The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

Brooks dedicated himself to an alter ego named Chris Gaines, a fictional Australian alt-rock musician intended to serve as the main character in a never-released movie titled The Lamb.

It was also the defining misstep of his career. Every possible analysis was negative.

Was he trying to separate himself from country music, but without the integrity of real artistic risk?

People spent the nineties sitting through commercials, and streaming live programming on any device that wasn’t a conventional television was pretty much off the table.

What changed existentially was what TV was supposed to mean (and, in a few cases, what it actually meant).

The Sopranos debuted on HBO in January of 1999 and became the model for what came to be called “prestige television,” a designation that simply didn’t exist when Dallas was cock of the walk. Dallas was important, but it wasn’t prestigious at all.

Seinfeld was an NBC sitcom based on the day-to-day banality of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, who were now concocting a story line where the fictional versions of themselves were trying to concoct a fictional version of their already fictional life. This level of self-awareness was virtually nonexistent in the television topography of the time. It was legitimately innovative.

You turned it on and watched whatever it gave you. The level of exposure was very high and the expectations were very low. It was a source of entertainment when no better entertainment was available, which was most of the time.

Television in this period was still dictated by the constraints of time and the boundaries of available space. Its main utility was just being around. There was an accepted passivity to its consumption.

Though tried many times, attempts at replicating the “feel” of Seinfeld always proved unworkable. Its comedic perspective was too eccentric and too personal to reproduce on purpose.

As Seinfeld progressed, there was also an increased emphasis on absurdist scenarios that only paid off if the viewer had already accepted that these fake characters were real people. To anyone outside of that bubble, the humor would seem impenetrable.

The ethos of the series was the “in between” intricacy of early adulthood, when your friends are more important than your family and you’ve yet to start a family of your own.

Friends became the model for how to pinpoint generational concerns without directly recognizing that generations exist. The feel of Friends was a depiction of the present moment, filtered through the prism of a timeless reality.

Yet the series’ overall trajectory is a catalog of what would now be seen as a collection of cliché Gen X concerns, mainstreamed through avatars who didn’t look or sound like cliché Gen Xers.

Friends trafficked in the very nineties belief that the only difference between friendship and romance is a physical barrier, and that the best person to sleep with is probably your best friend

Friends directly addressed the insecure ideologies of the nineties without acknowledging that the nineties had a meaning, or even that “the nineties” were a thing that was happening. It was casual modernity.

Thursday was considered an especially attractive evening to advertisers, based on the assumption that upwardly mobile young people would stay home on a Thursday but go out on the weekend.

Despite its reach and respect, ER was either the place you were going to leave or the place you ended up.

It was cleverly written and smartly cast. But its dynastic grip on critics and Emmy voters galvanized a paradox: Frasier was seen as brilliant television because it focused on characters who would never watch television. Its self-loathing elitism was proof of its intelligence.

it’s increasingly difficult to understand why TV was considered so inferior to not just film, but to almost every other variety of entertainment from this era.

In the nineties, that was its own kind of problem. If everyone enjoyed something, how good could it possibly be?

There was a movie culture pre-Titanic and a different kind of movie culture post-Titanic. It had looked like the world of cinema was moving one way, but then it moved back.

The budget for Titanic was $200 million. It seemed like such a terrible idea.

Cameron privately believed the movie would lose around $100 million. But then it came out. The reviews were good, the word of mouth was fantastic, and people just kept seeing it, over and over again.

Article after article emphasized how teenage girls were seeing the movie multiple times, a box office phenomenon previously associated with adolescent boys. DiCaprio was twenty-three, but he looked younger and acted older.

He carried himself like a star from the distant past—an enigmatic, larger-than-life chimera who revealed little about himself or his ambitions. What had changed was the amount of people who now did that work for him.

Titanic tapped into the reservoir of industry realities everyone always claims to concede while continually refusing to fully accept: Some people want entertainment to challenge them, but most people don’t.

There were numerous reports of people buying full-priced tickets for Meet Joe Black,[*] watching the Phantom Menace trailer, and then immediately exiting the theater.

The pop culture lionized by young adults of the nineties was often based on a myth: the dogmatic belief that things they’d loved as children had always been appreciated with adult minds.

the goal, it seemed, was to increase the intellectual value of bygone consumer art in order to make it match the emotional resonance that had been there all along.

So much time and effort had been invested in the Star Wars obsession that the film was mentally reimagined as something it never was: a movie about human emotion, made for adult humans.

The Phantom Menace forced people to realize they’d been betrayed by the falseness of their own constructed memories.

The vision of The Matrix as an elaborate transgender allegory is now the ruling framework when considering the film’s historical significance, leapfrogging the initial frenzy over its technical achievements

The Matrix also reinvented the reading of Keanu Reeves, both as an actor and as a person.

A blankness that previously suggested naiveté now suggested wisdom. The sublime experience of the movie was injected into the actor’s real-life identity.

Conspiracy theories arise from gradations of information, delivered indecisively. McVeigh’s case was more like a toggle switch: We were first told one version of reality, and then we were told the opposite, confirmed by the criminal himself.

For most of the 51-day encounter, nothing in Waco was happening:

Almost out of necessity, the ever-expanding news hole was filled with auxiliary information intended to show the “complete picture” of who was inside the compound

By constantly providing people with more and more conflicting data within an essentially static situation, it was possible for the audience to invent whatever narrative they desired.

McVeigh watched the buildings in Waco burn, live on his television, operating from the position that the people inside were innocent. It perpetuated his belief that the loss of innocent lives was acceptable collateral damage in a war he was fighting alone, inside his own mind.

The crux of Hill’s statement was that Thomas had pursued her romantically against her wishes and regularly made her uncomfortable.

What remains compelling about his 1991 nomination is the way it forced people to take entrenched positions on issues that had always existed but could previously be ignored. Television is what made that happen.

The contemporary explanation for why this happened is always simple: Society is a sexist patriarchy.

In 1991, it was still possible for someone to believe Hill’s account without believing that what she described qualified as harassment.

Forty years of network programming had trained people to associate the performance of emotion with the essentialism of truth, and Thomas had been much more emotional than Hill. He seemed angry, sad, confused, and uncompromising. She just made a good argument, which—on television—is never enough.

The most mind-melting aspect of the O. J. Simpson story is that the story no longer seems like what it was: the story of a guy who murdered two people and got away with it.

O. J. Simpson is perhaps the only person who has ever written a memoir about how he would have killed people he incessantly claimed not to have killed.

The obviousness of Simpson’s guilt was key to the postmodern drama. There was a game show quality to watching the trial: Could Simpson’s “dream team” of defense lawyers win an argument that seemed impossible to take seriously?

Looking at the case retroactively, purely as a collection of facts, only one conclusion can be drawn. But while it was happening, the trial provided an almost limitless spectrum of possibilities as to what this televised conflict was actually about,

The number of people who watched the chase is estimated to be around 95 million, many of whom were watching the NBA Finals before NBC interrupted coverage of a basketball game with coverage of a slow-moving SUV.