The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

Berlin Wall fell in November of ’89, but that was actually the onset of the euthanasia (though it took another two years for the patient to die).

Nothing can ever be everything to everyone.

The fashions of the 1980s did not gradually fade. The fashions of the 1980s collapsed, and—almost immediately—the zeitgeist they’d elevated appeared garish and gross.

It means less, however, to the sizable number of North American bozos who remain certain that Mandela died in prison during the 1980s.

As a society, we’ve elected to ignore that many people of the nineties—many modern people, many of whom are still very much alive—were exceedingly comfortable not knowing anything for certain. Today, paraphrasing the established historical record or questioning empirical data is seen as an ideological, anti-intellectual choice. But until the very late nineties, it was often the only choice available.

If two of the people erroneously recalled seeing his state funeral on late-night television, the fusion of their false memories would calcify into a shared actuality.

False memories have existed since the first human tried to remember anything for the first time.

McJob, a term coined by sociologist Amitai Etzioni to connote boring, low-paying occupations devoid of prestige or potential).

(“I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being’s eyes”).

The new goal was to emotionally and intellectually remove oneself from an uninteresting mainstream society.

Culture was now a pure commodity, so there was no reason to differentiate between elite culture, consumer culture, and the culture of kitsch. It all served the same popular purpose.

When informed that they were apathetic, the most common Xer response was disinterest in the accusation, inadvertently validating the original assertion.

By 2010, it was hard to illustrate to a young person why this act was once seen as problematic; by 2020, it was difficult to explain what the term literally expressed.

He’s the film’s spirit animal, thriving in an era when no one would have considered a term like “spirit animal” remotely offensive.

This erasure was seen as meaningful, as was the increasing likelihood that Generation X would be the only canonical demographic to never produce an American president.[*]

“[Our characters are] mostly motivated. Their clothes are clean, unlike Ethan Hawke, who wore the dirtiest things in Reality Bites.”

In 1992’s Et Tu, Babe, a fictionalized account of Leyner’s grappling with his own celebrity, he abruptly references “Uncle Jack,” a character he’d never mentioned before and would never mention again.

The 1990 Sears Holiday Wish Book still pushed Garfield the Cat telephones for $49.99.

cuddly hardcore drummer Dave Grohl.

its riff-based similarity to Boston’s 1976 hit “More Than a Feeling,”

That mystification proved essential.

After “escaping” from the Exodus Recovery Center in Los Angeles on April 1, Cobain flew home to Seattle (coincidentally sitting alongside Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan on the flight).

(when his wife, Courtney Love, bought a Lexus, he demanded she return it to the dealer so that they could continue driving an old Volvo).

The soft-spoken seventeen-year-old in that video does not seem like a kid who would not live past the age of twenty-five.

He’d made an optical mistake at the ’88 Republican convention, pointing into the camera and saying, “Read my lips: no new taxes.”

Bush was endlessly framed as a “wimp,” even on the cover of Newsweek magazine. It was an odd epithet, considering how Bush had been shot out of the sky as a pilot in World War II, played college baseball at Yale, and served as director of the CIA. Yet those biographical details could not compensate for the way he spoke, a nasally delivery that was rarely confident and never intimidating.

The way the world was presented through media was increasingly detached from the way the world actually was.

Had the U.S. done nothing, it would have likely become another interchangeable episode in the long series of Middle Eastern events that Americans accept as problematic without understanding what they are or where they’re happening.

He had large ears, bad eyesight, and weighed maybe 140 pounds if holding an armadillo.

(Clinton was, for anyone under twenty-five, the first presidential nominee in memory to resemble a father more than a grandfather).

It’s certainly possible to argue these qualities don’t always apply to Trump voters.

Hmph

Six people died (seven if you count an unborn child).

Many deaths were attributed to people having heart attacks while shoveling snow.

A few days after the Gonzalez verdict, two of the group members were arrested for violating a prohibition against lewd behavior during a late-night club show in Hollywood, Florida. They spent two hours in a Broward County jail, were not required to post bail, and were released in time to catch a flight to Phoenix for another concert.

(Vice President Dan Quayle called the song “obscene,” willfully ignoring the legal meaning of that term).

police brutality is inherent to police activity,

An anti-cop viewpoint was not universal. But what mattered was this was now a possible viewpoint to hold, even if you weren’t young or Black or living in Los Angeles.

Annoying

It would be wrong to claim Quentin Tarantino learned about film history by working at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California (“I was already a movie expert,” he explained. “That’s how I got hired”).

Here was a gangly, ultra-confident person who spoke so fast it seemed as if he was trying to answer questions that had not yet been asked.

Keitel’s recollection of reading the script is telling; he assumed (having never met him) that Tarantino must have had some kind of family connection to the world of organized crime.

All the dominos were aligned. Natural Born Killers was going to matter. It was going to be important. But then it came out, and it didn’t, and it wasn’t.

“What’s most bothersome about Pulp Fiction,” snarked Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic, “is its success.”

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. It’s like the philosophical difference between viewing time as linear and believing all time is happening at once: Travolta was still Travolta, and Travolta was what Tarantino wanted.

The attraction to sports is so individual and multifaceted that trying to explain why the attraction exists is like trying to explain why people enjoy falling in love.

But the one quality that coincides with all of those projections is the degree to which sports are clear, at least when compared to conventional reality: The rules are outlined in a book, the outcomes are nonnegotiable, and success or failure is a direct extension of physiological meritocracy. Unlike life, sports make it simple for the ordinary person to deduce who is good and who is bad, who has won and who has lost.

If someone had already reached middle age by 1995 (say, any person born before World War II), it was possible to view the internet as an interesting outgrowth of modernity that could be ignored entirely. It was neither a necessity nor an obligation.

If you ran a fantasy football league, you didn’t need to find the sports section of the Monday newspaper and do the math by hand.

This happened?

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).

The images may be like words, but there is no dialogue. You cannot reply to me.