While it's extremely easy to ridicule hipsters, what with their oversized vintage coats and taste in music that hasn't even been created yet, they also provide a highly necessary counterpoint for us all.
It's satisfying to smugly roll your eyes at that guy riding to work on a penny farthing bicycle or that girl wearing a bubble wrap bow-tie and it makes you feel like you're not quite as awful as you think you are, which is good.
They've also become more apparent up on the big screen, where their affected behaviour is even more apparent. We've assembled eight of the most painful examples right here:
Summer - (500) Days of Summer
Now, we already have a bit of a vendetta against Summer, played by the "adorkable" Zooey Deschanel, for being a totally evil heart-ruiner but even without all of that, her inherent quirk overdose is bad enough. She doesn't believe in, like, totally prescribed and mainstream monogamy, she's overly critical of "working for the man" yet doesn't really have any ambition of her own, she loves The Smiths and, because it's written into Deschanel's contract, she sings karaoke in the cutesiest way possible. Although, with his chalk board bedroom wall, Joseph Gordon Levitt's struggling architect sort of deserves her.
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Llewyn Davis - Inside Llewyn Davis
One of the bravest choices in the Coens' most recent masterpiece, is their refreshingly unsentimental portrayal of the lead character. Simply put, Llewyn Davis, expertly inhabited by Oscar Isaac, is a douchebag. He's the couch-sleeping, money-borrowing, job-ruining, girlfriend-impregnating friend that, without his charm and talent, would be sleeping on the streets and stealing from tourists. Focusing on his music, above all else, including a doomed cat, his selfish adherence to hipster commandments (4. always criticise those more successful than you for "selling out) makes him a total nightmare.
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Tyler Durden - Fight Club
While we were perhaps too in awe of him to recognise it at the time, Tyler Durden is in fact one of cinema's biggest hipsters. From his anti-corporate mantra to his vintage wardrobe to making damn soap in his artfully dilapidated house, he pre-dated many hipster clichés, which is in itself the greatest hipster cliché of all: doing something before everyone else. Surely being a mere split personality was his most hipsterish quality of all.
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Troy Dyer - Reality Bites
The stereotypical mid-90s hipster, Ethan Hawke's character is a smug slacker who wears his unemployability with pride. His main passion is, duh, his music while washing his hair and stringing together a non-cynical sentence are somewhat less important. He's a love interest for Winona Ryder's more ambitious character who ultimately ditches her settled mature boyfriend, played by Ben Stiller, for a life of sneering at men wearing suits for work and wearing sunglasses indoors.
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Juno MacGuff - Juno
The hipster with the most insufferable vocabulary imaginable, Ellen Page's eye-rolling, wise-cracking, baby-containing Juno was a lovable misfit to many. To others, she was a head-smashingly overwritten creation, spouting precocious lines and using a god-damn hamburger phone. We are part of the latter group, in case you hadn't noticed.
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Oliver Tate - Submarine
The Welsh male Juno, Oliver Tate might not have been as pregnant or as quippy, but he shared her incongruously precocious behaviour making him an utterly unbelievable teenager in every possible way. If Wes Anderson and Michel Gondry had a child, conceived in Paris, who was adopted at a young age by a travelling musician and a Beat poet, this would be him.
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Ana Pascal - Stranger Than Fiction
One recurring theme with our movie hipsters is their complete and utter hatred for "the man" and no one typifies the office drone better than Will Ferrell's tax man in this hugely underrated comedy drama. When he's sent to audit "free-spirited" baker Ana, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, he's met by a familiar chorus of "GET BENT TAX MAN" because hipsters shouldn't have to pay their taxes. They should be allowed to spend their money on second hand cardigans and making organic cookies for homeless people instead because "GET BENT TAX MAN" or whatever.
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Chris McCandless - Into the Wild
While he might have chosen to spend his time hanging out in forests rather than in pop-up cheese toastie and port bars, Emile Hirsch's artfully scruffy hero, or in our eyes somewhat of an anti-hero, is every bit a hypocritical hipster. His ethos of "living off the land and not spending any money because money is so mainstream" is hopelessly flawed since he happily accepts acts of kindness from strangers willing to make him food, bought with, yup, money. His abandonment of normality and all of the creature comforts that come with it, is only made possible by the comfortable middle class life he's led up until that point. His "sacrifice" is no real sacrifice at all. Hipster.
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