Not every “Gen X” movie was about Gen X (Dazed & Confused, anyone?), but there are a lot of characters that exemplify exactly what it felt like to us growing up as part of the slacker generation. Characters that reflected it and that defined it. If you’re already wondering if John Cusack and Winonna Ryder played them all, they didn’t, but they are on the list for playing Gen X movie characters quite a bit.
Lloyd Dobler (Say Anything…)
Any list like this has to start with a John Cusack role, and Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything… is the quintessential Gen X character. His drive to succeed hidden beneath his slacker aesthetic is how we saw ourselves, and we did in the now-iconic boombox scene. His fashion sense, especially the bands he chooses to rep on his tee shirts, influenced how we dressed. Most of all it is his teenage rejection of consumerism that he summed up in one scene, saying:
I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.
How can you not admire that?
Mark Hunter (Pump Up The Volume)
Gen X was kind of the last generation to grow up listening to and romanticizing radio. So, it was 1990’s Pump Up the Volume and its main character, Mark Hunter (Christian Slater), that found us all day dreaming about playing our music and publicly airing our angst about growing up in vanilla suburbs surrounded by plastic people and consumerism.
Mookie (Do The Right Thing)
Spike Lee exploded on the scene as a true voice of a generation. The conflict between Lee’s Mookie and Danny Aiello’s Sal exemplifies Gen X versus Baby Boomers. Sal is caught in the old ways, Mookie is ready for society to carve a new path. It’s hip-hop vs. doo-wop. Generational conflicts are as old as time, but Do The Right Thing identifies one of the biggest conflicts that still endures today between these two generations.
Janet Livermore (Singles)
It doesn’t get more Gen X than Singles. Set in the most ‘90s of cities, Seattle, Bridget Fonda’s character, Janet, is the epitome of an over-educated, underemployed 20-something trying to navigate her career struggles and her confusing love life. Gen X was taught we could do anything we wanted when we “grew up,” only to find that many of us had no idea what we should do, just like Janet.
Dante (Clerks)
Stuck in a dead-end job, obsessed with movies, and too tired to fight back against “the man.” That is us and that is Dante Hicks. Clerks is a time capsule of a short-lived time when video rental stores anchored mini-malls and Dante represents a generation of young adults that weren’t even supposed to be at work that day, but caved to the pressures of their boss. While a slacker ethos may lie underneath, an almost impossible-to-ignore work ethic is pushed to the surface (to Dante’s detriment). If we have to pick only one Kevin Smith film and character, let's pick the best.
Lydia Deetz (Beetlejuice)
The generation that invented goth found its direction from a handful of characters (often played by Winona Ryder). One of the most important was the black-clad, ghost-whispering teenager, Lydia Deetz, in Beetlejuice. Sure, she ends up happy and outgoing in the end, but Lydia represents the depressed, rebellious teenager that hates everything her parents love and sees her whole life as one, big, dark, room. And, we love her for it.
Veronica Sawyer (Heathers)
Ryder was back in Heathers as the popular teenager in a film that can best be summed up as a bizarro-world John Hughes movie. The dark comedy follows Veronica as the least important member of the mean girls' click (led by the three Heathers) in high school who's new boyfriend, J.D., played by Christian Slater (because, of course), is far edgier than she would like. The role was originally intended for Jennifer Connelly, according to Ryder, but no one could imagine it without her now.
Rob Gordon (High Fidelity)
To Generation X, music matters a lot, and Rob Gordon, played by John Cusack in High Fidelity, epitomizes that more than any other movie character. We don’t want to be rock stars, we want to critique and judge them. We’d rather rank the 10 best guitar solos in an ‘80s glam metal song than play our own solo. Rob and his employees at Championship Vinyl say out loud what so many Gen Xers think about music, life, and love.
Lelaina Pierce (Reality Bites)
We could’ve picked just about any character from Reality Bites to represent us. In the end, though, it’s pretty easy to go back to Winona Ryder, and her character Lelaina. If she could be defined in one moment, it’s the famous scene when she’s lamenting how much her job meant to her now that she’s lost it, and how she wished everything could be “reset” at the end of the day, “like The Brady Bunch.” For a generation of latchkey kids raised on Boomer TV shows, this feels like the confluence of our culture moving past that of our parents.
Stacey Hamilton (Fast Times At Ridgemont High)
Everyone knows that the mall was where all the action was for teenagers in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Stacey Hamilton in Fast Times At Ridgemont High, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, is lucky enough to work there. Like in real life, most of her world centers around the mall and high school, and she finds herself in the same position as so many of her generational brethren, stuck in the suburbs with nothing else to do but hook up.
Bill S. Preston, Esq. And Ted "Theodore" Logan (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure)
Together they are Wyld Stallyns! Once again, we’ve found the true archetype of the generation. Two slackers with big dreams and no earthly idea how to make them a reality. Bill and Ted (Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves) know they are destined for greatness, but it takes some prodding and some help from Rufus (George Carlin) to get them to believe they will save the world one day.
Trent Walker (Swingers)
There was a time in the mid-90s when Gen X was growing up and was sick of sweatpants and Cure tee shirts. It was time to be “all growns up," so who did we look to? Vince Vaughn’s Trent in Swingers. A character so stylish, he launched a brand new lifestyle, based on our grandparents' aesthetic, but modern and hip. His comedic irreverence only sold it more, and when it was over, we were all looking for the oldest places in LA to hang out.
Duckie (Pretty In Pink)
Duckie (Jon Cryer) is one way many of us saw ourselves. We were sensitive outsiders, too delicate for some things, but with a strong ethos and a stronger sense of style, as unique as we wanted it to be. Before norm-core became the, um, norm, we wanted over-the-top outfits that inspired us and angered the "richies." Duckie does all of that. While Duckie didn't get the girl in the end, he still stood by his morals.
Peter Gibbons (Office Space)
Ron Livingston’s Peter Gibbons in Office Space is the perfect character to represent how depressing the daily drudgery of life in a cubicle can be. His nihilism about life and work, when the movie begins, is something we can all appreciate on some level, and once he starts (not really) missing a lot of work, we learned that a work/life balance is more important than we could ever imagine.
Narrator (Fight Club)
A completely different, and much darker, form of generational nihilism can be represented aptly by Edward Norton’s Narrator in Fight Club, who is reborn under the guidance of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Modern life and work just don’t suck, they are the opposite of how we should all be living. While Office Space plays it for laughs, Fight Club makes it a revolutionary call to arms. As Tyler says:
We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.
Malik Williams (Higher Learning)
While we may have been sold the idea that America was a post-racial society, it was movies like Higher Learning that showed we were a long way from it. Malik, played by Omar Epps, wrestles mightily with race, both literally with his skinhead roommate Remy (Michael Rapaport), and figuratively with his hard-nosed professor played by Laurence Fishburne.
Randy Meeks (Scream)
Another film that we could pick almost any character from is Scream, because of its enduring legacy that makes Scream still relevant to us today. Sidney, played by Neve Campbell, represents our whole lives from bullied teenagers to strong parents. Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy), however, is the perfect representation of a Generation X film geek, the type who grew up to define nerd culture in the 21st century. Back then, without the internet, there was always the one guy that spent his weekends renting movies and reading Leonard Maltin books, and he was like Google for the rest of us (unless he was us).
Cher Horowitz And Tai Fraiser (Clueless)
Two teenagers with very different backgrounds, but both represent a little piece of Generation X. Tai (the late Brittany Murphy), is the shy girl from the other side of the tracks. She is played against Cher, portrayed by '90s legend Alicia Silverstone. They have an immediate connection, even though they are so different. Both so vividly represent high school life in the 1990s that it forever makes them icons for generations. Cher is so enduring, Alicia Silverstone is still grappling with the effects of the fame Cher brought her.
Lucas (Empire Records)
Lucas (Rory Cochrane) in Empire Records, is a lot like Rob Gordon might have been as a teenager. A lover of all things music who only wants work in a record store – an independent record store, that is. He falls under that all-too-familiar archetype. He may look like a slacker, but he’s anything but, just like we all see ourselves.
Brodie Bruce (Mallrats)
A comic book nerd with a biting sense of humor and a hatred for anything mainstream who spends all day, every day, hanging out in a mall? That, my friends, is how you become a Gen X icon. Everything about Brodie Bruce (Jason Lee) screams slacker generation. Without Stan Lee’s cameo and conversation with Brodie at the mall, would the MCU look the same? Probably not.
Mouth (The Goonies)
We couldn’t make this list without The Goonies, nor could we make it without a character played by Corey Feldman. In this case, we’ve picked Mouth. We all saw ourselves as someone in the Goonies crew when we were kids, seeking out adventure wherever it took us (though rarely actually out of the neighborhood). We fought bad guys and sought pirate booty, and all with a sharp sense of humor, just like Mouth.
A Brain, An Athlete, A Basket Case, A Princess, And A Criminal (The Breakfast Club)
No list would truly be complete without another John Hughes movie. No set of films more represents Generation X than the string of hits he had in the ‘80s and in The Breakfast Club, Hughes defined so many different versions of us. The iconic cast, Anthony Michael Hall as Brian, Emilio Estevez as Andrew, Ally Sheedy as Allison, Molly Ringwald as Claire, and Judd Nelson as Bender, nailed each of their roles like a perfectly played synthesizer and all of us can find something about ourselves in each.
Generation X has never really been slackers, nor have we ever not been slackers. One thing is definitely true, though, because we found ourselves in a lot of movie characters, as even movies from the '90s that weren't about Gen X specifically certainly define us.
