The Gen Z Tendency of Coming-Of-Age During an Apocalypse by Shayla Trautsch

Every generation has their staple coming-of-age movies; a perfect reflection of the assumed anxieties of youth, and in turn, the anxieties of the parents. My Gen X parents grew up with Stand By Me (1986) and The Breakfast Club (1985). Stand By Me is about a group of kids that go looking for the dead body of a stranger they heard died near their homes, simply out of curiosity. It’s about young boys learning about the darkness of the world and in each other's lives and coping with it by standing together. For parents, this might reflect the anxieties of the futility of shielding your kid from the world. The Breakfast Club is also a movie about setting aside differences and standing together, challenging cliques and systemic conflicts. It’s about prioritizing big pictures.

My generation, Gen Z, grew up with coming-of-age stories born out of mass futility, apocalypses, and end-of-the-world bucket lists. We have TV shows like Daybreak (2019) about high schoolers finding their place in the world in a zombie apocalypse, and manga series like Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead (2018) which follows a young man being taken advantage of by his employer and finding agency again in yet another zombie hellscape. It’s just us in a sea of impossibility, and the escapism is dressed up as total ruin and reform, our own personal dangerous sandbox.

Spontaneous (2020) came out during the peak of the pandemic when I was a high school junior. It's about a high school senior class that literally spontaneously combusts. Very graphically, like blood-filled water balloons. It started with one student and was treated like an isolated incident before it started happening to more students of the same graduation class. That senior class, or who remained, were then quarantined and heavily researched, locked away from their families and treated like guinea pigs. It’s about grief and coping with sudden unforeseen trauma. This horror comedy shows the fragility of the coming-of-age experience in the face of pure unadulterated existentialism. There’s always going to be some sort of unforeseen interruption: love, tragedy, death, indulgence, etc. At the end of the day, everything must resume, even if there’s nothing to go back to. What’s particularly interesting about this movie is that it takes away the idea of having faith in the future. Furthermore, that faith is redirected to living out of spite, out of the feeling of being owed something that could be stripped away from you at any minute. It challenges the “grass is always greener on the other side” and laces it with “this grass is dead under my feet, but it's still my damn grass."

The F***-it List (2020) is very similar in its takeaway philosophy, combating the idea that at some point of growing up, it's too late to live for yourself. While Spontaneous centers on aiming to live long-term and keeping working towards goals even if you believe you could die any second, The F***-it List centers on living-it-up in the present, but still circling back to ground yourself in building a life you can be proud of. It follows a high school senior guy who never really went to parties and prioritizes studying and grades over establishing interpersonal relationships and having fun. While his parents were proud of their son being accepted by several high-end colleges, he felt aimless and driven only by expectations. He becomes an unwilling participant in a senior class prank that goes horribly and blows up the entire school. While no one got hurt, he took the sole blame for the incident and everything he had worked for up to that point was suddenly gone. He ends up having a melt-down and posts a “f***-it list” for himself on social media while he was drunk and it goes viral. There’s more to it than that, but ultimately this movie plays off of the fear of long-haul ambition being for nothing. It challenges the narrative of what people need to do to be successful, and most importantly, to be happy. It emphasizes the materialism of systemic accomplishments, and while it doesn’t completely strip away their value, it does argue that there’s far more to life than “winning.” He thought his world was ending, and that’s what allowed him to fearlessly and shamelessly branch out. All or nothing. Even though the movie focuses on throwing caution to the wind, it still acknowledges the natural consequences, but he can feel like those consequences are truly his and not just the backlash of someone else’s.  

In the age of regurgitated hopecore, and the broadening of the cliché spectrum, it’s refreshing to see something so bleak. It's unapologetically bleak, and yet empowering because we can still make our mark in a zombie wasteland. We can still fight for something we may never achieve, because the fight by itself is worth fighting for. It’s rewarding to feel progression in the now, even if the end destination is just an abstract concept. It’s about finding a way to be happy just doing, living, creating, and surviving.