When It All Went Boom: A Generation Arrives with The Big Chill

Late last year, Fortune magazine announced a major milestone due in 2024 – the year when Gen Zers will outnumber Baby Boomers in the workplace. This doesn't signal a changing of the guard: according to the story, "Millennials will still reign supreme (even if some of their corporate relics like WeWork and Glossier are losing favor) for the next couple of decades."

Boomers, Fortune tells us, dominated the workplace until 2011. Their successors in Gen X only managed to have "a brief time in the sun until 2018" and Millennials took over after that and are expected to dominate the workplace until 2040. The story speculates on how this changing of the guard will affect businesses ("younger generations are more likely to want to talk about politics and issues of diversity and inclusion than their older cohorts" so be prepared for more of this for years to come) but the message is simple: the era of the Boomer is over.

Which seems as good a time as any to go back to the moment when the Baby Boom got its hands firmly on the wheel of the culture, if not the boardroom. The latter, some say, came after Bill Clinton (born 1946) won his first term as US president; the former arrived years earlier, with the release of The Big Chill in 1983.

The year marked two decades since the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the release of the first Beatles records, and a decade since the end of the draft in the US. The '80s were the decade when the Boomers entered middle age, and this is where writer and director Lawrence Kasdan (born 1949) has a group of college friends who've drifted apart reunite for the funeral of Alex (Kevin Costner, born in 1955...

Good article. I enjoyed reading it. Thanks for posting.

I know I've seen this film once, probably as a teenager shortly after it hit the video rental market. I don't remember much about it other than my parents and their Boomer friends absolutely loved it. And of course the soundtrack was a massive hit.

This line from the film near the end of the article stuck with me: "A long time ago we knew each other for a short period..."

How true this is. Looking back on high school, or college, I only knew those people for four years. It seemed like an eternity but it was only four years. And I don't know anything about them today, nor they me (other than the occasional Facebook post).

I'm similar in age to Mark Steyn, tail end of the Boomer generation, and the movie perplexed me as well when I first saw it in 1983. To me the movie portrayed a small group among the first of the Baby Boomers coming of age who were in the process of exchanging their 1960s "idealism" to the "conspicuous wealth lifestyle" of the 1980s.

This was around the time that the term "yuppie" was coined (young urban professional) and this smarmy, self-important little group personified exactly what yuppies were.

Spending the weekend in a huge mansion together, driving around in Porsches, and fretting about the "changes" in their lives, it was at times insufferable. Even the movie soundtrack sounded like a curated playlist of the most overwrought and overplayed 1960s era tunes.

However, the movie did help define a turning point of our culture back then. By the mid 1980s, the young generation of the 1960s had fully transformed from the anti-establishment hippies we once thought they were to the more materialistic and wealth-accumulating generation we saw during the "go-go 80s".

It was also a time when the Democrat party began abandoning their base of lunchpail blue-collar working men and started becoming the party of the educated "professional" class, who look down on everybody else. Yuppies.

Decades later, the transition is complete. The "liberals" of the 1960s are now the establishment. With total control of academia, entertainment, and the media, they will happily put their jackboots on the necks of those who question authority or dare espouse any kind of traditional values.

Same here. I’m a boomer and don’t know what the word inheritance means. I had to pay out of my pocket to bury my dad. My wife’s parents died owing us $50,000 from making their mortgage payment for 12 years. But we have two friends the same age as us, one inherited a million dollars and the other $700,000. Yet we still split the restaurant tab.

The movie “The Big Chill” served as an indirect inspiration for my college housemates and me. It motivated us to embark on a class project aimed at writing a 501(c)(3) business plan. Our goal was to purchase our rented house, secure a low-interest loan, and establish a student housing organization.

Three and a half decades later, we have grown apart, some relationships even at the point of disdain, but the organization we started still exists, and has added a half dozen houses.

To me the movie portrayed a small group among the first of the Baby Boomers coming of age who were in the process of exchanging their 1960s "idealism" to the "conspicuous wealth lifestyle" of the 1980s.

This epic line from an iconic 1980s hit was a lamentation of sorts about exactly that transition:

Out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. — “The Boys Of Summer” by Don Henley

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