It has become a popular pastime for commentators to take aim at the Boomer generation. While members of younger generations struggle to own a home, find remunerative employment, and have a voice in their community and government, Boomers enjoy all these blessings in spades. Moreover, Boomers have a reputation of being selfish with their wealth, hoarding their property, power, and prestige while dismissing the struggles of those below them.
As fellow writer Scott Greer explains in his defense of property taxes, in an essay provocatively titled “’F—k You, I Got Mine,’” most Boomers have no misgivings over saddling younger generations with massive public debt, higher taxes, hollowed-out cultural institutions, and millions of unassimilated third-world immigrants. From their perspective, “Your neighbors and community can all go to hell. All that matters is the individual and his own property. The man doesn’t believe he’s a member of any community. He is an island unto himself.”
Nowhere is this generational attitude better reflected than in the current American entitlement state, which favors Boomers far above younger generations. In an essay that breaks down the numbers of these expensive government programs, Russ Greene concludes that “America’s entitlement system will change radically within a decade, if not sooner…. Each day that passes means Gen Z and Millennials pay more of the price for Boomer irresponsibility.” Thus, even after the Boomers pass away, future generations will still be paying for their public extravagance.
As time goes on, this growing burden and consequent resentment will grow into something not just uncomfortable, but grotesque. And yet the problem festers because it still receives relatively little attention. In order to address and hopefully reverse this disparity between the Boomers and everyone else, the problem must not only be articulated in policy, but also in the culture.
As it happens, one such cultural product came out a year ago that works as a profound allegory of the Boomers ruining communities: Weapons. On the surface, the film seems like a typical example of the horror genre: a dark force enters a small nondescript town, causing a group of children to leave their homes in the middle of the night and mysteriously disappear. However, behind this premise lies an argument about the elderly preying on the young.
Despite what the title suggests, the film has little to do with actual weapons. Sure, a classroom of young children suddenly vanishing and the aftermath of angry parents demanding an explanation all smacks of a modern-day school shooting. But outside of this, the connection is tenuous. The loss feels more like some natural disaster befalling a community than an evil person committing a horrendous crime.
Figuring out the mystery becomes the major focus of the movie. The story is told from multiple perspectives, starting with the elementary school teacher, Justine, who immediately falls under suspicion since it was only students in her class who disappeared. A young single woman unequipped to deal with this tragedy, she desperately tries to return to work and talk to the one student from the class who didn’t disappear. Despite her personal failings, her proximity to the event and willingness to clear her name puts her in the best position to find answers. Nevertheless, the town prefers to find convenient closure by treating her as a scapegoat and likely perpetrator.
The movie then switches to other perspectives—a grieving father, a young police officer, a hapless junky, the school principal, and finally Alex, the one student who didn’t vanish—expanding the story beyond the event itself. What comes out from the different voices is that their town, while relatively peaceful and prosperous, has long ceased to be a real community. The people dwell in atomized, deracinated households with little connection to any human network. They aren’t neighbors wanting the same things and looking after one another, but isolated residents doing their own thing and minding their own business. They outsource their collective concerns onto teachers, administrators, police officers, and bureaucratic protocol, never dreaming of acting on their own.
This leaves them particularly vulnerable to the actual villain of the film (spoiler alert): a powerful witch named Gladys who can possess people. Gladys originally takes control of Alex’s parents to feed off their energy and stave off death. This apparently is not enough for her, so she uses witchcraft to abduct Alex’s classmates as well. Alex is forced to cooperate with Gladys and keep up a pretense that nothing is happening at his house while Gladys gruesomely fends off those who come too close to discovering her secret.
All of it is very creepy and disturbing, making Weapons an excellent piece of modern horror, yet it is also very suggestive. The film is more than an updated Grimm’s fairytale—though this element is also intriguing in its own right. It ends up being a commentary on the present widespread generational oppression depleting society of its vitality and agency.
Gladys represents the omnipresent parasitic Boomer who imposes herself onto younger generations. Unlike the witches of yore, she makes no attempt to trick her victims with sweets or promises of a better life, but simply assumes compliance and respect from them because she is an old woman. She bedecks herself like a clown, wearing a bright red wig and putting on heavy makeup, but somehow this never raises much suspicion from anyone. As with most Boomers, so much about her exasperating presence is simply accepted without question.
Additionally, like most selfish Boomers, Gladys has no misgivings about what she is doing. In a sense, what she does to her victims is worse than death since they are conscious of what is happening but completely helpless to do anything about it. They exist to service the witch by giving up their life-force and putting up no resistance. For her part, Gladys never bothers to justify her cruelty or question the morality of any of it; she feels entitled to everything.
Gladys’s decline prompts her to go on possessing people even younger than Alex’s parents in the vain hope of living even longer. Similarly, many Boomers are not content with merely exploiting Gen Xers, Millennials, and now Zoomers; they must prey on Generation Alpha (those born in the last 15 years) as well, denying them economic and political opportunities, hollowing out every major cultural institution, pushing mass migration from the third world, amassing unfathomable vast sums of debt, pushing addictive vices on everyone, and resurrecting destructive ideologies like socialism. Despite three whole generations living out the consequences of these Boomer-initiated evils and trying to reverse it where they can, Boomers will calmly overrule them like Gladys casting spells on those trying to stop her.
So what is the film’s solution to this problem? Again, the parallels between Gladys the witch and the parasitic Boomers holds: the tools (or “weapons”) of the offenders must be turned against them. In Gladys’s case, her still-possessed child victims turn against her and tear her apart limb by limb in a gory frenzy. In the Boomers’ case, the disenfranchised younger generations are primed to confiscate the Boomers’ property, cancel their legacy, remove them from public life, and euthanize them at the first opportunity—maybe the rising Democratic Socialists of America will lead the way on this. The only thing preventing this outcome is the half-formed conscience of younger conservative Americans who hold out hope of peacefully restoring the world to a better time before the Boomers took over.
It’s a sobering conclusion, to say the least, but one that makes a deep impression. Unlike most horror flicks, Weapons captures the imagination because it feels real, not only in the production and performances (which are superb), but in its characters, settings, and themes. Gladys is a believable menace because a version of her exists everywhere. One recent example was a 70-year-old man who tried drowning a 21-year-old man on crutches out of pure Boomer spite. The whole crime went viral on social media because this has become such a recognizable type in present-day America.
As Weapons illustrates, the only way out of this spiritual stranglehold is to forcefully respond to the Boomer excesses taking such a major toll on Americans everywhere. Hopefully, the end won’t be as brutal as in the movie, but a reckoning needs to happen one way or another so that witches like Gladys can return to the pages of fairytales, not continue casting their curses on Americans today.
Photo Credit- the Big Bois, Child Stories, Branches DSA, Gizmodo, Koimoi and Collider.
A version of this article was originally published in Chronicles under the title “How to Think About the Growing Resentment for Boomers.”
As, barely, a boomer...born four months before the designation ends...I simply don't grok how this works.
Belittling an entire generation as faulty.
You think none of us voted, spoke and fought against the frivolous, unsustainable spending that the government insisted in engaging in? You think none of us raged and railed and ranted against the policies that caused housing costs to explode?
If you said "liberal boomers" or "establishment boomers" or something along those lines, I'd agree with you, but when you lump me in with the leftists that I fought and argued so hard against for lo those many years, you lose me.
... I started to write an entire rebuttal to your piece, but you know what? What's the point? If you can't examine your ridiculous assumptions and beliefs critically enough to realize where you've gone astray, nothing I say is going to cause you to do so.
I will finish off with one thing: My parents generation left home, struck out on their own with no support and built their own lives. My parents expected the same of me and that's what I did. I wasn't coddled, I haven't been "handed" anything. I left home at age 18 with little more than the clothes on my back and have never received a penny from my parents in support. Not because they wouldn't have been willing to give it...and not because I never could have really used it...but because they already raised me once and after I became an adult, I accepted the fact that it was my job now. The younger generations these days live in their parent's basements, on their parent's health care plans, and their parent's cell phone and internet contracts until they're 30 and then bitch because they can't immediately afford to maintain the same standard of living that their parents provided for them as soon as they decide to get out on their own.
Cry me a river.
Just don’t confuse Boomers with us Gen Xers. We hated the Me Generation before you were born.