The millennial generation needs a dose of New Wave optimism
“Jean-Paul Belmondo est mort,” I told my online French class on Monday evening. Cue a gasp from the teacher. “Non! C’est pas vrai!” Well, it was vrai. However, he absolutely went out in style. Hero of New Wave cinema, graduate of dozens of pulpy gangster films and with a screen persona as magnetic as Brando, John Wayne, you name it. Belmondo was celebrated this week in a ceremony at the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris, with the French President in attendance.
Draped in the Tricolore, his coffin was carried on the backs of men in military uniform and proceedings were broadcast live on TV. Let’s be honest – only in France could such a fantastical spectacle unfold, this fusion of national drama, Republican valeurs and high culture. How suitable too for a patriot of France, who decried the influence of Hollywood and barely appeared in films outside his own country. As he was carried off, massed crowds stood in unison to honour Belmondo’s last journey. The camera flicked between various attendees in floods of tears.
It’s probably hard to find a British Francophile of the past fifty years who hasn’t some treasured memory of Belmondo – mine was, of course, his rakish performance as Michel Poiccard in Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature: A bout de souffle (“Breathless”). For a teenager growing up in profoundly stuffy Edinburgh, the look, the style, the animation, the freedom virtually pouring out of the screen showed me a world of urban swagger and a new definition of “cool”.
In his latest essay for UnHerd, “Boomers: the luckiest generation that ever lived”, journalist Ed West comments that if you grew up in the fifties, “you were officially part of the luckiest generation in history”. Released in 1960, Breathless summed up a dynamic era, in which the young at least felt liberated from a bleak period of post-war austerity, rationing and petty bureaucracy. The “luckiest generation” surfed on a “Nouvelle Vague” of rising social mobility, fresh opportunity and cultural optimism.
By contrast, the generation born in the 90s is profoundly miserable. There is a growing sense of realism about the inter-generational injustices at work in European society. While vast swathes of Mediterranean youth have already migrated abroad to escape crippling levels of unemployment, Brits born in the nineties are increasingly aware that society’s interests seem to be marshalled against them – hammered by tax rises and, over the past year, corralled and constrained by crudely constructed sets of government restrictions.
“Growing up after the financial crisis and austerity, and with house prices still increasing 10% per year, it must seem hopeless at times,” West continues. That sense of hopelessness infuses Millennial culture, which is profoundly pessimistic – the kids, as they say, are not alright. Take Sally Rooney’s novels, which have defined the sensibility of a generation. The characters are predominantly cynical and self-involved. They talk in the modern jargon of left-liberation politics – name-checking Marx and Baudrillard, but not really convinced it will do them any good, or change much in the grand scheme of things.
Millennials feel at once over-educated and a bit useless. The dominant mood is a pose of elegant apathy. Another decade of diminishing opportunities may transform that sensibility into something rather uglier.
Perhaps I’m being nostalgic for a time I wasn’t around to experience – every era has its challenges, after all. Nuclear annihilation, half of Europe behind a wall, third world poverty, Mao’s long march to nowhere… Nevertheless, in western societies, the sixties were a pretty good time to be alive. And complacency about the present societal order seems to me to be misplaced. After all, the disaffected western middle class produced many of the 19th and 20th centuries’ revolutionaries. We may find that the generation that comes after looks to action and political violence, rather than apathy, to protect its interests.