What's with young people movies these days anyway? Doesn't anyone have fun anymore? Doesn't anyone have Attitude? Sontaneity? A desire to blaze their own path?
Remember James Dean? All right, I don't either, except maybe on video, and on huge black-and-white posters that belonged to a different era. But yo do not have to have seen Rebel Without A Cause to notice that the guy has a face that says he does not give a damn what anyone else thinks of him. He will get on with his own life, thank you very much.
Now, take Reality Bites, which opened here last week. Everyone in the movie is would as tightly as a coiled spring. If angst could be harnessed for energy, there would be enough electricity for the Great Singapore Light-Up for a year.
Starring ex-teen angst queen Winona Ryder and Dead Poets Society alumnus Ethan Hawke, the movie is about a bunch of young people who try to find the meaning of life somewhere at the bottom of their underpaid, underchallenging McJobs, semi-disposable relationships and chees-covered pizzas.
Do not get me wrong, it is a good film, with bits of darm humour that appears rarely in mostly feel-good American movies. It also has a great soundtrack, with everyone from new discovery Lisa Loeb to the usual standards, U2 -- the perfect recipe to make a '90s statement.
But it is a difficult to get through the whole movie without wanting to pluck the characters from the screen, shaking them and asking them to stop taking themselves so seriously.
You could say it is an American movie and does not reflect the Asian psyche. But tense, uptight characters inhabit the screens here as well. Look at the characters in the Taiwanese movie, A Confucian Confusion, which was showing at the Picturehouse recently.
There is Molly, a rich Taipei yuppie who is tearing her hair over a business that is going out of control, firing everyone in sight; there is Siow Ming, a rising civil servant who agonises over his and his fiancee's every movie, evaluating everything by how it will affect their future; and there is Qiqi, Siow Ming's fiancee, who is tied up in knots worrying over whether people think her innocence and niceness is just an act.
Most of the characters are like waking time-bombs for ulcers and heart attacks. In their search for happiness, they make themselves unhappy. Even scarier, there is a bit of me -- and many of my friends -- in them.
Life cannot simply imitate art this way, can it? That would be too cruel.
Then again, maybe it can.
I am surrounded by people who make decisions like they are planning a war. Maybe I am just a magnet for type-A personalities. Maybe it is the air at Boat Quay where these people hang out. They cannot even make dinner plans without thinking five or 10 years ahead.
I know a 21-year-old finance graduate who refers to his medical student girlfriend as "an investment". He has mapped out his whole life -- in material terms. Three years after he graduates, he wants to be earning $7,000 a month (I wish him luck).
He came up with a time-line even before the Senior Minister's speech several weeks ago: car by 25, apartment when his salary hits $5,000 and marriage right after that. In the evenings, in front of the TV, he practises his golf swing to prepare for the networking he will be doing on the golf course.
Remember the recent survey on Nanyang Technological University graduates? Their uppermost concern about working overseas was having a proper career path when they came home because they did not want to fall behind their colleagues.
Half of the 400 surveyed felt they should get double their pay if they were posted overseas, and another quarter felt they should get even more.
Uh, are these people for real? Give up an overseas job because it does not pay 150 per cent of their current salary? Afraid to be left behind? Doesn't the experience one would have gained working in a different environment count for anything? What about widened horizons? Lessons in adaptation? Survival skills? Risks? Entrepreneural spirit?
Must everything be thought of in annual packages and promotions?
This pragmatism gets to ridiculous proportions. I have friends who got married just to buy property. I have friends who are looking to marry only money, and will ignore men, however decent, whose bank accounts do not match up to their ambitions.
I am all for forward thinking -- it is part of what led to Singapore's incredible success. But with all that planning, we seem to have pushed aside some essential things -- spontaneity, the ability to think on our feet, and the will to live life by how we define it, not what others dictate.
Of course, we can blame the system. It is the regimented way we have been brought up, right? The exams, the competition, the constant call to do better.
But you know what? Beyond a certain age, we are expected to have our own minds. If we are old enough to vote, we are old enough to think for ourselves. And if we find ourselves led tamely on a conveyor belt to utter soullessness, we only have ourselves to blame.
My solution? Another campaign. We should have a Great Singapore Lighten Up day where everyone shows up for work in candy-coloured pyjamas. Bosses, in particular, would have to show up in flannel nightgowns. No one would work on that day. We would sit around watching old Monty Python videos or A Fish Called Wanda or Wayn'es World.
Meanwhile, I am off to the beach to listen to the waves. I am going to drive with the wind in my hair, the windows down, and the Reality Bites soundtrack blaring. I may not have found the meaning of life in the movie, but at least I have some great music.