| "All
Grown Up and Nowhere To Go" (Spader speaks)
I'm an
actor, not a generational spokesman, but you notice certain things.
There's a tremendous concentration on immediacy and impatience. Remember
when you could eat mushrooms and be gone for eight or twelve hours?
All of a sudden it's cocaine. "I don't have time to drop acid
or even smoke a joint," people say. "Cocaine only takes
half an hour." Then that's not quick enough, and it's "Let's
smoke crack." Speed and efficiency rule. The lack of respect
for age, time, experience, patience, history--it's really scary. I'm
right in the middle - thirty-one. I look around at my peers and realize
the most of the people I admire and respect seem to be of the generation
before mine. The late Sixties and early Seventies were the influences
on my life - and I was all of ten years old. Most of my friends are
in their late thirties. That's the chair I'm most comfortable in.
Our generation is still trying desperately to find a way out of its
shadow and scream at the top of its lungs - about something. We can't,
because we've distanced ourselves from the world. We're more detatched,
desensitized - less visceral and alive. I've played some of the worst
of our generation. My attitude is, if I'm going to play him, I'm going
to play his as the biggest ass of all time. One of my ways sensitizing
myself is to get all the desensitized touches right. The more complex
you make that, the more distance you can put between yourself and
what you loathe. What's achievement? Is it the quality of the means
or the quality of the end? As far as I can tell, the end if just the
resting place to more means. Say you get there. You still have to
go home and wake up the next day. I see friends and relatives try
to buy a house, raise a family, pay for insurance. Then I hear the
labels and name-calling about all of that. The only thing that unifies
us, maybe, is that everyone I know inherited some sort of strange
anxiety. For me, it was eased be doing manual labor for five years
after dropping out of boarding school. Someone else can storm the
barricades, then relentlessly raise three children. The day-to-day
struggle is the most heroic struggle anyone fights. Something won
through a shortcut or a hole in the fabric is just not as heroic.
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