The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

In the 1992 film Singles, the romantic lead (Campbell Scott) drunkenly calls the woman he loves (Kyra Sedgwick) from a pay phone in a rock club, only to have his rambling confession destroyed when the answering machine’s audiotape unravels. In just over a decade, both sides of that equation would be moot. Pay phones would vanish and analog answering machines would be replaced by digital voice mail. But the scene remains as a deft depiction of landline communication at the onset of the nineties: It seemed as good as it could possibly be, with flaws that didn’t seem unacceptable until they were already eradicated. If a phone call was critical, you simply had to stay home. It was the only way to control the experience and the only way to ensure that the message would be received. And why would anyone have expected otherwise? Cell phones were the size of a brick and cost $4,000. They were gratuitous, even for millionaires. A TV commercial for the Canadian beer Labatt Blue was plotted on the premise that anyone who brought a cell phone into a bar was automatically an asshole,[*] much in the same way Ben Stiller’s character from Reality Bites is introduced as self-absorbed by talking on a car phone in his very first scene. Zack Morris carried a cell phone to school on the adolescent sitcom Saved by the Bell, and that seemed no less ridiculous than his ability to freeze time. You had to be at home to talk on the phone. Home was where the phone was. Until (of course) it wasn’t. In...