Word: angstful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sense, then, yuppie angst is the dysfunction that dares not speak its name. Edward Norton's character in Fight Club is so ashamed of the fact that he is bored with the Gap(tm)-bland banality of his successful life he is forced to pretend that his affliction is something completely different. Hence his addiction to group therapy sessions, where he can pretend that his unhappiness springs from testicular cancer or OCD rather than from the cookie-cutter pointlessness of his life. Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening) in American Beauty faces the same dilemma: she's wealthy, she has a nice...
...commercial that's become popular recently chirps "It's about suppression." The commercial is referring to a sexually transmitted disease, but it could very well be referring to yuppie angst. Pop psychology saw this coming: because it's not really socially acceptable to be unhappy about happiness, the Carolyn Burnhams of the world can't really make any sort of change to it. How to cope? Why, by suppressing everything inside, be it good or bad-thereby further emphasizing the emotionless tedium of yuppiedom. After all, the first and second rules of Fight Club are that you don't talk...
...most people try to counter feelings of listlessness with activity, motion, movement. Yuppies seem to take this to an extreme and counter feelings of extreme ennui with extreme activity-i.e. violence; repress your IKEA-fueled angst long enough and it'll explode in your face like a computer at midnight on New Year's Day 2000. Aggression seems truly to be the key to defusing the ticking time-bomb of yuppie angst. This is obvious in Fight Club: the entire movie is centered around the premise that yuppie poster boy Edward Norton finds escape from his micromanaged world only...
...decided to step on the giants' toes and give them a swift kick to the crotch when he came out with his novel Generation X only a year after yuppie whining manifesto thirtysomething went off the air. In this book and in Microserfs, Coupland chronicled the effects of yuppie angst on the rest of the world-that post-yuppie generation bit by their own species of the Y2Kare bug. Just as middle-management yupsters lashed out against the oppressive ineffectuality of upper management, so too did young up-and-comer twentysomethings feel oppressed by the IKEA angst of their yuppie...
...Fight Club tries to turn the same self-referential tricks as Smith's movies as an antidote to the violence of yuppie angst. The Clockwork Orange-esque rejoicing in mayhem that characterizes so much of the movie is contrasted with its many self-referential moments (without giving too much away...): the bizarre walk through the IKEA catalog; the moment when movie projectionist Tyler Durden, discussing the "change filmstrip" blip that appears on movie screens, points to the one on the screen of the movie he is in; and a final revelation about the relationship between Durden and the narrator. Unfortunately...