Janis Joplin died fifty years ago, and she is often remembered as the poster child of the counterculture. Yet, her values did not fully mesh with the counterculture ethos. Whether or not Janis deserves to be the icon of the counterculture depends on how the counterculture is remembered.
Read more“Nobody Calls Me Chicken”: The Crisis of Masculinity in Gen X Cinema
Gen X movies often dealt with the theme of the male underdog finally getting the upper-hand over the dominant male type. Whereas cinema in previous eras glorified the rebel or the tough guy, Gen X cinema elevated the loser: the freaks, the geeks, the nerds, the wimps, the squares, the virgins, the slackers. The fact that so many of these films centered around the theme of the loser beating the jock or the bully demonstrates that there was a crisis of masculinity happening for Generation X, and this crisis was being worked out through the medium of popular culture.
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