Xer Icon: Christian Bale

As a child, he embodied the Generation X childhood in his acclaimed role in Empire of the Sun that, though the character was of a different era, was everything we were: Left to his own defenses, his little boy became hard and cynical, but that blossomed into a self-reliance, a streetsmarts, and a fierce independence. As an adult, he’s portrayed both the very worst we Xers are accused of being -- self-centered and selfish, to a murderous degree, in American Psycho -- and the very best we can be: His Batman is the very model of how we mature Xers will use the particular strengths we developed via our rocky childhoods to, hopefully, save the world from itself. That probably scares some older folks, but hey: You made us this way.

Christian Bale was named one of the "Top 8 Most Powerful Cult Figures" in the 10th-anniversary issue of Entertainment Weekly, and is it any wonder? We Xers love our cult figures, especially when they look like us.