Millennial Nostalgia (Finally) Arrives
Why, Too Kay?
Y2K isn’t a great movie; it’s not really a bad movie, either. It basically sits in the fat part of the bell curve, where most films are seen and forgotten. Which is surprising for an A24 flick; love ‘em or hate ‘em, they’re rarely just fine.
The best parts were in the trailer, including that nifty bit where the cast walk past a hidden robot. A shot so cool,1 the director signed it—
Normally, I wouldn’t bother writing about a movie like this, neither intriguingly good nor trainwreck-bad. Except, as an elder Millennial, I experienced something I’ve never experienced in a movie theater before—genuine nostalgia.
This Time, It’s Personal
I’ve written about nostalgia before, but in an abstract, academic way. This is the first time nostalgia bait was aimed at me. Y2K, if you’re unaware, is a horror/disaster movie about what we all thought was going to happen with the Y2K bug. Of course, The Simpsons already did it.
The film starts as a pastiche of late-90s teen comedies, like Can’t Hardly Wait, 10 Things I Hate About You, and American Pie.2 We meet all of the characters preparing excitedly for the big New Year’s Eve party at the close of the millennium.3 It’s an assortment of thinly-drawn stereotypes, as you’d expect from a teen horror/comedy.
It would all be unremarkable if not for the fact that I remember December 31, 1999. I remember getting ready for the party. Picking up a couple friends who were on my way to our other friend Jessie’s house, who’s dad always let us have parties there. All of us joking about the end of the world, not really believing it, but kinda sorta maybe wondering what would happen.
As bog-standard as the opening sequence was, it still transported me back to that night. The clothes, the music, the hair, the technology, the slang.4 This was the cultural water I swam in as a young fish, unaware that I was even wet.
This isn’t the first time I’d watched characters my own age. I was about six when I started reading Calvin and Hobbes in the newspaper, ten when I was brave enough to sneak into the basement and watch The Simpsons with my brother when my parents weren’t looking. I went to homecoming and prom, graduated high school and started college all at the same time as Buffy.
But those were all contemporaneous. What I’ve never seen, what I’m not even aware of, is any movie catering to my generation’s nostalgia for that time.
Nostalgia Delayed
It’s not unusual for Hollywood to mine one collective memories while simultaneously catering to Kids These Days at the same time. Happy Days and American Graffiti were made by Boomers in the 70s, about their teen years in the 50s. That 70s Show was a 90s series…also created by Boomers—which actually kind of explains why we haven’t seen much 90s nostalgia (other than live-action remakes of the Disney Renaissance).
Boomer longevity has affected everything from politics5 to real estate to pop culture. Take Stranger Things, obviously nostalgia bait for the 1980s. It premiered in 2016, about a decade later than one would expect, given the above-mentioned equivalent series from the 70s and 90s. And yet in the Year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-two, Steven Spielberg, king of the baby boomer movie brats, made a film about how mad he still is at his parents for getting divorced 60 years ago.
The people running Hollywood keep getting older, but the audience stays the same age, as the saying goes. Alan Ladd Jr, head of production at Fox, was 40 when he greenlit the original Star Wars; Bob Iger, Disney CEO, was 61 when he acquired Lucasfilm and hired Kathleen Kennedy (then 59) to produce Episode VII. George Lucas was 33 when he directed the former; JJ Abrams was 49 when he directed the latter.
As life-expectancy grew, the saeculum extended, and Boomers rode that wave. They reached the top of society and stayed there for longer than probably any other generation.6 It’s why every year, the Oscars nominate movies that glamorizing either the Boomers’ youthful idealism in the 1960s, or their own childhood heroes from World War II. It’s true for popular films, too;7 Star Wars is again an illustrative example—Force Awakens is a loose remake of A New Hope, which itself was an homage to adventure serials and WWII propaganda.
Boomers have little interest in the 90s, much less the 2000s, which should be entering a nostalgia cycle right now. They were middle-aged, or even getting (God forbid) old. They’d rather look back at a time when they were young and vital, before most of the modern audience was even born. Which means large-scale, big-budget production keep growing farther and farther from the interests of the youth.
Broken Cycle
Y2K failed at the box office. I think there were three other people in the theater when I saw it. It appealed to neither Millennials’ nostalgia nor Zoomers’ basic teen urge to get out of their parents’ house.
William Goldman (of the Silent Generation) famously said of Hollywood success and failure, “Nobody knows anything.” That certainly seems true of the once-reliable nostalgia cycle. Disney is dangerously low on animated films to remake, and narrowly appealing to less than half of the country’s political sensibilities isn’t working anymore. Studios and filmmakers are going to have to try something different; but nothing too original, because hey! This is Hollywood.
Hollywood is cyclical; trends that can’t continue, won’t. Eventually, Baby Boomers will cede control of Hollywood to the next generation, if for no other reason than they won’t be around. At that point, the nostalgia cycle will continue rolling along. I suspect that we’ll speed run the 90’s and 00’s, until we land back at the 20-years-behind pattern that’s held for so long.
The question is, will the studios survive long enough for that correction to take place? The back-to-back hits of COVID and the double strike may have broken the younger generation’s habit of going out to the movies. If that’s true, the film industry may never recover. But maybe, if we’re lucky, Gen X studio executives will take over in time to guide Millennial filmmakers to create films that bring Zoomers and Gen Alpha back to theaters.
Wouldn’t that be a Hollywood ending?
Two Shots I'm Proud Of
The ultimate irony is this: even when a story is derivative or trite or incomprehensible, even when it openly insults an audience's intelligence, there is one thing that, now more than ever, the public will respond to and throw their money at again and again:
Cool shots.
A movie based on my home town, which created a whole different meta-experience, watching it in Grand Rapids in 1999.
Yes, yes, the new millennium didn’t ackchyually start until 2001. No one cared then; no one should care now.
Although they kept saying “corny” in a weirdly modern way.
Did you know Clinton, W. Bush, and Trump were all born within three months of each other, in the summer of 1946?
Assuming Trump completes his term, boomers will have been president for 24 out of 36 years. (28 if you count Biden, who’s basically, if not technically, a baby boomer.)
It's a perfect moment for this kind of nostalgia really because you have the Zooners and Gen Z also experiencing this nostalgia for a time they never knew. A time before cell phones and social media, or at least cell phones without social media.