I’m a millennial, and if there’s one thing the internet has taught the world about us, it’s that we love Space Jam. It’s always been slightly unclear to me how much of this love is meant to be ironic, but I’ve found myself in multiple conversations in various social circles of fellow millennial friends talking about our undying devotion to Space Jam. We slouched towards Bethlehem, taking the time to slam now. We had a real jam goin’ down. We had our chance. We did our dance.

I loved Space Jam when I was a kid. It had everything I could possibly want as a child. The Looney Tunes. Michael Jordan. Jokes that somehow involved butts. And yet, whenever I found myself in this conversation, I had to keep myself at somewhat of a distance. I haven’t actually seen Space Jam since I was a very little kid, and I’ve intentionally kept it that way because I want to keep the positive memory of Space Jam alive. I understand myself well enough to know that were I to watch it now, I would probably loathe it.

But lately I’ve been wondering whether or not the impulse to keep certain memories alive is ultimately self-destructive. As I write this, a lot of the art I regularly partake of seems to be going downhill. Movies just had a disastrous summer. I’m paying full price for video games I already bought in previous console generations because I don’t have a choice if I want to play them again. TV still thinks adapting movies is a good idea. And music’s problems… don’t have anything to do with the point I want to make. (Writing’s hard, ok?)

One of the main causes of this trend downwards is “nostalgia,” that word that even upon hearing it at this point makes me want to jump off something very tall and and very public. One day, future historians on whatever planet we’re living on in however many thousands of years from now will study all the records of our era. Upon a thorough investigation, they’ll assume that “nostalgia” was a monster living in some deep scary trench that we had to feed so that it wouldn’t leave its hole and devour us. Sadly, they’ll never realize that it’s a fairly basic emotional response, and it’s a hurdle my generation can’t seem to overcome.

The internet is a beautiful and dangerous tool. The plus of the internet is all the information of the known world at our fingertips. The minus is that it seems to have extended adolescence into our mid-thirties, as we’re content to use that information to relive our childhoods over and over again. Ultimately, I blame this never ending slog through the past on my fellow millennials. While we’re not always the ones who make this content, we are the reason why it’s here, and we’re the reason it continues to thrive.

And hey, millennials like listicles, right? So let’s do one of those!

1. Nostalgia Begets Shitty Art

I don’t think people in my age range understand their relationship with money.

I’m not talking about “privilege” or the problems that come with wealth. The latter of human misery is never-ending and give even the most diehard Bernie supporter enough money and they’ll start acting like Justin Bieber almost immediately. (Myself included.) I’m also not talking about financial planning or taxes. We’re still a young generation, and with the exception of a few tech millionaires and some artists, we’re just getting out of college and trying to make our way through the barren hellscape of the job market. We’ll learn about proper money management soon enough.

I’m talking about how on an almost daily basis, you’re confronted with the question of whether or not to buy something, and if you do, who benefits and what are the ramifications. What you choose to spend your money on matters, and though nobody likes to think in these terms, on some level it does reflect your values. You saw that thing. You liked it. You bought it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, so long as you’re alright with the choices you’ve made. My biggest non-essential expenses are art related. Music and video games and what not. I care about these things, so I’m at peace with the money I’ve spent. I’m not homophobic, so I don’t buy Chick-fil-A.

Problems arise with the casualness at which people my age will throw their money at the dumbest shit on the planet and won’t bat an eyelash at what they’re co-opting. Of course, the internet has made the simple act of buying things intoxicatingly easy. That said, plenty of the hipsters I went to college with were quick to decry capitalism’s flaws atop a small mountain of empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans, then they’d have the new iPhone the very next day. Again, nothing inherently wrong with that. You just might want to consider toning down the pretentious anti-capitalism speech when you’re a willing vessel for capitalism yourself. Also, you look like an asshole.

The great lie about Hollywood executives is that they’re stupid. They’re far from it. They just have different intentions than you do. You go into a movie expecting art. Your expectations of that art are entirely on you, but generally speaking, you go in because you’re expecting a piece of work that will be meaningful, or at the very least, entertaining. They see a product. (Not all of them, as there are plenty who fight for good, but they’re few and far between.) They look at projections, calendars, focus group tests, real estate prices, China, and a number of other factors, and they decide what new product they’re launching at what time. It’s just like any other business. The only difference is that we project a different meaning onto their product then we do a lot of others.

To put it simply, the studios see that we millennials are paying to see new versions of IP from our own childhood, and their understandable reaction is, “Do more of that.” To put it even more simply: A lot of the crap Hollywood puts out is our fault because we pay to see it.

I’ll admit that’s a bit of an oversimplification. There’s plenty of reasons why any given terrible movie can be terrible, be it from a creative or business standpoint. I’m merely saying that you have a role in what gets made and what doesn’t depending on what you pay to go and see.

If it seems that the current business strategy of Hollywood is “Write down a bunch of movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s on a bunch of strips of paper and let’s pick our next movie out of a hat,” that’s because it’s not far off from the truth. Some of these reboots work, and some don’t, and nobody really knows the logic as to why. But as long as we keep rebuying our childhood, they'll keep churning it out.

True, I have different stakes in the matter as I hope to enter this business one day, and it would make things a lot easier for me if studios started buying spec scripts again. True, some of these movies are pretty damn great. However, for every Lego Movie or Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, we also have to stomach through piss poor blockbusters like Batman vs. Superman and Independence Day: Resurgence. In the end, I’m not sure I think it’s worth it.

The superhero/nostalgia era will die. It might happen next year or twenty years from now, but it will happen. Look at every trend since the beginning of filmmaking and one thing becomes clear: Everything ends. We can bring about that end sooner or we can stretch it out as long as possible. Either way, millennials have more power than we think we do. We’re quick to hypothetical generosity with our money, but that’s because most of us don’t have any. This will also end, and it won’t be out of malice or greed, but for the normal reasons. We’ll have families. A loved one will get sick. We’ll want to retire or create a new life for ourselves.

We’re going to be more considerate with our money anyway. Might as well start now.

2. The ‘90s Were Shit

The millennial love of Space Jam comes from the millennial love of the ‘90s in general. You remember the ‘90s, right? Everyone was doing the macarana. All the kids had Furbies. Hurricane Andrew and the Rodney King Riots happened within months of each other, only to be followed up in the years to come by the second Ebola outbreak in (what was then) Zaire, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and the tragic shooting at Columbine that exposed the feral rage seething beneath the national attitude about guns in this country. But ask anyone in my age range and they’ll tell you the ‘90s were awesome. The music! The movies! The cartoons!

Consider this song:

Hooch By Everything I don't own this song

This is “Hooch” by Everything. It reached number sixty nine on the top one hundred chart in 1998, but did better in the subgenre charts under the rock umbrella. It was a hit. Not a huge hit, but a hit nonetheless. At the very least, I remember hearing it on the radio and in the background of a few movies.

“Hooch” is also unrelentingly awful, and by some horrifying confluence of probability and cultural value, “Hooch” hasn’t joined the great pantheon of songs considered “the worst.” In fact, this song’s awfulness reaches dark realms of awful. Imagine: A frat guy in ’98 returns to his dorm in the upper corner of the house. He turns on his boombox. A song from a custom mixtape leaks through the speakers and poisons the air. He stands on a stool. He removes his Titleist visor that encircles his greasy caesar haircut. He removes his tight Patagonia polo shirt and his belt. It’s one of those belts that has a bunch of flags on it, probably from southern states where you have to be extra cautious if you have the wrong skin color. He ties one end of the belt to a pipe that goes across the ceiling, and another around his neck. He puts a lemon wedge in his mouth and undoes the button on his khaki shorts. They drop and hit his penny loafers with an unsatisfying thud. He steps off the stool and cranks as hard as he can, but the lemon falls out of his mouth and lands next to the fresh stain on the floor. Panic floods his veins, but it’s hopeless. Soon enough, he breathes his last breath, and he hangs limp, drool trickling down his mouth.

“Hooch” was definitely the song playing in the background. It may not have been specifically “Hooch,” but it might as well have been. The ‘90s were the only time a song like “Hooch” could have been successful, because our newly deceased frat douche was the market.

People nowadays tend to worship ‘90s music as if most of it wasn’t total garbage. Some of that worship is warranted. Nirvana put a stake in the heart of ‘80s hair metal, killing it forever despite Guns N’ Roses’s attempts to keep it alive. (While we’re on the subject of Guns ’N Roses, fuck Guns N’Roses and that proud cracker bullshit.) Hip hop had a golden age. There was a lot of decent punk and a lot of experimentation that yielded great results in the years that came.

But we have a way of filtering our memory. You don’t like remembering the bad, nor do you like remembering boredom or when you were doing nothing at all. You’d rather remember that time when you and your best friend were making fireballs with a lighter and his mother’s hairspray rather than your time spent on homework or chores. (The previous sentence contains nothing specific to my own childhood. I promise.) Thus the bad and the unremarkable fall by the mental wayside, and we imbue yesteryear with a kind of glory.

But the bad happened, and it’s a fundamental part of defining your past. Yes, we had Nevermind and Illmatic. But we also had “Achey Breaky Heart” and “Summer Girls” and “Two Princes.” We had plenty of (mostly) disposable boy and girl bands. We had nu-metal and Ricky Martin and Vanilla Ice. Consider that this multitude of garbage was all incubated in the same decade. That we lived in a society where we could abide “Cotton Eye Joe” on the radio without flying into a violent rage over the state of things. Think of those executives from the previous section. We lived in a time where they could look at their graphs, conclude that Lou Bega would sell, and be right.

Lou Bega's official music video for 'Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit of.)'. Click to listen to Lou Bega on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/LouBegaSpotify?IQid=LBegaM5 As featured on A Little Bit of Mambo.

Take the same logic, swap out the names of the bands and the songs and the albums and replace them with movies. The logic still holds up. For every Pulp Fiction and Lion King, we had five movies like It's Pat and Wing Commander. (Remember the Wing Commander movie? I fucking do.) In fact, you can pretty much do this with any medium. For every Half-Life and Super Mario 64 you had Superman 64 and Elf Bowling. For every Twin Peaks and South Park there was, well… most of ‘90s TV.

The ‘90s weren’t special. Newness was born. Some of it good. Most of it bad. The good gets remembered. The bad gets forgotten. You had a shitty day, you return home, and there’s a sudden nagging thought. “Responsibility sucks. I miss Rugrats. I miss being a kid. I miss the ‘90s.” But you don’t really miss the ‘90s. You miss your projection of the ‘90s as this bastion of art and culture that it really wasn’t. It was just a time like any other time, and one day, our children will look back on 2016 and project onto it the same feelings millennials project onto the ‘90s. And you’ll think they’re stupid.

A lot of ‘90s art may not have been as bad as, say, ‘80s art. Some of you are undoubtedly into the ‘90s for the irony factor, in which case, yeah, whatever. But a lot of you aren’t, and I want you to consider something: Is it possible that the stuff you liked when you were younger wasn’t great? I mention this because…

3. Most of the Shit You Liked was Probably Shit

From the moment I had access to the store on the original Wii, I downloaded a lot of old games. A handful of them were the SNES games of old I used to play with my brother, but mostly N64 games. The N64, in hindsight, may not have been the best hardware at the time, but the games I played on that system had an important role in my development as a child, and thus I had a great fondness for them. So I played them all, and I’m sad to say that most of them don’t hold up. (I’d specify which ones, but I feel that would necessitate another paragraph of qualifiers and caveats, and we’re already running long.)

Looking back, I don’t really know why I expected them to be any good. I was merely a prepubescent, unaware of the true nature of the world. My only concerns were the accumulation of toys and rewatching James Bond movies on VHS as many times as I possibly could. Now I’m in my mid-twenties. I’ve read more books. I’ve seen more movies. I buy cooking implements and I call the customer service line at Toshiba and yell profanities at the lady because my external hard drive malfunctioned. I’m aware of my own mortality. You know… adult stuff.

Back then you needed less, thus you wanted less. You didn’t know the difference between “good” art and “bad” art because you hadn’t experienced enough to know the difference. You get older. You experience more stuff. Your tastes change. What you liked back then isn’t enough anymore. That’s how it works.

I've been telling myself for years that I'm going to go back and rewatch all the Bond movies in release order. Most of them probably won't hold up, and that's fine.

Or at least that’s how it supposed to work, because there seems to be a trend amongst my fellow millennials that if you bring up even the mildest of criticisms against any movie we enjoyed in our childhood, we’ll pounce upon you like a herd of hyenas and you’re Mufasa. I posted a negative opinion about Mulan on Facebook once, and within five minutes I found myself embroiled in at least three separate arguments. Generally speaking, my point was that Mulan is a great character trapped in a movie that’s beneath her, and while some had good points to make, the substance of most of these arguments was, “I liked Mulan then, and thus I like it now.”

I would like to say that this behavior is exclusive to millennials, but I don’t think that’s the case. If aliens from a more advanced civilization had found Earth and witnessed our behavior during the fiasco surrounding the Ghostbusters reboot, they would’ve destroyed us and never have thought twice about it because we clearly aren’t a species worth saving. From where I was sitting, as someone who’s indifferent to the original Ghostbusters, I wouldn’t blame them. All the misogyny and claims of childhood ruination and Twitter nonsense and people trying to outblog one another. I almost bought a ticket out of shear spite.

Nostalgia should not be a metric for appreciation. There is no magic formula that dictates, “Beloved art from childhood + most nostalgia = best art.” It’s a powerful force to be sure, but it’s not enough. That’s not how art works, and to behave otherwise is a willful act of cognitive dissonance. It’s a denial of the interesting person you are now for the sake of a projection of who you thought you were then. And let’s face it: You were probably awful. We were all awful. I was awful. Kids are awful.

4. Nobody Gives a Shit About How You Feel

(UPDATE 11/10/2016: I wrote the following section before the election of Donald Trump, or Drumpf as I see him thanks to my "Make Donald Drumpf Again" extension. I'm struggling with how I feel about what I wrote below. I understand that I was talking about empty political gestures and our self-destructive desire to inflict the ugliest parts of ourselves onto others, but I live in a different reality now. I thought about cutting this whole section out, but I'm going to leave it in to remind myself how I used to think, and how I want to move forward.)

Ok, there’s a more tactful way of phrasing that. I’m sure you have plenty of friends and family that love you and blah blah blah.

I’m talking about the feeling some of you get whenever a reboot or remake of something from your childhood comes out, and you feel like you’re owed something. I’m talking about the knee-jerk emotional response to impose your will on the world because a remake doesn’t live up to your arbitrary standards. I’m talking about the impulse to wrap yourself around your childhood because you think it’s worth protecting, and because of that, you think you have a say in someone else’s work.

You are owed nothing. What you felt when you were a kid doesn’t matter to anyone but you. You have no right to dictate the terms of what a corporation does with their own property just because you watched something when you were a kid and a few lights flickered to life in your still developing brain. In an ideal world, remakes, if we must have them, would remain loyal to the spirit of the original. But the world you live in is unfair, your emotional well-being is your own responsibility in the end, and it’s illogical to expect anyone or any corporation to behave any differently for the sake of... you.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is why the world seems so hellbent on hating the millennials. True, older generations hating the youth isn’t a new concept by any means, and the hatred for millennials probably seems more intense than it actually is because of our relationship with the internet. But still, it does seem intense, and the cause has never been clear. Hell, even I hate a lot of the behavior of millennials and I am one.

I don’t think there’s one reason, and out of the many I’ve come up with, most of them boil down to irrationality and the simple fact that some of the stuff we do is pretty annoying. (Put your phone away during dinner, for instance.) However, I think that part of it comes from a perception of millennials that we have the uncanny ability to take anything in our lives and somehow make it about our emotions. We deny ourselves unpleasant but possibly vital experiences and art because we might be “triggered.” We aren’t mature enough to properly filter information because we mistake our initial emotional response for truth.

This video is cool. Coolcoolcool.

I don’t think all millennials behave this way, but I think there’s a reason that perception exists, and it’s easy to understand why this way of living bothers people so much. We convince ourselves that when we write our political Facebook statuses or police each other's behavior, we’re doing it for any reason other than making ourselves feel good for a few minutes. That we're motivated by the need to make the world a better place, when we seem to be more motivated by the desire to have others see us do it. To someone older who’s overcome the worst of what life has to offer, we must look ridiculous. We think things are bad now. We have no idea what’s to come, especially when we're responsible for others.

(Of course, if someone’s saying or doing anything to harm your race, sexuality, gender preference, or anything else related to your basic rights as a human being, trigger away. Hell, there’s nothing stopping you from tweeting at Donald Trump right now. I'm not questioning your right to be who you are. I'm questioning our motives and whether or not the way we choose to cope with the world is actually effective.)

This desire to fixate solely on how the surrounding stimuli makes us feel also takes all of our conversations about art away from merit and back into the meta. The conversation about a piece of art isn’t actually about the art anymore, but about the reaction to it and the discussion. I think that this is one of the subtle driving forces behind the nostalgia era of art and entertainment. Millennials seem to want to live in a world that feels emotionally safe, like it did back when we were kids. Instead of swimming out to new waters where things might be more dangerous, we seek comfort in old rehashes of movies we already know are secure, and we get mad when they don’t live up to our severely high standards. We even act this way when those original movies weren’t that great to begin with.

With this is mind, I rewatched Space Jam. I wasn’t surprised to find out that it’s total dog shit. It doesn’t really have much of a story, the jokes aren’t funny, the acting is hammy, most of it looks poor, the money grubbing nature of the premise is shockingly evident, Lola Bunny serves no purpose and the implications of her existence are... troubling, and the whole thing has this lazy feel of, “Fuck it, it’s for kids, so who cares.” Also, Foghorn sings a minstrel song.

"Dixie" is a minstrel song and always will be a minstrel song no matter how many confederate roosters sing it.

Yes, that happy childhood memory is gone, but there's nothing wrong with that. It means I'm free to stop defending art I know is bad for the sake of my precious childhood that isn't your problem.

Now I can watch something new.