ABSTRACT
“Generazione X” has enjoyed a particular career in the Italian media. In 1995, it was the Italian title of Kevin Smith's Mallrats, a movie starring two iconic Gen Xers, Ben Affleck and Shannon Doherty. The reason for the extreme title change was twofold: first, because malls (centri commerciali) were not built en masse until the new millennium, mall culture was completely alien to Italian society in the mid-'90s; second, the phrase referenced Douglas Coupland's slacker generation while paying indirect homage to Marvel comics, which play a fundamental role in the film, as witnessed by Stan Lee's cameo appearance. That same year, Generazione X became the title of two talk shows, airing contemporaneously on two different private networks, Mediaset and TMC. At the helm of both shows were two teenage hosts who faced an audience of young men and women between the age of 14 and 23 and discussed matters of interest to that specific demographic. Of particular relevance to my discussion is that Ambra Angiolini, the popular host of Mediaset's Generazione X, would often read passages from Coupland's novel during the show, thus reaffirming the relevance of its words to an audience that seemed, however, fairly younger than Coupland's original target: whereas Angiolini's audience was born between 1972 and 1981, Coupland spoke of men and women born in the '60s and '70s. And this same shift that widens the limits of the Italian Gen X, as perceived (or instantiated) by the media, may be observed in a Generazione X manifesto that went viral on the Internet for the past few years, undergoing reappropriations and permutations that have significantly altered its content. 1
