A trailer was just released for a movie starring Miles Teller and Anna Kendrick called Get A Job. It’s about a couple of college grads struggling to get by in a dicey job market and with a crushing burden of student loan debt, but with a rom-com spin. There’s a lot in this trailer I recognize. I’m a Millennial, I graduated from college with six-figure debt and was trying to get by in Los Angeles with bills I struggled to pay and job prospects that were unstable at best. I’ve done the Ramen diet, I’ve sold everything I own to make rent up to and including my middle school band flute, and I’ve debated the necessity of paying the electricity bill versus the gas bill. More than once, faking my death to get out from under the student loan bills seemed like a halfway decent idea.
But through all that, I always knew there was a safety net for me, in the form of my parents. If worse came to worse, they’d be there to scrape me out of the gutter, I knew that. And though women face many challenges at every level of the workforce, as a college-educated woman I had opportunities so many others didn’t, and don’t. I’m self-made in the same way Gwyneth Paltrow is—I started from third base.
That’s what’s missing from this Get A Job trailer. Someone involved with this movie clearly had the Broke-Ass Millennial Experience, but overall it’s like every stereotype of Millennials in one two-minute package—lazy, entitled stoners who’d rather smoke dope than get a job, “under-employing” their way through life. There’s an echo of Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, but that show is sincere about the inherent privilege that leads to this kind of career-hopping existence. Get A Job feels like a movie that was ordered by a Baby Boomer producer, and a Millennial with this actual lived experience wrote it, and then it got re-written by a Gen X’er who despises Millennials.
