Slow Players #14: "Don't Trust a Goddamn Thing That You Think About Your Identity as a Writer" (Wilcha)

Hello—

Lately I’ve been thinking about Generation X, that waffly and uncomfortable demographic I’ve loathed ever since it bothered to define itself and its alleged sensibilities in the nineties. Like the true Gen X-er I am, I rejected just about every primary text upon arrival: Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X, Less Than Zero, Reality Bites (God did I hate that one, the script for which I read a year or so before the movie arrived in theaters, and which struck me as hopelessly corny and synthetic), Pavement, Prozac Nation. I’ve since come around on a couple of those things, but the hapless, uncommitted posture that was ascribed to my generational cohort struck me as bullshit, some elder’s idea of what my friends and I were like, and so I denied it in my own, uh, hapless and uncommitted way. In other words, I was as Gen X in my attitudes as they come. (“Slackers aren’t real,” I told myself, as I flipped through a copy of Motorbooty magazine on the bus to my twenty-five-hour-a-week temp job in San Francisco, then spent the rest of my time sleeping in, hanging around record shops and playing basketball with my friends . . .) I was the perfect mark for all that stuff.

I think of all this both because I’ve finally finished a book that considers my own experience as being fully entwined with a generation’s—a “systems memoir,” is how I’ve described this book to those who’ve asked, very much along the lines of the systems novel only, y’know, a memoir—and because even my approach to this very Substack (occasional, something I write only when I feel like it) seems extremely Gen X. Last time I mentioned a paid tier, and I may still launch that, but something in me resists, whether it’s ambivalence around selling out (lol) or reluctance to create for myself a sense of obligation around it. It’s a luxury, I realize, but most writers should be free to write, or at least publish, when they feel internally impelled to, rather than churning the hamster wheel of the 21st Century media economy. That belief, of course, is extremely Gen X-coded, something I would imagine most of my Millenial and/or Gen Z friends would feel differently about, but all the same. No matter how I try, I can’t escape the attitudes—cynical, beleaguered, too self-conflicted to be small-l libertarian but too stubborn, really, to be anything else—I once insisted were neither my own nor my cohort’s when I was younger. Which only shows what I knew. When a reader wrote to me not long ago to (I paraphrase) thank me for “redeeming” Generation X after {redacted book title X/redacted author Y} with Always Crashing in the Same Car I thought the praise was a little extravagant, but I accepted the premise. Gen X, man. That’s me.

I thought about this recently when I went to the movies. Sam, my wife, wanted us to drive to Glendale to see a documentary. I was tired, not paying attention—I’d had a lightly painful/invasive doctor’s office visit the day before (Gen X: alas, we’re not so young these days)—and so I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go. But we piled into the car (“it’s a documentary about a record store,” she said, reminding me that her friend—our friend, now—Adam Goldberg produced it, and that Jonathan Lethem, my pal/our pal would be in conversation with the director afterwards), and off we went. I like record stores, even if I’m not sure I need too many documentaries about them, and so I went in with exactly the attitude you’d expect: a little grudging, but willing, relaxed. Hopeful, but not too hopeful. This could be good, I thought. But I had my curmudgeonly, Gen X doubts the movie was going to flip my switch all the way.

Well. The trailer for Chris Wilcha’s Flipside quotes a review that describes the film as “about a record shop the way Moby Dick is about a whale.” Which is true, so far as it goes. But the thing is, Moby Dick really IS about a whale—its whiteness, its various properties, and one man’s crazed pursuit thereof—where Wilcha’s film . . . is only partially, peripherally, elliptically “about a record shop.” Indeed, as the movie unfolds, lateral stretch by lateral stretch (first it’s about a record store—a dusty little outpost in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey called Flipside Records, where Wilcha clerked as a teen—but then it’s about Wilcha’s early success in his twenties with a documentary called The Target Shoots First, and then it wanders off to focus on a jazz photographer named Herman Leonard, and after that on an abortive project featuring Ira Glass), one begins to wonder what, exactly, the movie is really “about.” Not in an irritable way—the film is sure-footed, charming, and just pensive enough, with each zone of focus absorbing and delightful—but one remains unsure where Wilcha is going as he ropes in Judd Apatow, David Milch, David Bowie, an oddball Jersey comedian named Uncle Floyd, a writer named Starlee Kine. It becomes a matter of holding the movie’s many strands in equipoise, hoping he’ll be able to stick the landing.

In the end? Oh boy, he does. But how he does exactly—it comes down to a final scene and needle-drop, which left me in tears—is the pleasure of it. You know he’s going to, and yet you don’t see it coming. At some point in the screening I leaned over to Sam and said “This kind of reminds me of Always Crashing in the Same Car.” Which was an odd and slightly uncanny feeling—it seemed a kinship of spirit, subject and sensibility; nothing too explicit—as usually when I catch the face of one work of art shining through another that face tends to belong to somebody else. But I loved it, and somehow wasn’t surprised when I ran into a friend a few weeks later, the wife of a Gen X musician whose reformed band is presently on tour, who said “Hey, we saw a movie the other night that reminded us of your book.” Whatever watermark or thumbprint, likeness of feeling or mood, might link Wilcha’s work and my own, the comparison delighted me. And since Flipside, after a handful of screenings that garnered an avalanche of rave notices (this one, from the New Yorker, is nice), is finally available to stream on Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, and various other streaming platforms of convenience, treat yourself, won’t you? I promise, you will be enthralled.

I’ll wrap this up with the assurance there really will be more—much more—coming soon. The Golden Hour, the aforementioned systems memoir that has eaten up my writing time over the last year or two and made this Substack far more occasional even than it would otherwise have been, really is coming soon. Copy edits and legal review is looming, and galleys will be off to the printers in a month. I’ll have more to say about that, and about the many, many doors that book opens onto—more, I think, than Always Crashing had—shortly. Until then, and for now, dive into Flipside. You’ll be a real lamestain if you don’t, so slip into some wack slacks and swing on the flippity flop with it at your earliest convenience.

Until soon—

Matthew