The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

Prior to the VCR, it was difficult for average people to develop a personal, intimate relationship with non-obvious filmmaking. Outside of New York, Los Angeles, and a handful of university towns, there was just no way to see any movie that wasn’t being simultaneously experienced by large numbers of people.

Throughout the eighties and early nineties, the retail cost of a VHS movie was inordinately high—usually around $79 to $90. Top Gun, released on video in 1987, made national news for being “only” $26.95, the lowest introductory price ever for a major release (McDonald’s received similar attention in 1992 when the fast-food chain distributed copies of Dances with Wolves on VHS for $7.99, if the buyer also purchased food).

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”). He’d started privately collecting films on videotape in 1978, years before he owned a VCR. As a sixteen-year-old in 1979, he seemingly saw every film screened in greater Los Angeles and can still recall in which theater he saw each picture.

The majority of internet content is an incomplete reproduction of something that already exists elsewhere, delivered in a capricious sequence self-directed by the user. Every message or image is preceded and followed by a different message or image with which it has no natural relationship, except to modify the meaning of whatever is currently being experienced.

There are no statistics illustrating how rare it was for someone to ignore a ringing telephone in 1990. This is because such a question would never have been asked (or even pondered). To do so was unthinkable.

Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner. If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it.

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everyone had to be where they said they’d be, and everyone had to arrive when they said they’d arrive. Life was more scripted and less fluid, dictated by a machine that would not (and could not) compromise its location. Yet within these fascistic limitations, the machine itself somehow mattered less. It was an appliance, not that different from the dishwasher. The concept of buying a new phone every other year[*] would have seemed as crazy as installing a new toilet every other Thanksgiving.

Originally called “BackRub,” the search engine was renamed “Google”

most Americans doxed themselves. Home addresses and telephone numbers were listed in the phone book, annually distributed to every local home for free. Phone customers were charged a monthly fee if they didn’t want their home number included in the directory.

Throughout all of the 1980s, not one player hit 50 home runs in a season. Now a low-profile spray hitter—a guy weighing less than 200 pounds, who’d hit only 16 homers the year before—was amassing numbers that crushed the accomplishments of the previous generation’s best sluggers.

Brady Anderson

Crystal Pepsi was presented as a visual product. It looked like 7Up, so that’s what people anticipated it would taste like. Yet despite its clarity, it tasted like regular cola, and the human mind does not respond positively to familiar products that contradict expectations.

“We would launch a Tab Clear product and position it right next to Crystal Pepsi, and we’d kill both in the process,” Coca-Cola marketing strategist Sergio Zyman explained in the 2011 book Killing Giants. “It was a suicidal mission from day one. Pepsi spent an enormous amount of money on the brand and, regardless, we killed it. Both of them were dead within six months.”

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The absence of food was a greater problem than Nelson’s diary suggests. The crops were supposed to be pollinated by honeybees and hummingbirds, but the birds and bees all died. Nelson lost 25 pounds, and at least one other crew member lost twice that much. Yet this medically supervised “healthy starvation” would have likely ranked only third on the laundry list of Biospheric problems. The most pressing issue was that the facility was running out of breathable air. Microbes in the soil were producing carbon dioxide faster than photosynthesis was creating oxygen. After sixteen months, the oxygen level had dropped from 20.9 percent to 14.2 percent, the equivalent of living at the summit of the Swiss Alps. There was no way to fix the problem, so outside oxygen had to be pumped into the facility,

Some assumed Dolly would have numerous internal weaknesses and deformities. She did not. Others assumed Dolly would only survive for a few months. She lived over six years, dying of a respiratory cancer common to sheep raised indoors.

In the nineties, when a semi-educated young person was asked to identify the root cause of most American problems, the probable answer would not have been capitalism. The more likely response would have been commercialism. That shift prompts a loaded question—what’s the core ideological difference between those two generational complaints?

Garth Brooks was, by a broad margin, the biggest musical act of the decade. He would have been the biggest act of whatever decade he lived through, because Brooks is the biggest solo artist of all time. He released twelve albums during the nineties, and eight would eventually sell more than 10 million copies. His worst-selling release was a second attempt at a Christmas album that still went platinum.

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.

“Must See TV.” 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.

Frasier is (technically) the most critically lauded sitcom of the late twentieth century, winning the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in five consecutive years.

The budget for Titanic was $200 million. It seemed like such a terrible idea. Knowing what we know now, it’s difficult to think about Titanic as a mistake, even though that was the consensus up until it opened that December. Part of the suspicion was over the inflexible inevitability of the plot—how do you make a story dramatic if absolutely everyone knows how the story will end?

Cameron privately believed the movie would lose around $100 million.

Titanic

It was written and directed by Lilly and Lana Wachowski, who were still living in 1999 as men. Their eventual gender transition is now the most glaring subtext to The Matrix, directly illustrated when the story’s main character has to choose between swallowing a blue pill (which would allow him to continue living a false, fabricated life) and swallowing a red pill (allowing him to experience physical existence as it actually is).

Timothy McVeigh, was an American citizen and a decorated military veteran. He’d served in the Gulf War and hated the government. His actions might have been easier to comprehend had he been visibly psychotic, but he was not: Up until his execution in 2001, he spoke of his attack with cogent, clinical language, sometimes writing essays that compared his act of domestic terrorism to memorable military assaults by sovereign nations.

The very first sexual harassment case in U.S. history (under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act) had happened just fifteen years before this hearing. For many Americans, the Anita Hill allegations were the first time they had considered the possibility that sexual harassment could exist without a direct demand for sexual activity

makeshift cardboard signs proclaiming, “The Juice Is Loose.” It seemed perverse then and still seems perverse now. Yet this can also be understood as the primordial impulse of what would eventually drive the mechanism of social media: the desire of uninformed people to be involved with the news, broadcasting their support for a homicidal maniac not because they liked him, but because it was exhilarating to participate in an experience all of society was experiencing at once.

Columbine High was nowhere near to being the first American school shooting. Less than a year before Columbine, a mentally ill fifteen-year-old killed two of his classmates and wounded twenty-five others at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon. The history of such acts is disturbingly long, dating back to the dawn of public education in the New World.

it was (incorrectly) believed that Harris and Klebold had targeted popular kids, it was (incorrectly) assumed that this must have been a response to merciless bullying.