Avsnitt
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This week DPP delves into Guy Ritchie's feature debut Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998).
What did the 1990s rebirth of Cockney-cool during the Blair era mean for Gen X? How did London feel just before the turn of the 21st century? And why are British-gangster movie directors so posh?
Find out in today's episode.
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Patreon and full episode here.
In the second of DPP's special book episodes, Sam and Chase interview Yale Law and History professor Samuel Moyn on his new book Gerontocracy in America: How the Old are Hoarding Power and Wealth – and What to Do About It (2026).
For how much longer will the Boomers and Silent Generation rule America? And how does their dominance differ from historical gerontocracies from Sparta to the Soviet Union?
What levers does the US government and US democracy actually have to prevent gerontocracy from continuing?
Find out in today's episode.
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This week, DPP explores the cult film — Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered (2001).
Panned at the time by venerable critics like Roger Ebert — Freddy Got Fingered has only grown in influence in the last two decades, generating a reputation as the ur-Gen X slacker and freak-out comedy.
Is this a piece of Dada genius or a symptom of the Hollywood studio system indulging the worst tendencies of a generation?
Find out in today's episode.
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This week, the DPP lads head east — to the wild years of Russia in the 1990s after the fall of communism.
That's right — we're talking about 1997's gangster coming-of-age feature Brat by Aleksei Balabanov, a film that explores Russia at a turning point: between the drunken post-Communist years of Yeltsin and the rising authoritarianism of Putin.
To paraphrase Gramsci — "the crisis consists precisely in the fact that Boris is dying and Vladimir cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
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DPP ventures into the North Chicago suburbs as it broaches its first John Hughes film — Sixteen Candles (1984).
What does adolescence look like in the affluent upper middle classes for Gen X? What role does the family play? What did dating look like for those coming of age in the epoch?
Find out in today's episode.
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This week, the DPP boys check out Reginald Hudlin's 1990 House Party.
The film launched a long-running series of coming-of-age comedies under the House Party title, terminating in 2023.
Centring around the exploits of rap duo Kid n' Play, the film did much to introduce hip-hop into the American mainstream. It also foregrounds African American middle-class suburban life on film in a groundbreaking way.
Where did the film's subtle hints at pan-Africanism and 1990s affluence lead in the 2000s and 2010s?
Find out in today's episode.
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In the first of DPP's special book episodes, Sam interviews Oxford politics lecturer and NYT contributing writer Anton Jäger on his new book: Hyperpolitics (2026, Verso).
Jäger's text is an expansion of two essays: 'From Bowling Alone to Posting Alone' (2022) and 'Everything is Hyperpolitical' (2023).
Through an analysis of political change in the late 20th and 21st centuries and the curation of various cultural objects: the novels of Michel Houellebecq and Annie Ernaux, plus the photos of Wolfgang Tillmans, Jäger makes the case for five types of politics immediately before, and after, the 'end of history.'
These sequential stages are 1920s-1940s mass politics (high politicisation and high institutionalisation), 1950s institutional politics (medium politicisation and high institutionalisation), 1990s and 2000s post-politics (low politicisation and low institutionalisation), 2010s anti-politics (medium politicisation and low institutionalisation), and, finally, 2020s hyperpolitics (high politicisation and low institutionalisation).
Has the 'end of history' really ended — or are the 2020s just a continuation of 1990s deinstitutionalisation with more posting?
Find out in today's episode.
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Patreon is here.
Today's DPP episode explores the little-known 1994 feature by multi-media artist Jessica Hagedorn – Fresh Kill.
Recycling, sushi, yuppies, toxic waste, nameless megacorporations, ethical hacking – Staten Island – Fresh Kill has it all, wrapped up in a dissonant prose-poem of a script.
But did the world really turn into the endlessly diffused and globalised set of networks that Hagedorn predicts?
Find out in today's episode.
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The DPP boys were picking through the flea markets of Berlin — looking for Trabant car parts and old jars of Spreewaldgurken. In amongst the clutter, we came across a dusty videotape — Goodbye, Lenin! (2003).
Wolfgang Becker's breakout hit — a deep dive into Ostalgie — only a few years after German reunification — asks the question: what if you could keep living in a dead political system and world? How possible is it to protect ourselves from the shocks of capitalism, to retreat into nostalgia?
Find out in today's episode.
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This week, DPP delve into the high school comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). The film, directed by Amy Heckerling and based on the gonzo reporting of Cameron Crowe, is a vignette of teenage life in suburban southern California in the 1980s.
With Reagan in power, plentiful jobs, and easy credit, what did adolescence look like for a broad swathe of the American population not normally depicted in films, for lack of interest and dramatic effect? (i.e the Californian middle class). And what was the texture of life like in the early 1980s, before the neoliberal turn had had its full effect on the same group of people?
Find out in today's episode.
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Chase is solo on this episode with guest Andrew Young to discuss i ♥ huckabees, an under-the-radar feature film by early Gen-X wunderkind David O. Russell.
NIMBYism, environmentalism, cod-psychology, adolescent existentialism, self-help, the fear of suburbia, ecological doom, space-hoppers – i ♥ huckabees has it all.
Where does a generation go when questions of material survival have been answered?
Find out in today's episode.
Patreon, as always, is here.
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This week, DPP takes on Gen X myth-making about the city of Manchester – namely, through Michael Winterbottom's 2002 film 24 Hour Party People.
Why did Manchester explode as a Gen X-era subcultural and music mecca in the 1980s and 1990s, overtaking places more central to the boomer consciousness like Liverpool? And how did those involved in the post-punk and acid-house scenes of the era understand the sociology and economics of the epoch in retrospect?
Find out in today's episode.
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DPP journeys to the Garden State, and Chase's political domain, this week — that's right, we're covering slacker favourites Clerks (1994) and Clerks II (2006).
Directed by Kevin Smith, these films explore what it's like to spend a decade working marginal, dead-end jobs, without actively identifying oneself as marginal or a failure, because you've got your friends, pop culture, and ever-present escape routes.
Were the lifestyles exhibited in Smith’s oeuvre only possible during a brief period at the end of history?
Find out in today’s episode.
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The DPP boys head back up to Scotland (we can't keep away), in search of meaning in deindustrialised hellscapes — that's right, we're doing Trainspotting (1996) and Danny Boyle's lesser-known follow-up: T2 (2017).
Is there any compensation for the full-scale loss of meaning, association and community brought about by the offshoring of manufacturing and the rise of finance? Individualism, punk rock, raves, heroin — EU redevelopment funds?
Listen to this week's episode to find out.
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In the first of our solo episodes this season, the DPP boys sit down, shut their asses up, and listen to Gen X women in the workplace, specifically Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow and Alanna Ubach in Jill Sprecher's 1997 office comedy Clockwatchers.
If Office Space, Fight Club and Falling Down express a male rage at deindustrialisation, the meaninglessness of white collar work, and arbitrary hierarchies — that is very much still with us — what does Clockwatchers have to say about the first generation of women (1965-1980) partaking equally (at least formally and legally) in the professional labour market?
Interestingly, Sprecher's female leads couldn't be further from the 'Lean In' feminism of Sheryl Sandberg that came to dominate the 2010s — and in many ways they share more with their Gen X male analogues (Tyler Durden, Peter Gibbons) than might, at first, be expected. Because, of course, everyone (no matter your identity marker) can agree that "work sucks."
Find out in today's episode.
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This week, the DPP lads are joined by David Jamieson, journalist and editor of Conter Scot to discuss Mel Gibson's 1995 epic Braveheart.
What does a botched historical drama about Scotland's First War of Independence (1296-1328) by an American-Australian traditionalist Catholic tell us about the political conscioussness of Gen X and the contemporary American right? What does, and did, freedom mean to those born in the 1960s and 1970s?
Find out in today's episode.
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This week on DPP the boys sit down with Eddie Averill, formerly of Extended Clip, now of Vintage Violence, to investigate Paul Thomas Anderson's LA epic Magnolia (1999). Is Hollywood an American virus? Is TV the Gen-X brain bug? Dig in with Chase, Sam, and Eddie to find out.
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This week, DPP is joined by poet, podcaster, author, and host of Varn Vlog — C. Derick Varn — to discuss Richard Linklater's non-linear, slice-of-a-generation classic, Slacker (1990).
Set in the suburbs of Austin, Texas, Slacker follows an interwoven set of 20 and 30-somethings, doing, well, not exactly much. This is pre-techlord and podcaster Austin. However, Linklater still captures glimmers of the hipster explosion that is to come in the characters of Slacker — conspiracy theorists, anarchists, conceptual artists, skaters, post-punk drummers, etc.
In 2026, we live in a world where Gen X's children across much of the western world, and increasingly the far east, are out of work, out of education and on the scrap heap (NEETs, lying flat etc). If Gen Z are structurally excluded from much of the work force, Gen X conciouslessly opted-out.
As always, like, rate, subscribe — or don't: whatever, man.
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You can find our Patreon here.
This week, the DPP lads are joined by writer, critic and marketing director at publishing house Deep Vellum (and friend of the pod) Jon Repetti — to discuss Spike Lee's 1999 crime thriller Summer of Sam.
Summer of Sam revolves around the fallout from a real-life killing spree committed by David Berkowitz between 1975 and 1977.
Lee's 1999 feature is an odd combination of 1970s nostalgia aimed at a young Gen X, combined with subcultural analysis and crime thriller tropes. The film delves into the urban psychogeography of New York City's outer boroughs and ethnic neighbourhoods — at a time when NYC was widely considered to be in decline, yet also experiencing a huge cultural flourishing of underground scenes, musical creativity, and club life.
Does Gen X's childhood fear of the city and the urban, in the 1970s, translate into today's pervasive paranoia about large American cities? Find out in today's episode.
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This week, Chase and Sam at DPP are joined by architecture critic and writer Owen Hatherley to discuss British director Patrick Keiller’s London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997).
London and Robinson in Space form the first two parts of the decade-long Robinson trilogy. Keiller's two essay films capture Britain during the interregnum between Thatcher and Blair — an oft-forgotten period, after the end of the Cold War, but before the short-lived ecstasies of Cool Britannia.
Keiller charts a country still very much in thrall to tradition, mediating its own decline, and with a surprisingly intact industrial base. Both films feature an unnamed narrator who journeys around England with an unseen accomplice: the titular Robinson (a permanently precarious academic). Keiller’s camera lingers over petrol stations, suburban business parks and other liminal spaces — a post-Thatcherite, globalised, netherworld of commercial utilitarianism.
Through a patched-together series of shots and reams of economic data, Keiller, arguably, makes the case that Gen X, not the boomers, were the UK's last industrial generation: squatting over the final flames of manufacturing during the rule of John Major — the infamous prime ministerial 'grey man.'
Major and Blair haunt the background of Keiller's work, bookending the period his films explore. The former is presented as a bland technocrat at the End of History, the latter a representative of American-style personality politics. Keiller's films place us in a British interregnum — and, to steal a line from Gramsci, 'morbid symptoms' are everywhere.
Hatherley is the author of several books, including Militant Modernism, Trans-Europe Express, Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London, Modern Buildings in Britain: A Gazetteer and, his latest, The Alienation Effect (out now with Penguin).
Our Patreon can be found here. Like, rate and subscribe — or Sam will drag you on a 5 hour walk under Birmingham’s Spaghetti Junction in search of mutated fish.
- Visa fler
