Singles: The film of the Gen Xperience

As Generation X meanders its way through middle age, occasionally pondering with a distinct sardonic glance who they are and how they got here in a Talking Heads-esque “Letting the Days Go By” montage, they need look no further than the box office poster for Cameron Crowe’s 1992 low-budget cult film Singles. In that image of the twentysomethings profiled in the movie resides the spirit of a generation of young people making the most of an uncertain time by focusing on their pursuit of lifestyle over career and depending on the “neighbors” who subbed in as family. Cliff and Janet on the park bench as Steve and Linda stroll pass enmeshed in a kiss, the image evokes a sense of socialness and community — they are friends and neighbors, bonded by their proximity and hopeful about the decades of adulthood out in front of them. The poster and film offer hope, promise, and above all, authenticity.

When the twenty-fifth anniversary of the film basically coincided with the passing of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, watching the film again brought a hard dose of nostalgia against a reality check of middle age. It was the untimely and emotionally heavy death of Chris Cornell, just a month shy of the quarter century mark for the soundtrack’s release, that led me back to the first and only film that spoke to us with generational authenticity. And, when I’m feeling that generational tug and that middle age nostalgia, I look back to the gang from Seattle to remind me how it once was, and why today looks pretty good.

The film that truly captured the Gen X ethos — even before most Gen Xers knew they were a generation — was aptly accented with a soundtrack anchored by rising Seattle bands and Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg, resonating an acoustic–indie rock vibe before it was even a thing. From the opening track with that tinny resonant twang and the eerie distant Robert Plant-esque voice of Cornell in the song “Seasons,” the movie and its music evoke a hallowed nobility of that strange time in the early 90s when a bunch of twenty-somethings were trying to figure it all out. The angst-y existential questioning — so amusingly summed up by Matt Dillon’s singer’s lament, “Where is this generation’s Stairway to Heaven?” — formed the backbeat for a film about music and life. Little did Dillon’s wannabe rock star and barista Cliff know how prescient his words could be, with Crowe accidentally chronicling the rise of grunge in the early 90s and a generation’s identity through music. The Seattle sound merges seamlessly with the plot, as Cameron Crowe established himself as early practitioner of the soundtrack conceit for film and television, later developed and even perfected in television dramas from Beverly Hills 90210 and The OC to Gray’s Anatomy and Glee.

One recent Friday evening I sat down with a few beers and spent some time with the original “Friends” gang living in an apartment complex in Seattle around the early days of Grunge and coffeehouse culture, remembering an era of a jaded generation’s quest for identity before it was commodified, re-branded, and marketed to the masses. The ensemble film begins with Kyra Sedgewick’s Linda “living in this duplex, no dorm, no roommates” and all the promises of adulthood out in front of her. Linda’s job with the Seattle Environmental Council reflects a growing environmentalism for a generation realizing “this whole decade is going to have to be about cleaning up” following the Alaskan Exxon Valdez spill. In contrast to that existential heaviness of the long work of adulting and world-saving in front of her, Linda retained a hopeful pragmatism outside of the weight of her career by depending on her friends and relationships, knowing “I’d always have someone to go out with.” In our forties and fifties now, Gen X may smile when her friend assures her “we will always go out dancing,” especially because most of us don’t anymore. But we remember what it was like to have that spirit of community in a world that seemed more intent on splintering and cocooning than connecting.

Singles as a film captures that moment when Xers became the first generation for whom the idea of “twenty-something” was a legit moment in time and an identifiable demographic. It wasn’t necessarily a transition phase. For many in the early 90s, that window of time after school but before careers and marriage felt like all there was, and that was really fine because it was about the most stable that many latch-key kids had ever felt. The most hopeful of the group, Bridget Fonda’s Janet, captured that twentysomething-ness with her observation that she was twenty-three and that “somewhere around 25 bizarre becomes immature.” So, she is focused on making something of that moment in time. And Janet’s journey is the simplest yet most profound as she moves from innocent and giddy with her ideal of the perfect guy — one she’s willing to undergo plastic surgery for — to a wiser, calmer Fountainhead reading woman just looking for a man who’s human enough to say “God Bless you” when she sneezes. The friends in Singles grow in understated but significant ways as they move not from twentysomethings to adults, but from searchers to human beings.

At the time of the film’s release, I was casually living an expat experience in Taiwan teaching English, and only loosely tied to American popular culture through film and music and my monthly dose of Rolling Stone magazine, airmailed to me (true story) by my mom. In the May 1993 edition of the magazine, I was drawn into a Cameron Crowe article which was actually his diary of the making of Singles. It was so raw and honest, recounting how Crowe had been living in Seattle at the time of the death of Mother Love Bone’s singer and songwriter Andy Wood — I still recall a line “We’re gonna ride mountain bikes and hang out and get through this.” That spirit of family among a group of young people trying to carve out a life resonated sharply with the expat in me. Shortly thereafter, Mother Love Bone would become Pearl Jam and the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind would forever change the face of Seattle and rock music and the entire decade of the 90s. The same dynamic would also become the era’s biggest television hit Friends — coffee shop, dancing in the fountain of the apartment courtyard, roommates. But at that moment, before marketers and media began to capitalize on the Gen X persona, that group of kids in Seattle were just “neighbors.”

So many timely and timeless conceits of the film reflect a bygone era for the last generation to come of age prior to the Internet. The exchanges between the characters sans cell phones, much less smartphones, evoked a more simple humanity in the way people were connected. There is something so quaint yet poignant in the moment that Steve ponders the potential omen of Linda reaching over to unlock his car door. Watch that scene again and drift away on the riff opening REM’s “Radio Song,” and you’ll consider just for a moment trading your car in for a model with hand locks and hand crank windows. Who knew a film could explore such depth of romance through a quick nod to the unique era before keyless car entry? It only extends from there into Steve’s desperately poetic calls from a payphone and the heart-wrenching moment of his confession chewed up by an answering machine tape. That’s a defining generational moment that will never happen again, a poignant glimpse of angst future generations will never know.

The challenges of dating in our early twenties was captured early in the film when Campbell Scott’s everyman Steve Dunn breaks the fourth wall with a monologue on the dynamics of dating, asking the viewer “how does this stuff get so complicated?” He pines for a simpler time, that never really existed except in art. Case in point, his longing for a life encapsulated in the postcard “someone sent me” with the classic image of photographer Robert Doisneau’s “Le baiser de l’hotel de ville” (Kiss by the Hotel de Ville). That postcard image has the same effect that Singles’ box office poster does, capturing a spirit of connection in an increasingly disconnected world. As an amusing after thought, he reflects on the advice his dad gave him just before he left — “Have fun, stay single.” Steve’s look of sardonic befuddlement captures the classic narrative of the divorced childhood. “I was eight,” he dryly adds. In comparison today’s era of online dating via eHarmony and Tindr, the introduction of video dating for Debbie is practically quaint. The video ad was an early form of branding and marketing the preceded those online profiles, and viewers are left with the amusing reference to the director being the “next Martin Scorsese,” with an entertaining cameo from Tim Burton as the cameraman and videographer.

The characters shift between finding identity in their relationships and struggling for it in their jobs. “Maybe it was never simple,” Steve laments as he resigns himself to “work …. the only thing I have total control over.” Of course, Steve becomes the one whose job and career aspirations truly collapse, derailing him in a far more extreme way than any other, even Cliff the aspiring rock star, hardworking barista, and unskilled-labor everyman. That naive moment of clarity emphasizes in a bit of prescient sociological musing on the unique relationship that Generation X had and always will have with with jobs and work. The sad idealism of Steve and his fruitless aspirations to solve Seattle’s traffic problem are poetically captured in the the collapse of the cubicle after the mayor pulls the plug on his project. Even director Cameron Crowe would probably smile when Steve’s dream received a jumpstart just five years later as the Seattle area voted to begin developing mass transit, including light rail trains. Not quite the Super-Train he envisioned, but certainly a step forward and reminder of Generation X’s progressive efforts to quietly go about improving the world while rarely receiving credit for doing so.

Work, life, friendship, relationships, and culture all merge sometimes seamlessly and other times awkwardly in Cameron Crowe’s portrayal of the Seattle scene of the early 90s. Some characters seem to be settling into careers like Steve at the Department of Transportation or a character who “builds airplanes,” reflecting Seattle’s status in the tech-aerospace industry. Others like Cliff capture that non-career focused Gen X existence as he holds down multiple minimum wage jobs while he waits to “put out an independent album.” There’s also a maitre’d at a French restaurant who lives his life “like a French movie,” and there’s a young Eric Stoltz passing time as a mime and bumming rides to a party. Amidst it all is the subtly ironic title of Singles because these people are not solitary, isolated individuals but actually a community of people looking for connections and authenticity. The gap between those two ideas is nowhere better reflected than at the club when Steve first sees Linda and tries to flirt by claiming to not put on an act, and she curtly dismisses him by explaining, “I think not having an act is your act.” As Steve slinks away, we know the connection has been made through the honest attempt and blunt retort. Similar connections are made over the course of the movie between Cliff and Janet who explains her slowly diminishing expectations for a mate, settling for “a guy who says bless you when I sneeze.” Those moments of clarity and coming into awareness are the essence of Generation X’s desire and continuous quest for authenticity in a world that had always been anything but honest. When Janet realizes she doesn’t have to stay with Cliff and she retreats to the apartment building’s rooftop with magazines, a boom box, and the sun, she relaxes in the comfort of knowing for the first time that “Being alone, there’s a certain dignity to it.” When she lets go of the unrealistic expectations, she and Cliff move toward being Singles together.

What makes Singles the definitive movie of the Generation X experience is the type of people it chronicles. That assessment requires looking past that other cinematic portrayal linked to Gen X, starring Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, and director Ben Stiller who relied on cheap gags, clichéd songs, and a cartoonish corporate enemy meant to appeal to the masses. The difference is that Gen X is not the masses, and Singles was never meant to portray a marketing demographic. Rather than Troy’s pathetic tantrums and Lelaina’s incessant whining, Crowe’s movie offers Steve asking Linda “What took you so long,” emphasizing connections as Gen X realizes it’s just been “Waiting for Somebody,” as Westerberg closes out the soundtrack and film. Ultimately, the idea of Generation X is more of an idea and attitude than it is chronological bookends of people born at the same time. As Douglas Coupland explained in commentary on his novel, “Generation X” is about a type of person, not a block of time. Drawing from Paul Fussel’s book Class, the X-class was a type of person who existed outside the norms and institutions of society. For Gen Xers, the first generation to not comfortably slide into careers, marriage, and childrearing, the era between college and career was that exit from the norms. Janet, Steve, Cliff, and friends were Gen Xers, whereas Andi and Troy where simply Hollywood caricatures of twenty-somethings in the 90s.

So, if members of Generation X find themselves sitting around and wondering just how it was that we, the disaffected, latch-key generation, ever made it to middle age intact and pretty well-grounded, this movie, that soundtrack, the poster, and one of the final scenes where Janet rescues Steve from himself explain it all. Following the loss of his job, dream, and raison d’etre, Steve is crashed out on his floor with the apartment in a shambles and the madcap craziness of a jazz riff keying in his retreat into “hang time,” where he tries to re-group and find himself all over again. After climbing through the window because garbage has blocked the door, Janet levels with him, saying “Steve, you’re wigging … people need people, Steve. It’s got nothing to do with sex.” That wry observation and bit of advice was a key point of self-awareness for Gen Xers of the divorced, latch-key, disaffected upbringing too common in the 70s and 80s. By the 90s, however, Gen X was beginning to figure it out. In one final moment and attempt at misplaced romantic connection, Steve sweetly offers “I bet in a parallel universe we make scorching couple.” Janet’s smile declines with all the wisdom of her twenty-years, telling him, “Yeah, but in this one — neighbors.”