1971

DECLINING YOUTH (youngest were 26 - 34)
from 1972 to 1980

Parents: mostly lost & older greatest
Children: mostly X & younger boomers


OLDEST OVERLAPPING GENERATION




Current Age: 91 - 107 (very old/centenarian)
Education: 1917 - 1951 (high school majority 1928 - 1945)
Workforce: 1930 - 1993 (peak 1960 - 1976)

RISING YOUTH (oldest were 18 - 25)
from 1930 to 1937

DOMINANT YOUTH (18 - 34)
majority of young adults were greatest from 1938 to 1954

DECLINING YOUTH (youngest were 26 - 34)
from 1955 to 1963

Parents: mostly progressives & older lost
Children: mostly boomers & younger silent


OLDEST OVERLAPPING GENERATION




Current Age: 108 and older (centenarian)
Education: 1900 - 1934 (high school majority 1911 - 1928)
Workforce: 1913 - 1976 (peak 1943 - 1959)

There are no living members of this generation who were young adults before the 1920s.

DOMINANT YOUTH (18 - 34)
majority of young adults were lost from 1921 to 1937

DECLINING YOUTH (youngest were 26 - 34)
from 1938 to 1946

Parents: mostly Victorians & younger progressives
Children: mostly silent & younger greatest


OLDEST OVERLAPPING GENERATION





THE GENERATIONS IN EACH ERA


The oldest silent is born in 1929

Childhood • Adolescence

Childhood • Adolescence • DOMINANT YOUTH



Childhood

Childhood • Adolescence • Youth (Rising)

DOMINANT YOUTH • Maturity • Middle Age



The oldest boomer is born in 1946

Childhood • Adolescence

Childhood • Adolescence • DOMINANT YOUTH

Youth (Declining) • Maturity • Middle Age



Childhood

Childhood • Adolescence • Youth (Rising)

DOMINANT YOUTH • Maturity • Middle Age

Maturity • Middle Age



The oldest X is born in 1963

Childhood • Adolescence

Childhood • Adolescence • DOMINANT YOUTH

Youth (Declining) • Maturity • Middle Age

Middle Age • Aging • Old Age



Childhood

Childhood • Adolescence • Youth (Rising)

DOMINANT YOUTH • Maturity • Middle Age

Maturity • Middle Age

Middle Age • Aging • Old Age



The oldest millennial is born in 1980

Childhood • Adolescence

Childhood • Adolescence • DOMINANT YOUTH

Youth (Declining) • Maturity • Middle Age

Middle Age • Aging • Old Age

Aging • Old Age • Very Old Age



Childhood

Childhood • Adolescence • Youth (Rising)

DOMINANT YOUTH • Maturity • Middle Age

Maturity • Middle Age

Middle Age • Aging • Old Age

Old Age • Very Old Age



The oldest zoomer is born in 1997

Childhood • Adolescence

Childhood • Adolescence • DOMINANT YOUTH

Youth (Declining) • Maturity • Middle Age

Middle Age • Aging • Old Age

Aging • Old Age • Very Old Age

Old Age • Very Old Age • Centenarian



Childhood

Childhood • Adolescence • Youth (Rising)

DOMINANT YOUTH • Maturity • Middle Age

Maturity • Middle Age

Middle Age • Aging • Old Age

Old Age • Very Old Age

Very Old Age • Centenarian



Childhood • Adolescence

Childhood • Adolescence • DOMINANT YOUTH

Youth (Declining) • Maturity • Middle Age

Middle Age • Aging • Old Age

Aging • Old Age • Very Old Age

Old Age • Very Old Age • Centenarian

Very Old Age • Centenarian



Childhood • Adolescence • Youth (Rising)

DOMINANT YOUTH • Maturity

Maturity • Middle Age

Middle Age • Aging • Old Age

Old Age • Very Old Age

Very Old Age • Centenarian

Centenarian






EXPLANATION OF PROCESS

As already noted, I'm not any kind of official demographer. While drawing on common cultural reference points, I put my own spin on these definitions. In doing so, I sought a common metric to facilitate comparison between generations and eras. Most importantly, these generations needed to be the same size. Using 1946's boomer kickoff as a near-universally agreed-upon benchmark, I chose to measure each generation by seventeen years. Eras are alternately eight and nine years, the first corresponding to a "rising" young generational minority turning eighteen each year, the second corresponding to a different "declining" young generational minority turning thirty-five each year. (By this definition, on the last day of each nine-year era, the dominant young generation reaches its zenith: on December 31, 2014, for example, every single young adult was a millennial and every single millennial was a young adult). This all very neatly snaps each generation and era into place, allowing it to be defined by a different juxtaposition of youth groups and social phenomena. This also creates perfect echoes, so that the age range of boomers during the "Sixties Rebellion" period is an exact match with the greatest generation during the "Great Depression" period or millennials during the "Millennial Crisis" period, and so forth.

FORMAT OF THIS POST

In the first part, I list each generation with a picture of ten Americans who fit inside the age group. I initially hoped to use ordinary people to suggest a more general application, but this proved too difficult to figure out. Instead, I'm compiling film actors which does of course better suit a website named Lost in the Movies. Below this group portrait, I highlight a few important facts like the generation's current age range (as of December 31, 2019), prime years of school (defined by ages five to twenty-three) and work (defined by ages eighteen to sixty-five), their parents' and children's generations, and the "oldest overlapping generation" who lived at the same time as them - reaching back into the nineteenth and even eighteenth centuries. As parenthetical asides, "high school majority" refers to the years between the oldest members' junior years and the youngest members' sophomore years, while "peak workplace" refers to the years between the oldest members' forty-eighth and sixty-fourth birthdays. Finally, since so many generations are defined - for better or worse - by the years of their youth, I outline the eras between their eighteenth and thirty-fifth birthdays: their eight "rising" and nine "declining" years as described above, with their own seventeen-year period of majority dominance in between. The various eras created by this formula also proved remarkably apt in carving up distinct historical periods. The eras are often named for events or phenomena that define the surrounding years without necessarily encompassing them (for example, World War II began and ended inside the period titled "World War II" while the Cold War stretched far beyond the "Cold War" period illustrated here; you get the idea).

The second part uses those eras as its organizing principle: under collages of cultural iconography defining each period (a mix of grand global history and pop ephemera), I list each generation by illustration and age group. The illustration is a film screenshot featuring an actor - or in one case, a documentary interview subject - from that generation. The age groups are childhood (up to eleven), adolescence (twelve to seventeen), youth (eighteen to thirty-four), maturity (thirty-five to thirty-nine), middle age (forty to fifty-nine), aging (sixty to sixty-four), old age (sixty-five to seventy-nine), very old age (eighty to ninety-nine), and centenarian (one hundred and up). Obviously the "maturity" and "aging" categories are somewhat novel, but I've always felt the need for transitional periods between youth and middle age, as well as middle and old age, much like adolescence providing a bridge between childhood and youth. I also denote where the young generations stood in each era (rising, dominant, declining) as described in the previous paragraph. If the first part of this post offers an overview of the generational forest, this second part lets us linger in the trees, contemplating the step-by-step process of how we all intersect with historical contingencies (not just fashion but the technological shift from black and white to color) as well as the universal process of aging.

As for the youngest generation, their name hasn't been locked down yet so I had to make my own choice. "Gen Z" and "zoomer" appear to be the most ubiquitous terms. I went with "iGeneration" because it's the only semi-common title that isn't a retread of another generation (Z in particular doesn't make any sense since the onetime Gen Y long ago abandoned the alphabet to become millennials). That said, although "zoomer" doesn't even have a Wikipedia page yet, it's the one I see most often on social media, especially in the past six months; I have a hunch it will stick. On my computer I've created a back-up cache of images using the title "Zoomers" rather than "iGeneration" - just in case. (I finally changed the images in November 2021.)

FINAL DISCLAIMERS AND CAVEATS

Granted, there would be a certain logic to defining generations in eighteen-year increments, still anchoring the baby boom in 1946. Eighteen years would mean a new generation begins whenever the oldest member of the previous generation reaches adulthood. All the more consistent and symmetrical, right? The millennial generation would end like clockwork at Y2K. Gen X would emerge as a fully post-JFK generation, their inborn alienation sprouting like radioactive flowers in Camelot's paranoid wreckage. We could even reassign the early eighties babies, whom so many Xers want to claim (they were teenagers when Kurt Cobain died!) and so many millennials want to reject (they graduated high school in the late nineties!). Even the lost generation would gain three additional years of World War I veterans. I'll concede that maybe this route makes the most sense, and I was probably stopped (at least in part) by something as petty as accepting that '81 - just two years older than me - truly belongs to a different generation. As I put it on Twitter recently, can you really claim that Reality Bites and (500) Days of Summer both depict Generation X? If Zooey Deschanel - born just barely at the dawn of the decade - isn't a millennial, where does that leave our cherished cultural stereotypes?! In all seriousness, you can find similar contrasts at the bookends of the greatest generation (Ingrid Bergman and Shirley Temple!) and boomers (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama!) but this is always going to be the case, all the more so if you're expanding rather than contracting the age range. So we might as well be choosy. If 1946 was my hard boundary, 1980 was my soft one, and this had the added benefit of creating the neat youth/generation/era symmetry described above: eighteenth and thirty-fifth birthdays are the natural brackets for youth. I like the idea of containing a generation entirely within that, and I love the combinations that emerged in this post as a result. Meanwhile, sixteen-year increments would start to disrupt Gen X/millennial/zoomer solidity in the other direction, creating millennials who were already in their mid-twenties on 9/11 and pre-Obama high schoolers who aren't millennials. So seventeen it is.

Anyway, these conundrums are not unique to my own system; even those that mix different-size generations run into trouble. Consider that every analysis of the baby boom roots it in 1946, which splits the sixties youth movement down the middle. Indeed, most leaders of the Black Panthers, the Yippies, SDS, and SNCC - not to mention Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and pretty much the entire sixties rock wave, were born during or even before World War II, making them technically late silents. (Hell, just look at Bernie Sanders, a silent who stands poised to potentially rescue the sixties legacy from boomers like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump - all three born in 1946.) Nonetheless, there's a certain justice to dividing the older and younger sixties youth. Among the (influential) minority who graduated college, the class of '68 presents a sharp dividing line between an older crowd who could choose to ignore the still nascent counterculture and New Left, and a younger group who would have to explicitly embrace or reject them. On the other hand, as I've discussed in other pieces, what we often mean by "the sixties" is a very brief period of time during which all of the long-percolating trends building during the postwar period finally spilled over into cultural hegemony, some already receding while others will still advancing. As late as '68, the vast majority of people - including young people - had short hair and dressed conservatively (by seventies standards), and as early as '69 there was a sense that the expansive political and cultural energy of the rock movement and radical activism had begun, subtly, to wane. With that in mind, it does make sense to lump people who were high school or college-age in the late sixties with people who were too young for the sixties youth culture. One could argue that even the older boomers who directly participated in the very brief "high sixties" moment belong to a particularly post-sixties generation: they didn't shape this moment so much as they were shaped by it. If this lengthy aside proves anything, it's that there are many ways to justify (or just plain rationalize) arbitrary distinctions created more by mathematics than social conditions.

This all leads to the question: are generations a useful tool at all? And if so, should they be much shorter - say, ten years (in which case we need some more names) - and/or more fluid, blurring into one another with various gradations? This is where real demographers could come in handy (although, again, given how they've dealt with the sixties question, the science already appears to be shot) but I see my job here as attempting to solidify already existing terms, not create new ones. And I do think those existing terms can be illuminating, as long as we don't treat these boundaries as all-encompassing. The very arbitrariness arguably helps this process along, revealing the natural contrasts and repetitions that time and external factors always create even when viewed from a random vantage point. Besides, generational identity is self-fulfilling; watching that process coalesce, mutate, and reflect back on itself over time is a deeply fascinating experience. I hope my work here can evoke and contribute to that experience for the reader.



MY RELATED WORK

COMING SOON
(links active on publishing date)

The rest of my Mad Men season 3 viewing diary on December 23 - March 2
(greatest generation, silent generation & New Frontier era)

Thirteen review on January 15
(millennial generation & Millennial Crisis era)

(Generation X & iWorld era)

Her review on February 12
(iWorld era)

Lady Bird review on February 19
(millennial generation & Millennial Crisis era)

(baby boomer generation, Sixties Rebellion era, Seventies Fallout era & Reagan Eighties era)



PUBLIC HIGHLIGHTS

2002 in 2012: The Making of My Movie, Class of 2002
Recounting my work from first concept to final edit, including a long reflection on the story's relationship to my generation and the zeitgeist when we entered adulthood
(millennial generation, End of History era, Millennial Crisis era & iWorld era)

Sixties Reunion: The Big Chill & Return of the Secaucus Seven
Two films, with tellingly different sensibilities, both about seven sixties veterans now in their thirties, gathered for a reunion at one friend's home in the country
(baby boomer generation, Sixties Rebellion era, Seventies Fallout era & Reagan Eighties era)

Growing Up is Hard to Do: BoyhoodThe Giver, fragments of memory, and notes on the "death of adulthood"
Alongside my review of the film chronicling a younger millennial's coming of age, I uploaded drawings of my own early explorations of aging, generations, and eras (predecessors to this post) and responded to the "death of adulthood" articles by A.O. Scott and Andrew O'Hehir
(millennial generation, Millennial Crisis era, iWorld era & process of aging/passage of time)

Back to the Future: Welcome to Hill Valley (video)
My side-by-side video essay compares all the different versions of Hill Valley in the Back to the Future trilogy, released on the actual date Marty arrived in the "future" (for one brief moment, on October 21, 2015, that meme was finally true)
(New Frontier era & Reagan Eighties era)

Six Years in America: Louis Malle's God's Country (video)
A comparison of the 1978 and 1985 sections of Malle's PBS farmland opus
(Seventies Fallout era & Reagan Eighties era)

NOT JUST O.J.: 7 Subjects in O.J.: Made in America (video essay)
My last Fandor video looks at both halves of the Oscar-winning documentary's title - what does the film tell us not just about O.J. Simpson but also the society that created, worshipped, and criticized him?
(every period from the Sixties Rebellion era onward, including a coda looking at the MAGA Meltdown era)

A chronological film clip series divided into thirty-two chapters, each accompanied by a description of the period it encapsulates
(every period up to the iWorld era)



PATREON PODCAST TOPICS
(usually short discussions within eclectic episodes - timecodes in show notes)
















OTHER WORK


GENERATIONS

Millennials

Frances Ha
Greta Gerwig's second collaboration with Noah Baumbach continues to play with ideas of a generational zeitgeist

Class of 2002
My dramatic mock-documentary uses still images and found footage accompanied by narration - this is the final revised version

Brothers
Millennials reach maturity in (some) onscreen depictions






Generation X & Millennials

Greenberg
Greta Gerwig and the influence of mumblecore mellow the bilious Noah Baumbach


Generation X

Patreon update #50: Requiem for a Dream
My podcast discusses this deep dive into narcotic states of consciousness as (among other things) a zenith for Gen X




Baby Boomers

Boomer Baseball: Field of Dreams & the American 60s
Field of Dreams is not just a film about baseball, it's a film about the sixties - particularly how a segment of baby boomers envisioned their own past and legacy in the late eighties

Mark Rudd and the Weather Underground
Reporting on a live appearance by a former member of the Weather Underground

Silent Generation

Desistfilm
Early Stan Brakhage is experimental but not abstract



Greatest Generation

Generations Linked by Video: The iHistory WW2 Project & Interview with Jeffrey Worthington
Brief Q&A about a project where students interview World War II veterans

Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
Watching a Howard Zinn documentary shortly after his death, very early in my first tentative steps toward the left


Lost Generation

It's a Wonderful Life - first essay
This multifaceted film, covered for my Big Ones series, is like switching the channel from a novelistic communal portrait to an intense psychodrama to an episode of The Twilight Zone (topped off by a Christmas special)

The Favorites - It's a Wonderful Life (#10) - second essay
Bedford Falls is a fantastically impressive microcosm (and generational portrait), a self-contained universe worthy of a decade-spanning soap opera, yet somehow contained within a single two-hour film - all as set-up for the famous final act

the process of aging, passage of time, and comparison of different eras

7 Rooms: montage guide for an abandoned film
A video I created to help me envision the structure of an anthology film - includes categories based on age and historical era (centuries of Western society in this case)

The Favorites - The "Up" Series (#26)
Film project tracks a group of Brits from childhood to old age; each time I watch the series I can identify with a different chapter since I match up roughly with one of the installments every seven years

Patreon update #49: The Social Network
My podcast covers "the Facebook movie" as it relates to 2004, 2010, and 2018

The more things change...: A collage/catalog of Forrest Gump
Visual examples of repetition and variation from a film that's full of both

The Favorites - Casablanca (#57)
Thirty, forty, even fifty years after release, the film's zeitgeist still seemed within reach - but, seventy-five years later, does it still?


ERAS

Jazz Age (1921 - 29)

Echoes of Fitzgerald
Excerpts from the essay "My Lost City"






Sixties Rebellion (1964 - 71)

#WatchlistScreenCaps, 1/23 - 2/1 (Sixties & Early Seventies Edition)
Another ten screenshots, sampling my favorite era

Sixties Flashback: #iPodAlbumPlaylist, January 2014
What I listened to in the first month of the year, with particular emphasis on re-visiting classic rock favorites


Reagan Eighties (1981 - 88)

The 80s Tape: Commercial Break
Advertisements for kids' products taped off Saturday morning cartoons when I was four or five

Precocious Pastiche: Recycled Culture in 80s Cartoons - and Beyond
A week devoted to imaginative children's entertainment from the eighties ends by examining how works like Muppet Babies or Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein remix classic texts

End of History (1989 - 97)

They Once Were Coming Attractions... (memories of my movie past, 1988 - 1998)
A gallery of posters from a decade of moviegoing, from the four-year-old convincing his dad to take him to Twins in '88 to the fifteen-year-old catching Affliction in early '99

Twin Peaks on the Internet...in 1990 (an alt.tv.twin-peaks archive)
What folks were saying about Twin Peaks on listservs/message boards as the show originally aired (some great posts in here - Barb Miller's particularly impacted me as I worked on my videos)

Millennial Crisis (1998 - 2005)

The Way We Weren't: Art Under Bush
Newsweek collected many perspectives on "the ways artists responded to the Bush era" and I found most of it pretty risible. This was my response. (includes some of iWorld era)

iWorld (2006 - 14)

Obama: Premonitions of a new epoch
I took an overnight bus to D.C. to witness history, and wrote about the presidential inauguration the following day

You Don't Need a Metro to Know Which Way the Wind Blows (or It's All Over Now, Hollywood)
Musings about change on the horizon for the medium and industry

Year Obama
My thoughts on the one-year anniversary of the president's first election

Two News Stories
Reacting to headlines in the fall of 2009 - Obamacare stalling in Congress and the shooting at Ft. Hood and the larger cultural conversations around both

The Muslim Matter (Fort Hood & Maj. Hasan's Religion)
Taking issue with the coverage of a shooting on a military base

January 20, 2010 - wither the new epoch?
Thoughts on Scott Brown's special election to the Senate

Lucasfilm Lost
I found more to mourn in the end of George Lucas' ownership of Star Wars than to celebrate in Disney's promised expansion of the universe

Obama: Recollections of a Premonition
Remembering Obama's first inauguration on the occasion of his second


#WatchlistScreenCaps, 5/7 - 5/8 (viral video edition)
Another ten screenshots, based mostly off some random "Greatest YouTube videos from its first five years" list (aside from the frog one, which is very much a personal favorite)

#WatchlistScreenCaps, 5/28 (viral video edition II)
Another ten screenshots based on that YouTube list, with animal and infant hijinks

#WatchlistScreenCaps, 5/28 (viral video edition III)
Another ten screenshots based on that YouTube list, with some Election 2008 flashbacks

#WatchlistScreenCaps, 5/28 - 5/29 (viral video edition IV)
Another ten screenshots, the last of the YouTube exclusives based on that list

What I feel needs to be said
I didn't usually blog about politics at this time but was horrified by the Trayvon Martin verdict and infuriated by the rhetoric surrounding the case (although in retrospect I didn't go far enough in some observations)

5 Years: The Complete History (more or less) of Lost in the Movies, 2008 - 2013
In an essay stuffed with links, I trace my content, expansion, and many changes in design over a half-decade

Appearance on Beyond the Filter podcast
A broad discussion of Twin Peaks includes a reflection on the early days of the blogosphere and the turn-of-the-decade zeitgeist

MAGA Meltdown (2015 - present)

Election Day Status Update
On the morning of the presidential election, I reflected briefly on my political evolution even as my engagement with current events had mostly vanished from the site (or rather, migrated to Twitter)

11:30 pm to 3:30 am: The Unthinkable
Tweeting the night of Trump's election

December status update: where we've been, where we're going (+ my call to the Ben Dixon show)
Taking stock and sharing a political call-in as 2016 approaches its conclusion (about left-wing criticisms of anti-Trump protests)

Another Ben Dixon call-in & status update
A political podcast call-in about Black Lives Matters and conservative perceptions of liberals and the left

February 2017 Status Update (including Ben Dixon call-in: "divorce the Democrats"?)
Last political podcast call-in about how leftists relate to the Democratic Party


ERAS VIEWED THROUGH PARTICULAR FILMS

JAZZ AGE (1921 - 29)

GREAT DEPRESSION (1930 - 37)
The Struggle (1931) • Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) • Modern Times (1936)

WORLD WAR II (1938 - 45)

COLD WAR (1946 - 54)
White Heat (1949)

NEW FRONTIER (1955 - 63)
Bigger Than Life (1956) Funny Face (1957)Some Came Running & Kiss Me Deadly (1958 & 1955) Primary & Four Days in November (1960 & 1964) Dead Poets Society (1989) Mad Men (2008 - 10 seasons)

SIXTIES REBELLION (1964 - 71)
Greetings (1968)The Trip (1968) Easy Rider (1969) Medium Cool (1969) Gimme Shelter (1970) 1969 (1988) Running on Empty (1988) - takes place decades later but deals with this era's legacy The Weather Underground (2002) I'm Not There (2007) Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008) - although the film is about German society, the review relates its portrait to American currents of the time as well

SEVENTIES FALLOUT (1972 - 80)

REAGAN EIGHTIES (1981 - 88)
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) • Scarface (1983) • The Terminator (1984) • God's Country (1986) - comparison to "Seventies Fallout" era • Storytelling Giant (1988)

END OF HISTORY (1989 - 97)
 Before Sunrise (1995)

MILLENNIAL CRISIS (1998 - 2005)
9/11 (2002) • 25th Hour (2002) • Elephant (2003) • Before Sunset (2004) • Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) • The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004) - focus of essay is how it displays zeroes decade zeitgeist • Veronica Mars (2004-05) • Frontline: The Al Qaeda Files (1999 - 2005) • Iran: The Next Iraq? (2005) • Why We Fight (2005) • Iraq in Fragments (2006) • ...So Goes the Nation (2006) • The War Tapes (2006) • When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) • No End in Sight (2007) • Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) • W. (2008) • The Hurt Locker (2009) • Green Zone (2010) • The Social Network (2010) + visual tribute to new old & new technology in the film

iWORLD (2006 - 14)
An Inconvenient Truth (2006) • Veronica Mars (2006-07) • Frontline: The Choice (2008) • The Girlfriend Experience (2008) • Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) • Up in the Air (2009) • The Dark Knight Rises (2012) • Boyhood (2014) - how the end of the film & my review of it looks in retrospect (from 2019) • Veronica Mars (2014) • Inside Out (2015)

MAGA MELTDOWN (2015 - present)
La La Land (2016) • Get Out (2017) • Black Panther (2018) • Sorry to Bother You (2018) • Veronica Mars (2019)



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