![]() ![]() We’ve been mourning that loss ever since. Through the 90s, there was a hopeful idea of what millennials could become. But soon, we began to feel a similar ache. Some of this is projection, older artists working through their failure to fully understand young people – Obi-Wan’s agonised “You were the chosen one!” upon defeating a fully Dark Side-d Anakin in Episode III may as well be the cry of a parent feeling their kid slipping away. Each generation rages into adulthood in its own way, but so much millennial media builds paeans to adolescence, while connoting coming-of-age with loss. While it’s inherently foolish to try to boil down an entire generation’s identity to the media enjoyed by a small subset of it, patterns do emerge.Īmidst the economic anxiety, social media malaise and burgeoning forms and genres, what stood out to me was just how many millennial works are preoccupied by growing pains. As millennials built a parallel multiverse on the internet, “The Millennial” of monoculture became a feedback loop: a mutating image of us, performed by us, then projected back onto us, back and forth forever.Īs a film programmer, I always look for works that rhyme: Which pieces will flow together best and echo off one another? How will a presentation add up to something greater than the sum of its parts? Building this list was no different. And anyway, I was above all else concerned with “The Millennial” as a creation of mass media, constantly iterated upon, disrupted and reconstituted as the tide of the internet rose to engulf all. Viral videos, memes, and Vines were off the table: Any attempt to build a comprehensive, comprehensible view of online visual culture over the past two decades would undoubtedly send me on a Borgesian descent into madness. In an existential haze, I sought to finally answer a question that has haunted me since downloading a leaked copy of Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion shortly before my 20th birthday: “Am I really all the things that are outside of me?” But what made me was less tangible – entire histories confined to obsolete formats, blogs that go offline, server transfers that fail. Telling the difference was tricky: Like Aksel, I grappled with the ephemera that made me. The unbearably familiar rhythms of the film both resonated and frustrated, not only as memories from my own life but also as ones I absorbed from culture across my 33 years of life. ![]() ![]() I knew that I was watching the Last Millennial Film – an acknowledgement of time passing, youth fading, life continuing on within and without us. “I reached a point in my life when suddenly… I began to worship what had been. Knowledge and memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about… Collecting all that stuff, comics, books… and I just continued, even when it stopped giving me the powerful emotions I felt in my 20s. ![]()
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