The ’90s: The Last Great Decade?,” asks the title of the National Geographic Channel’s three-part documentary special, premiering this month, the noisy capper to a 90s nostalgia craze that really got raring last year online, along the cable grid, and in the dense foliage of the fashion pages.Grunge; Friends; Seinfeld; Felicity; Dawson’s Creek; Buffy the Vampire Slayer; The X-Files; My So-Called Life; Beverly Hills, 90210; Clueless; Thelma & Louise; The Matrix; Saved by the Bell; Boy Meets World; Beavis and Butt-Head; Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation; Biggie Smalls; Tupac Shakur; the hoop-net arabesques of Michael Jordan—what a hit parade. The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, a 90s kids’ favorite, are set for a movie reboot, the songs of Alanis Morissette stream from the car speakers of the sporty convertible Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon share in the upcoming The Trip to Italy, and Coogi knitwear has made a comeback. As someone whose decade loyalty is to the 70s, I don’t begrudge others their 90s glow-on. It’s only fair that Generation Xers—the Nine-ettes—enjoy their turn in the hot-tub time machine now that they’re old enough to appreciate what a disappointment life can be after the louche splendors of the old dorm. But nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, to borrow the wistful title of Simone Signoret’s memoirs.
Mostly a white people’s pastime, nostalgia used to be a pining for an idealized yesteryear, for a prelapsarian world tinted in sepia. “Nostalgia appeals to the feeling that the past offered delights no longer obtainable,” the social critic Christopher Lasch wrote in The True and Only Heaven. Ah, no longer. Since the publication of Lasch’s book, in 1991, the Internet and cable TV have colonized the hive mind and set up carnival pavilions. Now every delight is obtainable and on display at an arcade that never closes. Friends, Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The X-Files still cycle in syndication; Felicity and My So-Called Life are on Hulu; making a Holy Ghost appearance as a hologram at the Coachella music festival, Tupac and his thug-life gaze have cast the posthumous spell of Malcolm X posters (he is even the subject of a new Broadway musical, Holler if Ya Hear Me); and the grunge look is a perennial, re-applied with a grease gun. This anxious, ravenous speedup of nostalgia—getting wistful over goodies that never went away—is more than a reflection of the overall acceleration of digital culture, a pathetic sign of our determination to dote on every last shiny souvenir of our prolonged adolescence, and an indictment of our gutless refusal to face the rotten future like Stoic philosophers. It’s also a recognition that September 11, 2001, and the Iraq war cast a pall over everything that has come after. The millennium has been a major letdown. Yet let’s not con ourselves. It’s not as if the 90s were some belle époque, either, a last fling before the anvil fell.
Mostly a white people’s pastime, nostalgia used to be a pining for an idealized yesteryear, for a prelapsarian world tinted in sepia. “Nostalgia appeals to the feeling that the past offered delights no longer obtainable,” the social critic Christopher Lasch wrote in The True and Only Heaven. Ah, no longer. Since the publication of Lasch’s book, in 1991, the Internet and cable TV have colonized the hive mind and set up carnival pavilions. Now every delight is obtainable and on display at an arcade that never closes. Friends, Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The X-Files still cycle in syndication; Felicity and My So-Called Life are on Hulu; making a Holy Ghost appearance as a hologram at the Coachella music festival, Tupac and his thug-life gaze have cast the posthumous spell of Malcolm X posters (he is even the subject of a new Broadway musical, Holler if Ya Hear Me); and the grunge look is a perennial, re-applied with a grease gun. This anxious, ravenous speedup of nostalgia—getting wistful over goodies that never went away—is more than a reflection of the overall acceleration of digital culture, a pathetic sign of our determination to dote on every last shiny souvenir of our prolonged adolescence, and an indictment of our gutless refusal to face the rotten future like Stoic philosophers. It’s also a recognition that September 11, 2001, and the Iraq war cast a pall over everything that has come after. The millennium has been a major letdown. Yet let’s not con ourselves. It’s not as if the 90s were some belle époque, either, a last fling before the anvil fell.Unscrewing this time capsule is opening a can of worms. The 90s were the decade when the last tatters of privacy were torn aside, a national forest of woodies seemed to sprout overnight thanks to the rollout of a little blue pill called Viagra, reality TV unthroned soap opera as the medium’s queen of discord, and political theater lit up like a porno set. The snapshot of Donna Rice sitting on Gary Hart’s lap that torpedoed the married senator’s 1988 presidential hopes looked like Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello having a cuddle compared with the sex scandals the 90s were about to run through the grind-house projector. From the pubic hair on the Coke can and the invocation of “Long Dong” Silver in Anita Hill’s testimony at the Senate confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas to the semen stain on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress and the pursed-lipped prurience of independent counsel Ken Starr’s Starr Report (which historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the most salacious public document in the history of the republic”), the down-and-dirty details were a godsend to late-night comedians and a new breed of leering pundit quite different from the august eggheads of capital sonority, for whom David Broder of The Washington Post was dean. The tone of political discourse and public debate took a distinct dip. The Washington establishment and its tail-wagging courtiers fell into a circular frenzy somewhere between a witch hunt and a panty raid. Unless you were a Clinton-hater and/or a conspiracy hound convinced that Hillary had Vince Foster snuffed out, it wasn’t much fun then and it looks even worse now.
by James Wolcott, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: John Ritter
