The Millennial Aesthetics and Mumblecore Influences in Contemporary Indie Film
I was recently talking with a friend about how we had to get in our apple picking with the kids before the end of fall!
We’re both millennial moms, and we’re under a lot of pressure all the time. Mainly due to the lack of affordable childcare, the maternal wage gap, an overwhelmed healthcare industry profiting off of our sickness, and the pathetic lack of paid family leave in this country.
However. This is not about that pressure.
The pressure we felt ourselves under most recently was the immense social pressure to make sure we provide these formative and photographable experiences for the babes as they stand next to an apple tree. I said to my friend that I don’t think apple picking was a thing before 2012. Before it became THE Instagram-worthy post for a highly curated feed of good, life-affirming times to be had by us (at the time) 20-somethings.
Okay, I’m obviously not saying NO ONE went apple picking before 2012. I just don’t think the kids rented cars and drove upstate to do it before 2012. I just think that, as an event, it’s much more event-y because it can be captured, captioned, and contented into the internet wild. It’s a chance to show off your plaid jacket.
And even as I semi-bemoan the content creation of fall activities, I do also find myself rummaging around Target looking for pumpkin-scented window cleaner. Or pumpkin-scented dish soap. Or pumpkin-scented dryer sheets. These fall-loving trends — the picking or the pumpkining — are often called basic. Couple that with skinny jeans and a side part, and you’ve now become both basic and dated. Very…millennial. Yeesh.
I really don’t have my finger on the pulse of the Gen Z vs. Millennial debate. I’m in the middle of potty training my kid, a decidedly non-Instagrammable fall activity. But what I’ve gathered from the little internet reactions I’ve scoped out is that Gen Z thinks Millennials are dorks? We’re basic because … we use the word basic? We should have quietly quit a long time ago? And our hustle culture of the early 2010s is cringe? Maybe we don’t say cringe anymore? Or we do? I’m lost on that one.
Either way, it got me thinking about the millennial aesthetic, what it’s in reaction to, and how it shows up in art.
Defining the Millennial Aesthetic and Millennial Comedy
A couple years ago there was an article in The Cut called “Will the Millennial Aesthetic Ever End?”, which ouch, but okay. And when I went back to read it recently, it did really actually make me laugh. There is much millennial comedy in our design choices from the 2010s. Writer Molly Fischer describes millennial aesthetic,
You’ve entered a white room. A basketlike lamp hangs overhead; other lamps, globes of brass and glass, glow nearby. Before you is a couch, neatly tufted and boxy, padded with an assortment of pillows in muted geometric designs. Circles of faded terra-cotta and pale yellow; mint-green and mustard confetti; white, with black half-circles and two little dots — aha. Those are boobs. You look down. Upon the terrazzo nougat of the coffee table, a glass tray trimmed in brass. It holds a succulent in a lumpy ceramic pot, a scented candle with a matte-pink label. A fiddle-leaf fig somewhere looms. Above a bookshelf (spines organized by color), a poster advises you to WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE. In the far corner, within the shrine of an arched alcove, atop a marble plinth: one lonely, giant cartoon jungle leaf, tilting from a pink ceramic tube. You sense — in a way you could neither articulate nor explain — the presence of a mail-order foam mattress somewhere close at hand.
Let’s just agree, boob pillows are implicitly funny.
Anyway, Fischer beautifully illustrates the way the millennial aesthetic defines a generation, not so much through the design choices but through something bordering on wasted earnestness.
Do you know what I mean?
Let me put it in context of indie film.
When I watched Lady Bird, I had already been in love with director Greta Gerwig from her work as an actor in Frances Ha. And THEN she put Dave Matthews Band in the soundtrack for her coming of age movie set in 2002 — the exact year I was driving around in my mom’s Toyota Camry listening to #41 on repeat and thinking oh this would be a great lyric to put in my AIM away message.
(I’m sups millens.)
There was also a certain essence of Greta Gerwig’s indie film that took me a minute to nail down. And then when I figured it out, it unlocked so much about my own writing.
The film was just so sincere.
In our current cultural vibe, takedowns and cancellations are prized as morally righteous behavior, but back in the early aughts, when we millennials were stepping into college and work and Life As An Adult, there was this big desire for things to be niiiiice. A huge desire to feel like we were checking off the lists our parents gave us. A monstrous desire to prove we were making it.
The first pilot I ever wrote was a millennial comedy based on my self-published book, The First Ten Years. It was about my earnest attempt to make it to Broadway and all the trials and tribulations en route. It touched on the harassment I received from my boss at my day job, but it didn’t take him down. It barely kissed the toxicity of the New York theatre industry that we’ve since seen get a (sort of) comeuppance. And in the first few drafts, it barely acknowledged the 2008 recession which defined literally everything about our daily lives from the moment it happened.
It wasn’t until I was sitting at a white board, trying to map out the big issues in the pilot, that I wrote “2008” and everything clicked. Every character made sense. I got it.
And then, of course, I couldn’t write what I was writing anymore.
I didn’t want to be polite.
I wanted to be honest.
The Artist Anxiety in Millennial Aesthetics
Everyone who had come before us told us to, as the poster also instructed, “WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE.” We had done that, and it hadn’t really worked out for us.
I came to New York City to act starting in 2006. I was getting job after job after job. I got my Actors’ Equity Card to join the union and (hope to) have basic protections when it came to my safety, health, and a living wage. And then, everything changed in 2008. Casts went from ten leads plus a 20-person ensemble to a 4-person show. If you were already in, you were in. If you were young and trying to break in, sorry but get in line. Literally — the audition line, on 46th Street, outside of the Actors’ Equity (ha!) Building at 6am in the dead of a New York winter.
It was this plus the men who harassed me while I was bartending for financial bros that put my artist anxiety into full effect. It was hard to make money. It was hard to be an artist. Some months I had to ask my parents for some grocery money, which felt like I had failed because I was supposed to “be whatever it was I wanted to be!” Which was decidedly not what I was.
Anyway, this isn’t a boo-hoo for me. It’s just one (privileged) point of view and it wasn’t abnormal. And this is where and why I think we get a certain level of artist anxiety in millennial aesthetics. Fischer again puts it so adeptly,
If you simultaneously can’t afford any frills and can’t afford any failure, you end up with millennial design: crowd-pleasing, risk-averse, calling just enough attention to itself to make it clear that you tried. For a cohort reared to achieve and then released into an economy where achievement held no guarantees, the millennial aesthetic provides something that looks a little like bourgeois stability, at least. This is a style that makes basic success cheap and easy; it requires little in the way of special access, skills, or goods. It is a style that can be borrowed, inhabited temporarily or virtually. At the very least, you can stay a few hours in a photogenic co-working venue. At the very least, Squarespace gives you the tools you need to build your own presentable online home.
Oh god, she says bourgeois stability and I wince. Because that was it. All we wanted was to feel stable.
A lot of my most recent writing projects have been mined from that period of time. In Kinsley Vs., our titular character is dealing with an acute sense of artist anxiety. She’s coming out of 2020 NYC pandemic life, but she’s also a millennial. So this millennial comedy, by default, takes both 2008 and 2020 into account. Her anxiety is positioned in her given circumstances, but there’s another layer to it. She’s anxious because it’s ingrained in her that if she’s the right kind of ambitious, she will succeed. And she hasn’t. And so she’s adrift. She doesn’t belong anywhere. She’s too nice and too unsuccessful, maybe too ambitious, or perhaps not ambitious enough, and the millennial aesthetics of her roommate’s house plants aren’t even her aesthetics.
She owns nothing but her own thoughts.
The Indie Film Trend Mumblecore and Where Millennial Comedy Fits In
So this brings me to my last thought, which is about mumblecore. If you’re unfamiliar, mumblecore is a subgenre of indie film. You’ll know it when you see it because it emphasizes naturalistic acting and dialogue — sometimes improvised — as well as a very low budget even for indie film production, a value of dialogue over plot points, and a spotlight on artist anxiety, relationship anxiety, life anxiety, and other anxieties felt by young adults in their 20s. Mumblecore was a prelude to what became a renaissance of indie film in the late aughts when millennials were bursting forth from Toyota Camrys everywhere, ready to “go in this way, but take my own way out!”
And this renaissance prized DIY filmmaking. It’s perhaps why, once technology got real real good, it was actually considered possible to get into the film industry with a mumblecore sensibility and this new-fangled smart phone. In fact, self-published, DIY art-making became how to get into the film industry.
No Film School writer Alyssa Miller puts it like this,
Mumblecore isn’t truly gone, but it has evolved to fit the higher-quality technology that is more accessible than ever in this new era of the internet and technology. It's a movement that promotes working with what you have, and that is something we will and should never stop celebrating.
Even that is just so earnest, right? So sincere.
Do what you can with what you have.
And this is why I love it as a guiding philosophy for indie film development and production.
Kinsley Vs. is definitely an earnest story. It’s certainly sincere. It’s a real attempt to explore one woman’s artist anxiety and (hopefully) find some places to laugh at it. It’s a millennial comedy that embraces the very particular disasters of our times that live just below the surface of all Kinsley says and does.
So I suppose there are a lot of ways to laugh at the millennial aesthetic. And I admit, I do very much laugh at my own confusing desire to acquire a pumpkin-scented household cleanser.
But maybe if we can’t have affordable childcare, affordable housing, living wages, or healthcare as a human right, we can at least have a boob pillow.
What I realized when I stopped writing about the niceness of my millennial hopes and dreams, and opted to write stories that had more biting things to say, was that there is a place for that sincerity to exist right alongside a scathing critique of systemic failures.
Millennials have a lot to say about systemic failures.
We entered the workforce during a massively destabilizing one. And just as we were halfway through paying our student loans and finally starting to save a little money, a pandemic swept stability away yet again.
I do think we have a lot of things to say about this, and we should.
I do also prize being kind. I like optimism as a rule. And I think earnestness is rarely wasted.
But if we ignore the particular ways in which the system failed us, and only opt for risk-averse niceties…
Maybe we’re not really being sincere at all.