Over at PopMatters, Charles Moss has posted a lengthy consideration of Michael Bay’s Transformers as a “Generation X” phenomenon. An excerpt:

Brian Goldner, Hasbro’s chief operating officer, realized that most of the boys who played with Transformers in the ‘80s are now adult men. He knew that we would be suckers for it. And we are. We’ve become nostalgia-loving adults who find it comforting to revel in childhood as a sign that we don’t take ourselves as seriously as our parents, the baby boomers, had. It’s not that we have refused to grow up, but like the transforming toys we loved so much, the transformation from childhood to adulthood is one which we want to take our time making, figuring out the right twists and turns, making sure every piece of our lives is in place.

Oddly, though Moss’s piece has much to say about slackers, it’s got nothing to say about Slacker.

Moss credits Kevin Smith with bringing “Generation X out of the fanboy closet with 1994’s Clerks, which started a string of films dealing with 20-something slackers who spent most of their time discussing the finer points of Star Wars or superhero sex,” but he doesn’t mention Richard Linklater. I don’t know about you, but to me it seems more and more like Linklater is the true stand-out director of that pack of early-to-mid 90s Sundance brats, the only one with the ability to speak to tendencies common to an entire generation, and not just the Jersey-based comic-gobbling wing of it (I actually wouldn’t want to knock Kevin Smith specifically–there are numerous other directors who could be cited for nailing one specific aspect of Gen X culture while failing to grasp the bigger picture, from Gregg Araki to Wes Anderson to–but Moss brought it up).

Slacker, a 90-minute walking tour of pop philosophy and cultural preoccupations, plays today as a straight-faced precursor to contemporary cable’s endless stream of bargain-basement punditry –– and is Britney’s pregnancy test selling at auction materially different from Madonna’s pap smear selling on the black market? Linklater followed that film with Dazed and Confused, a deceptively “straight” teen comedy that drew a straight, ancestral line back from Gen X cultural/economic ethics (or lack thereof) to idyllic high school stoniness. The film implicitly asked the question, “Is our rejection of our parents’ economic and social values a political statement, or are we just coping with adulthood by reverting to teenage fantasies?”

So basically, the Gen X viewer is Wooderson. But whereas that character fended off old age by arming himself with the totem of teenage pleasure (ie: pot, redheads and Aerosmith tickets), the 30-something dude described by Moss uses Transformers as an excuse to crawl back into the warm embrace of childhood. Instead of peacefully wallowing in nostalgia, the Transformers generation gets aggressively hung up on the details (ie: the debate over Optimus Prime’s lips). “What is wrong with us?” Moss asks. Maybe we’re just trying to go too far back in time.