The Days of Our Beige Lives
This post contains light spoilers of the film Passages.
Clean, minimal, and understated.
These have been the most pervasive adjectives people use to describe homes, clothing choices, makeup routines and increasingly, our tastes. Tik Tokers at the receiving end of these remarks often post “routine” content. In that, their content features the breakdown of their daily routines and they post the same content over and over again. The story goes: a white, thin influencer with perfectly curled hair awakes from a large bed donned with white sheets. The bed has at least four pillows, of course. She (it is often a she) takes a shower using Aesop or Aesop-aesthetic adjacent products and has a 20 step skincare routine. She never skips the sunscreen. Her day is filled with her putting on her best athlesiure to sit at a desk (dual screens preferred but not required) sipping from a beige Stanley cup.
This content is seen as aspirational. Yes, making your bed and running a comb through your hair is now something folks should aspire to. If that doesn’t tell us everything we need to know about the state of Gen Z psyche, I don’t know what does.
As a Gen Zer, I am all too familiar with the fact that we are living in a state of pure chaos. As a young, Black woman living in the United States, I wake up with fewer and fewer rights everyday. With the economic downturn, I feel like whenever I breathe, I spend $25. So, I understand why folks my age would gravitate to this kind of content, and why they eat up any and everything Matilda Djerf and Hailey Bieber do. It is our attempt to control some fragment of our lives when we are rendered powerless in every other sector of society.
But I’m in my twenties. When did life get so boring?
To quote our Gen Z spokesperson Portia from the second season of The White Lotus: “I just feel like there must’ve been a time when the world had more, you know? Like mystery or something.” We attempt to live punishingly healthy lifestyles — we workout, sleep early and many of my peers, including myself, have decided to stop drinking. I find myself coveting the lives of the characters in coming-of-age 90s movies, asking myself if I am finally ‘of age.’
Like Portia, I’ve even been secretly wishing I had a bit more chaos in my life, the opposite of schadenfreude, if you will. This reached a fever pitch last night when I went to see Passages, the new indie film by Ira Sachs at the cinema. If you haven’t seen this film, a one word descriptor for it would be “mess.” The film, set in Paris, follows a film director Tomas (Franz Rogowski) who begins an affair with Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). It is made apparent in the first twenty minutes of the film that this is a common occurrence. Whenever Tomas finishes a film, he has an extramarital affair, much to his husband, Martin’s (Ben Whishaw) dismay.
This time, however, Tomas has sex with a woman. The events that unfold are gut wrenchingly painful to watch and at times, the audience gets a healthy helping of second-hand embarrassment. Tomas is rude, he’s selfish and he doesn’t see his partners outside of his desire for them. This is made visible by the fact that he has his back to the camera in a number of scenes, often eclipsing them. It also doesn’t help that Agathe and Martin are written with such little character that when they are not on screen, you often forget they exist.
Granted, this is an extreme case. But the film has themes of love, hope, colour, grief, anger and desire. Everything but boring. I was inspired by the film — to go outside, scurry in the streets, to love loudly and sing badly, to wear prints and not make my bed. (Crazy stuff, am I right?) While not revolutionary, it is a breath of fresh air and an escape from the sea of beige.
