What I most resent about baby boomers is that, technically, I am one. The baby boom is most often defined as encompassing everyone born from 1946 to 1964, but those nineteen years make for an awfully wide and experientially diverse cohort. I was born in 1958, three years past the generational midpoint of 1955. I graduated from high school in 1976, which means I came of age in a very different world from the earliest boomers, most of whom graduated in 1964. When the first boomers were toddlers, TV was a novelty. We, the late boomers, were weaned on “Captain Kangaroo” and “Romper Room.” They were old enough to freak out over the Sputnik; we were young enough to grow bored of moon landings. The soundtrack of their senior year in high school was the early Beatles and Motown; ours was “Frampton Comes Alive!” Rather than Freedom Summer, peace marches, and Woodstock, we second-half baby boomers enjoyed an adolescence of inflation, gas lines, and Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. We grew up to the background noise of the previous decade, when being young was allegedly more thrilling in every way: the music, the drugs, the clothes, the sense of discovery and the possibility of change, the sense that being young mattered.
The idea of generations with well-defined beginnings and endings, like Presidential terms or seasons of “American Horror Story,” is inherently silly, of course. Generations are more like sequential schmears, overlapping and messy, and the idea that each one shares essential traits is perhaps a marketer’s version of astrology. Still, these divisions would be slightly less dubious if crafted more artfully, and, with that in mind, I have a proposal: let’s split the baby boom in half and dub those of us born between 1956 and 1964 the “Dazed and Confused” generation, after Richard Linklater’s quasi-autobiographical teen movie, which is coming up on its thirtieth anniversary. (The Criterion Collection just released a restored 4K edition, marking the occasion.)
Teen movies, especially those made using a rearview mirror, have become essential to generational mythology. I can’t speak for how accurately George Lucas’s “American Graffiti” captured what it was like to be a teen-ager in the early sixties, nor can I fairly assess the portrait of an early-two-thousands high-school experience provided by Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird.” But I can vouch for “Dazed and Confused,” which not only nails the clothes, hair, music, and cars of the period but also the laissez-faire vibe—the way parents and other authority figures, who had divorce and EST to deal with, seemed checked out, and kids were left to stumble through adolescence on their own.
