Molly and me

I’ve been thinking more and more about the John Hughes tribute during the Oscars. It is the only moment from the ceremony that I find memorable but more importantly, I really see it as a touchstone moment in the history of Gen X. It really marks the moment where we are all forced to realize that we are adults.

To put this in a little perspective: Molly Ringwald is five years older than me so while she would not have been in high school with me (unless my parents would have relented and let me skip a few grades) but she would have been a classmate of one of my brothers. Same with Anthony Michael Hall. Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez are a few years older than that and Judd Nelson is fifty, which is just frightening. So the cast of The Breakfast Club are slightly older than me but not by too much. And Molly and Anthony Michael really are in the core of Gen X.

That is what makes their appearance at the Oscars so important. In part this is almost an acceptance that my generation gets a seat at the big kids table now. Sure, we have our own awards over the years but now we are called upon to honor a director who exemplified our generation. It wasn’t a Spielberg on stage honoring a colleague; it was people my age. I can’t quite remember something like that before.

Even more important though is the fact that this moment showed that we are all adults. One of the wonders of film is that certain stars will always remain a certain age. Molly Ringwald will always be a teenager in our minds and to see her as a true adult, beautiful and confident, takes us a back a little. We all have our own mental age, which is what we feel we are in our heads. For me it is something like 23 or 24. I’m continually in that just out of college stage. But Sunday night showed that is not the case. Anthony Michael Hall looks old in the sense that he looks like me and all my friends. We are old.

But even though Gen X is now old we have created this whole environment where we are perpetual teenagers. The majority of my Facebook status updates come from people I went to grade school and high school with otherwise known as people I have not seen or talked to for nearly twenty years. Most of them I would have no clue who they were if I passed them on the street. But thanks to Facebook I am constantly returned to high school with all of the bad and good that that implies thanks to their comments. I’m not alone on this. We are the John Hughes generation and we never left high school.

It’s strange to think that we have no voice in Gen X that I know of to lead us into adulthood. The boomers made their own show Thirtysomething to deal with it. We have, uh, Cougar Town? I don’t know of any good, mid 30’s television show out there. The voices of our strident college years are all gone, several of which by their own hands. The only music act that is still relevant from my college years is Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder does one hell of a job putting up the good fight (Just Breathe may be as touching and meaningful as anything that I have ever heard.) Still, Dylan always spoke for the Boomers and we seem to have lost or maybe even never had that type of voice. We are a small generation that is no longer a target market. Media doesn’t care about us anymore.

Maybe that is my last take on the group of them standing onstage at the Oscars. They were successful but unsteady, for the most part unsure in their own skin. They all knew that they were adult members of society but the fancy clothes just felt wrong even on someone like Matthew Broderick for whom this is second nature. I think Gen X is scared of taking that step into adulthood. I know I am.