Back in the halcyon days of 2019, when we merely faced the existential threat of climate change and not yet a pandemic, a meme began to pick up speed, first flooding TikTok and seeping into the general lexicon from there: “O.K., boomer,” a catchphrase young people used to condescendingly dismiss the generation they believed had created many of their problems. As the phrase proliferated on social-media platforms, a particular video caught the wave: a woman giving a speech about climate change in New Zealand’s Parliament and brushing off a heckler with a brisk, almost throwaway “O.K., boomer.” In the clip, the young M.P., whose name is Chlöe Swarbrick, moves on to her next line seemingly without much reaction from the audience in the room, but the moment wound up garnering her more global attention than the rest of her precocious political career up to that point.
The video of Swarbrick spread at the same time that a shockingly high number of mainstream news outlets started to gleefully cover the controversies surrounding the meme, and a backlash occurred as baby boomers began to parse the term’s flippant intent. Swarbrick faced criticism from her colleagues, including the conservative M.P. who interrupted her speech, but stood her ground. “My ‘OK boomer’ comment in parliament,” she wrote in the Guardian, “was off-the-cuff, albeit symbolic of the collective exhaustion of multiple generations set to inherit ever-amplifying problems in an ever-diminishing window of time.” At this point, the meme had reached a point of saturation that diminished its coolness—Swarbrick conceded that she was “responsible for killing the meme, according to the internet”—but the intergenerational resentment that inspired it remained.
Despite the fluky, absurd nature of viral fame, Swarbrick is, in reality, one of the more serious possible representatives of the reasons that some millennials and members of Gen Z feel frustration with those who came before them. At the age of twenty-two, working as a journalist, she interviewed the potential candidates for mayor of Auckland and found them all “uninspiring,” so she decided to run for mayor herself. She did not come close to winning, though she placed third in a field of nineteen. She joined the Green Party, ran in the general election, and secured a place in Parliament through New Zealand’s enviable system of proportional representation, which grants each party seats based on the percentage of votes it earns. Since joining, she has fought for, among other things, a motion to declare a climate-change emergency, the divestment of public funds from fossil fuels, and an effort to reduce New Zealand’s carbon emissions to zero by 2050—the policy she was advocating when she swatted down her heckler. Knowing the stakes of her speech, one might argue that unadulterated politeness is less important than keeping the planet habitable.
The documentary “OK Chlöe,” filmed in the wake of the attention Swarbrick received from that viral moment, offers a more detailed look at her life and its subtleties. Although her political project is idealistic in nature, she expresses her weariness with her job’s long hours, constant conflict, and public scrutiny. “This system dehumanizes people,” she says, sitting in the empty Parliament chamber and looking gravely downward, “and you, therefore, become inhuman and disconnected from the people you purport to represent.” But, at other moments, she is animated by exchanges with her constituents, whom she appears to charm effortlessly at a march for L.G.B.T.Q. rights and during a letter-writing campaign to increase voter turnout. And her gruelling efforts appear to be bolstered by close relationships with her father, whom she calls her hero, and her sister, who complains affectionately that Swarbrick is too busy to pick up her FaceTime calls.
As a child, Swarbrick’s father explains in one scene, she frequently asked him, “Dad, what is the purpose of life?” (“While that sounds quite sweet,” he adds, “when it’s every week for about five years, the novelty wears off.”) For many members of a generation born into rising inequality, economic instability, and the pressing dangers of a warming planet, the answer to that question seems to involve trying to steer the troubled course of the world through activism and political engagement. It’s admirable for the young to be so decisive about political action so early in life, but there is an element of tragedy in the necessity of their work and the pressure they feel to take it on. Both come from the knowledge that most people in positions of power do not share their priorities or their acute fears about the future. Swarbrick says that she considers leaving her position in Parliament all the time, but “if you’re not there for the long haul, then, it’s hard to see the work getting done at all.” There can, at least, be moments of hope along the way: the carbon-emissions bill that Swarbrick was speaking in support of when she uttered the “O.K., boomer” heard around the world became law.
