By Buzz Drainpipe, ghostwriting for the generation that won’t get a Criterion release
Somewhere between Dennis Hopper on an acid trip and Wes Anderson sketching extracurricular heartbreaks with mechanical pencils, there’s a flicker—a reel splice—where time folds in on itself like a mixtape melting on a dashboard. Easy Rider (1969): my dad’s cigarette-scarred America. Rushmore (1998): mine, all hand-drawn title cards and overachieving loners with locker-sized hearts. Now my kid’s clocking in, dead center of the algorithm-scrubbed nowhere, and I’m holding my breath, waiting for his movie.
Will it be a muted indie with kids vaping through the apocalypse? A TikTok melodrama with emo trap soundtracking first kisses and failed revolutions? Or some sleeper masterpiece dumped on a streaming service at 2 a.m., rediscovered by teens passing around pirated files like samizdat zines?
This ain’t a review. It’s a transmission. A smudged love letter stuffed in a lunchbox, unsigned but unmistakable. A recognition that movies don’t just reflect their era—they haunt the ones before and after. My dad once stared at Peter Fonda’s cracked shades and saw freedom. I stared at Max Fischer’s yearbook and saw a mirror. My son? Maybe he’ll see some punk kid in a hoodie hacking into the school’s surveillance system while humming JPEGMAFIA and reciting Oppenheimer quotes. Maybe he’ll write his own damn screenplay.
I tried to submit this to BrooklynVegan, but they said it lacked irony. I sent it to Maximum Rocknroll, but they said it had too much feeling. So here it is, left in a bathroom stall somewhere between grief and graffiti, scrawled in black marker:
We are all the sons of dead Dads.
We are all the fathers of future myths.
And every generation needs one movie
that teaches them to ride the fuck away
or love the school that doesn’t love them back.
And if it hasn’t come out yet?
Just means your kid’s gonna make it.
Buzz out.
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