The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

The nineties, or at least the first half of the nineties, adopted the look and feel of the seventies with uncalculated orthodoxy.

By the decade’s midpoint, even pleasant childhood memories required heavy injections of emotional distance.

Nothing, however, capitalized on the sarcastic/sincere interest in the seventies as explicitly as That ’70s Show. The title of the program was the program, defying all possibilities for deconstruction.

The two most durable joke constructions were (a) casually dismissing something new that would later become extremely common, and (b) referring to some forgotten triviality as if it were destined to be timeless.

The seventies were beloved, but not as a historical period; the seventies were beloved as a collection of stuff, some of which was cherished precisely because it now seemed dumb.

That ’70s Show could have instantly been remade as That ’80s Show[*] or That ’90s Show if the references were changed and the fashions were updated. The characters and the conflicts were not entrenched in the seventies but ubiquitous to the entire last quarter of the twentieth century.

What the 1980s destroyed was the fantasy that culture could happen by accident. A band like Led Zeppelin had (seemingly) come into existence organically, but the bands that followed looked and acted like photocopies modeled off the original.[*]

What seemed enticing about the seventies was that life experiences were still unscripted, and that no one had figured out how to give the people what they wanted before the people even knew what that was.

But throughout the 1980s, the concept of commodifying pop culture had become so widespread—and so undisguised—that it was difficult to see anything emerging in the nineties as a naturally occurring phenomenon.

By 1990, 65 percent of U.S. homes had multiple televisions and the majority had at least one VCR.

No movie or director influenced nineties film culture as much as the advent and everywhereness of the video store.

Prior to the VCR, it was difficult for average people to develop a personal, intimate relationship with non-obvious filmmaking.

The majority of film history was extremely difficult to access. It was monoculture by default.

The fact that the videotape industry was based around renting (as opposed to selling) was critical.

Renting fostered a culture of aesthetic diversity, to the point of pure randomness.

The rental experience was locked within the physical world, and there was no algorithm coercing consumers toward things they were predisposed to enjoy.

Clerks did not look or sound like other films, or at least not like films made by professionals.

Clerks exhibits an almost supernatural commitment to Smith’s own sense of aesthetics and taste.

It was now possible for anything to be culturally important, based on the personal proclivities of the viewer. Which, depending on your perspective, was either exhilarating or idiotic.

Swanberg now dismisses his own period of rental-based self-education as inherently uncreative. “The video store, for me growing up, was access to watch and rewatch shit.

You have this wrapped-up nostalgia and regurgitation and overcompensation of mediocre shit . . . and I directly tie that to the video store.”

The backbone of his argument, however, is not far removed from the same argument one would make in favor of this experience.

It shifts the focus away from the straightforward message received by the audience (“This is a story about why high school is hard”) and amplifies the components generating those messages (musical cues, shot framing, and the casual integration of minor pop culture references carrying their own autonomous meanings).

A single redeeming detail could be taken from an immaterial B movie, repurposed within the context of a good movie, and drastically change the meaning of both pictures. Which had always been possible—it’s just that most people didn’t care or notice until the arrival of Quentin Tarantino.

He became the most important filmmaker of the nineties by making movies exclusively designed for his own idiosyncratic pleasure.

Tarantino’s understanding and interpretation of the underworld was exclusively generated by other movies. And this, as it turns out, was the catalyst for almost everything he’d ever make.

the author’s primary guide to human interaction comes from the consumption of meticulously crafted conversations, expressed through performances designed to make the craftsmanship invisible. What Tarantino captured was something that was accelerating across all popular culture: not reality, but a kind of hyperreality, where the secondary meaning always mattered more than the first.

Roth is an actor pretending to be a policeman who’s learning how to pretend to act like a drug dealer, employing the same techniques Tarantino used in order to make Harvey Keitel believe he must have a familial relationship with actual crime.

For all of the twentieth century—and particularly in the decades following World War II—the volume of manufactured consumer art had exponentially increased. The volume was now vast enough to replace the natural world in totality. A fixed reality was no longer needed; there was enough unfixed reality inside a single Blockbuster to sustain the entire cinematic multiverse. Content could be made from content.

The only hitch was that the word of mouth, though effective, usually seemed to focus on the same detail: “Have you seen that movie where a guy gets his ear chopped off?”

In an attempt to point out traditional flaws, the critics (Turan especially) were unknowingly describing the incendiary power of the Video Store Aesthetic. The elements they deride would have been problems for any movie that aspired to be other things. They were strengths for a movie that aspired to be a movie.

Tarantino wanted Travolta in Pulp Fiction for the same reasons he’d liked Travolta in Urban Cowboy and Saturday Night Fever and Welcome Back, Kotter. The culture may have shifted, but—within the aisles of the video store—all those performances remained unchanged.

The nineties were a fertile period for the self-indulgent genius and an amazing decade for high-gloss unconventional film, saturated with anti-cliché, self-contained projects defined by the interiority of their creators:

Their manufactured realities were lifelike, but not transposable with life itself. They demanded to be seen (and considered) as isolated and nontransferable. Time and again, the movie was about the movie.

Sports can be whatever you want them to be—escapist, political, symbolic, inspirational.

The rules are outlined in a book, the outcomes are nonnegotiable, and success or failure is a direct extension of physiological meritocracy.

By never really verifying the champion, college football was able to sustain an illusion of old-school amateurism that belied its economic superstructure (and its negative academic influence).

the invention of the wheel was not the key to wheeling things around. The key was the invention of the axle.

The wheel, as a concept, was always just sitting there. It merely took a few millennia to figure out how to make it do all the things wheels are supposed to do. The internet can be viewed in a similar way, accelerated by a factor of 1,000.

When the hypothesis of a World Wide Web was first proposed in Switzerland in 1989, almost no one in the United States who wasn’t a computer scientist had any idea what that meant or what it could be.

It was only the middle cluster, Group B, who were forced to wrestle with an experience that reconstituted reality without changing anything about the physical world. These interlocked generations—Boomers and Xers—will be the only people who experienced this shift as it happened, with total recall of both the previous world and the world that came next.

The full spectrum of social and psychological consequences that accompanied the advent of the internet is too profound to explain or understand (then, now, or ever).

For the (so-called) average nineties person living a (so-called) normal nineties life, no part of day-to-day existence changed as radically as their relationship to the telephone.

The primacy of a landline connection dictated how life was lived, with such deep-rooted universality that its role in shaping humanity was virtually unconsidered.

the main reason everyone always answered the telephone was the impossibility of knowing who was on the line. Every ringing phone was, potentially, a life-altering event.

If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it. There was no other option. If you didn’t know where someone was, you had to wait until that person wanted to be found.

Yet within these fascistic limitations, the machine itself somehow mattered less. It was an appliance, not that different from the dishwasher.

It suddenly became essential to describe the internet as simple, and to assert that the user did not need to understand how it worked in order to enjoy it.

Having a life focused on computers and technology was still an unorthodox way to live. But within half a decade, such an experience would encompass millions and millions of lives, often against their will. That forced a lot of people to reluctantly become what Smith labeled as nerds, controlled and oppressed by a minority of geeks who insisted the nerds should be thrilled about it.

within a decade relentlessly categorized as cynical and underwhelming, the cult of the internet was evangelical in its belief that this technology was not just positive but unassailable and limitless.