Say Anything arrived on home video this week in 1989, after an April 14th theatrical release.
This was the last great teen dramedy of the 80s.
Within a few years, the coming-of-age story would drop out of high school entirely. Singles and Reality Bites gave us twentysomethings still figuring it out, but now with rent to pay and the vague suspicion that maybe nobody ever really grows up, they just get older.
We were starting to figure out that we had no chance of figuring anything out.
Lloyd Dobler’s “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything” was the bridge between 80’s teen rebellion and Gen-X slacker philosophy. He wasn’t rejecting his parents or railing against high school bullshit – he was rejecting the entire premise of ambition. That was new. And that seemed like the proper reaction to a totally exhausted decade. To quote Mark Hunter: “Everything decent’s been done.”
The angst, the alienation, the heartache, the listlessness – it all migrated from cafeterias to coffee shops, but it still smelled like Teen Spirit. -Pop