Good Millennial. Bad Millennial.

Mild spoilers for Mr & Mrs Smith (Amazon, 2024) and I May Destroy You (BBC, 2020)

The set-up for the recent TV series Mr and Mrs Smith (a reimagining of the 2005 film) is that two professional spy-assassins are placed in an arranged marriage by their mysterious spy agency, and then screw everything up by falling in love with each other. Over the series they navigate ordinary-couple-stuff - commitment, jealousy, house-hunting, differing approaches to washing-up - while killing people and running away from explosions. It’s wonderfully put together and compulsively watchable; I could see it was extremely good fun, in the way you hear a wild party taking place next door and have to admit that it seems highly enjoyable. 

My problem was that I was almost unbearably irritated by the ‘wife’ bit of the husband-and-wife team, Jane Smith (played with brio by Maya Erskine). John Smith (Donald Glover) is charming and handsome and warm and goofy; he is a timeless male archetype. But Jane Smith is a whole other barrel of cats. She is horrifyingly aggressive, and proud of it. She defines herself through her professionalism, despite being demonstrably bad at her job in several important ways. She is shockingly venomous, yet quick to take offence. She despises and punishes weakness, and she is amazingly self-righteous. At one point the British supernova Michaela Coel pops up playing Bev, another freelance spy-assassin. (Just how many of these people are there?) Bev is a relief, because she is the only person in the entire series who correctly identifies Jane as an absolute bloody nightmare. ‘Just to be clear,’ she says at one point when Jane is monologuing away while holding a gun to Bev’s head, ‘we’re not bonding.’ Hearing this flat disdain expressed in a London accent made me feel almost tearfully patriotic.

Wanging on about Millennials is very five-years-ago and - more importantly - it’s stupid and boring. But nevertheless I am going to wang on about Millennials, or at least one specific aspect of Millennial culture. And that is: why are all their women so bloody angry? In films and TV it’s becoming impossible to escape thirtysomething women who are vituperative, neurotic and perma-furious. You can see this archetype in the awkward aggression and borderline sociopathy of the Millennial queen, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s eponymous Fleabag. You can see it in Jane Smith, who says she was turned down by the CIA because she is too much of a sociopath. (This is characteristic of the jokes in this series, which are mostly very good.) Freddie deBoer has a whole list of these characters, ranging from ‘every character in Archer’ to ‘the horny feminist droid in Solo’. He calls them ‘Velmas’, after the way the character of Velma was developed in a recent adaptation of Scooby Doo. (My attention keeps wandering back to those last few words. Someone adapted Scooby Doo.)

Velma simply never stops insulting everyone and everything around her, dropping one liner after one liner and making sure every other character and the audience knows that she’s unimpressed with everything. We’re told that she’s really insecure at several points, but that’s never dramatized.

Does this have any significance, beyond the fact that I find it annoying? I think it does, because to a non-negligible extent these youth-culture paradigms seep out into ordinary life. Popular culture offers behavioural templates and feeds them back into the real world, where impressionable young people pick them up, try them on and sometimes say: ‘that’s so me!’. Young people are pretty impressionable, and they like to feel part of a tribe. This is just how it works. After one viewing of Slacker and a couple of listens to Nevermind Gen X decided that we were lazy and disaffected, that nothing meant anything, and that Bill Hicks was funny. That was our preferred self-caricature, and we have indeed turned out to be a generation that accomplished very little. The preferred self-caricature of Millennial women, as revealed in too many films and TV programmes to ignore, is that they are behavioural grenades with the pin half-out.

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There’s an irresistible line between this and the Millennial deployment of shame and punishment on social media, a project that could only be driven onwards by people who embraced anger as a cleansing force. Thoughtful progressives often tell themselves that ‘Millennial cancel culture’ isn’t a real thing, by which they mean that it only happens to bad people. I know they think this because I used to think it too. I was a reasonably early adopter of Twitter, and for a while I thought it was great fun. I liked the stage where an enthusiastic mob destroyed the lives and careers of men who were sexual predators, and then moved on to men who were a bit handsy, before coming back for men who really liked having consensual sex with young adults. By this point, if we’re honest, we were just going after ‘men’, and that was larks. 

But it turned out that Millennials didn’t only want to cancel men and other bad people. No: as I really should have anticipated, it quickly turned into a case of #MeToo. After a professional entanglement in the blindfold knife-throwing contest that we in the UK are pleased to call ‘the trans debate’, cancellation stopped being a lark and became a personal reality. Seemingly overnight, through a mechanism that nobody could explain, 20-somethings in stupid jeans decided that I was irredeemably bigoted and thus a legitimate target for stunning levels of unpleasantness. The whole thing was like a bad trip: nothing made sense, everything was threatening, the scenery kept lurching, and I was constantly nauseous. If this hasn’t happened to you it’s difficult to describe its staggering force: how relentless it is, and how anger feels like its prime characteristic. The walls shook with other people’s fury. Eventually it all calmed down, and most people involved have moved on. But I haven’t. Like a tribe that once encountered a bear, I still freeze when I encounter angry Millennials; their image is burned onto my retina.

When they first took to Twitter around 15 years ago, even the oldest Millennials were just pushing 30. They weren’t old enough to fancy people 20 years younger than them, or to have staff with whom they could misjudge their interactions. They confused this absence of human complication - as young people often do - with being unusually morally pure. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s lots of Gen Xers had all the same puritanical impulses as 2010 Millennials. But we didn’t - thank God - have a global machine for inflicting shame and punishment at lightning speed. (All that remains of our self-righteousness is a few agonised novels about campus politics and Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, which hardly anyone remembers now.) All politically engaged teenagers and twentysomethings are like the newly-founded United States in the late 1700s: the absence of history, of personal involvement in squalid compromise, allows all kinds of magical stories about their own incorruptibility. 

This blind spot is the territory of Coel’s 2020 series I May Destroy You, which uses narratives about sexual consent to examine the assumption that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are immutable and mutually-exclusive states. Coel develops a recurring pattern over the 12 short episodes. First, we are shown an incident: a violent assault, a regrettable threesome, a blurry episode of sex-gone-wrong. All of these fall within the technical definition of ‘rape’, and by the end of the scene the viewer has developed firm opinions about who deserves our fury. You are invited to freezeframe your judgement, to pin it carefully to the board. And then - sometimes straight away, sometimes a while later, just like life - we find out a little bit more: some relevant personal history, a new piece of testimony, a different point of view, the uncovering of a lie. Who deserves your fury now? The pattern is repeated: each character, each incident is peeled back over and over, in layers of hurt and precarity and mistakes and self-preservation. How about now? It’s basically a six-hour version of the famous Guardian advertisement. 

Coel shows how we all lie to people, or trick them, or demand more empathy than we’re willing to extend. She shows how the rush of self-righteousness actually incentivises us to construct narratives that emphasise our own victimisation and exaggerate our own weakness. She shows the hall passes we give ourselves, but not other people. (You might suspect me of doing all of these things in this piece, and you’d be right.) The story of Theodora, who runs a support group for survivors of sexual assault, has more switchbacks than a coastal road in Menorca. 

In the final episode of Mr & Mrs Smith there’s an attempt to show Jane having a similar moment of honest self-examination, but it doesn’t give it enough space; after seven and a half episodes of sheer bloody nastiness, the self-criticism lasts all of two minutes. It comes across as cursory self-exculpation, like one of the public apologies forced out of people at the culmination of a cancelling: life is hard, work is hard, I’m damaged and psychologically complicated. Aren’t we all, darling. My kneejerk response was to extend her exactly as much empathy and indulgence as her real-life counterparts had offered me.

Beyond Jane Smith’s viciousness, the Millennial nature of Mr and Mrs Smith is revealed in its insistent ugly-delicate luxury aesthetic. It’s full of evil-looking succulents in wonky pots and complicated food in tiny portions. All the expertly cut clothes are in the colours of decomposition: ‘infected toenail’, ‘abandoned chisel’, ‘stale batter’, ‘sad cheese’. (I despise this palette. It is dreadfully unflattering for my people, the sallow.) The careful ugliness and organicism of Millennial clothes and ornaments, the emphasis not just on ‘nature’ but on infection and corruption - earth and dirt and pus and blood - reflects the way these pop-culture characters embody an intentional discomfort, scratching away at their own imperfections and those of the people around them. They don’t only access and express their anger; they find all their own meannesses and furtive enthusiasms, their own pimples and boils, their smells and their sweats, and they write it all down and put their names underneath; they are willing to deal with the aftermath. When I came close to cancellation I wasn’t even brave enough to stand by my own thoughts; I ran away from all my social media accounts instead. It taught me a lot about my capacity for cowardice and my need to be liked, my preference for comfort. Unlikeable as Jane is, she is unlikeable - at least in part - because of her courage, and her refusal to seek approval or affection. Somewhere in this unblinking core there’s a partial explanation for Millennials’ brilliant success, their extraordinary cultural and political impact. 

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Still, it’s hard not to be resentful of them when they make series like Mr & Mrs Smith; energetic, funny, smart pieces of pop culture that place their own hideously unlikeable avatars at the centre and require us to offer them our empathy. When Millennials were discovering Friends and Rick Astley I thought we would be twin generations, but instead we’re like cousins who fell out years ago and now the younger one keeps winning the Booker Prize. They mostly ignore us, which of course only makes it worse. The thing that I liked best about Twitter back in those early days was the way its Millennial vanguard deployed Gen X’s signature moves: pop culture archaeology, determined silliness, languid denigration, technicolour ennui. I know I wasn’t the only Xer who thought I’d found my people, and that I’d be welcomed like some kind of wise Yoda-figure: Ayyyy, we’ve finally worked out how to run a really good global chatboard! What are we all drinking? But when we made the mistake of thinking that we could disagree with their political propositions, it was revealed that they had no affection for us at all. They just turned around and started shooting at us. Humiliatingly, we had no idea how to defend ourselves. Gen X: all tactics, no strategy.

If not affectionate recognition, what is it that they think about us? There’s a hint in one of the other big cameos in Mr & Mrs Smith, a glorious turn by Gen X icon Parker Posey as a spy-assassin (yes, another one) who turns into an enemy. On her first appearance Posey carefully presents herself as a fun older-sister type, necking booze and offering wry wisdom. Then, in a sudden lurching plot twist, she tricks Mr & Mrs Smith into taking on a mission that sounds flatly suicidal. She bundles them into a helicopter while giving them very sketchy instructions, all the while insisting that the whole thing is going to be really character-building. As the helicopter draws away from the landing pad the camera turns from John and Jane’s terrified faces to Posey, who is doing a fabulous little dance on the landing pad. Her hands are in the air like a mum at a Taylor Swift gig; a huge fake smile appears on her face and she starts pumping her hips from side to side. It's gonna be such fun! You’ve got this! 

Mr & Mrs Smith is a self-consciously Millennial series, and its writers - if not all its viewers - surely know Posey is as X as it gets, so I think it’s not too much of a stretch to interpret this scene as an intentional metaphor. This is what Millennials think we have done to them. They think we’ve stuffed them into a precarious vehicle while shouting threadbare instructions for a dangerous mission, and that we don’t even have the decency to be honest about what we’ve done: the maddening internet, the unpayable student loans, the impossible housing market, the gig-economy jobs, the entrenched prejudice, the planet that’s about to catch fire. They think we’re dishonest, condescending, dangerous and selfish, while trying and failing to be super-cool. (They also think we drink too much.) They think we’re waving them off to a dreadful future, and all we can do is pump our ageing hips from side to side in our stupid jeans. They think that the Gen X rallying cry - ‘It was like that when we got here!’ - is insufficient. Maybe they really are just bloody furious with us.

Or maybe they don’t think any of these things. Maybe I’m trying to find some hugs and learning so that I can stop feeling uncomfortable. Maybe I’m just desperate for Millennials to have any opinions about us at all, any sign that they recognise us, any indication that they want anything from us other than literally going away and dying. Maybe I mostly like I May Destroy You because I think Coel would recognise me as a fellow human and give me a fair hearing. And maybe I mostly don’t like Jane Smith because she wouldn’t like me first, and she wouldn’t like me more. And she’d say so, in a piece that would be a lot better than this one.

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For more on the generational stories, try Rowan’s piece on the exquisite agony of being in yours 20s in the ‘90s: