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.
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.
One of the limitations with nostalgic look-backs presented as a sizzle reel or Web-site slide show is that they divvy up the past into pizza slices of garish spectacle. The inquisitorial hysteria and the underlying pathologies of the 90s’ political and cultural wars are better captured and preserved in the resounding drum of Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain, set in 1998 at the high noon of the Clinton-Lewinsky melodrama, and Lewinsky’s own memoir of those madding days, published in these pages in the June issue. Pathology and polarization were the twin propellers of this newly inaugurated era of perpetual outrage, and the low-flying pilot of this crop duster was Newt Gingrich, who, elected as Speaker of the House after Republicans won big in the 1994 midterm elections under his insurgent leadership, poisoned everything in his wake. His legacy of sliming liberals as “sick,” “pathetic,” “despicable,” and similar sweet nothings, his appetite for the political destruction of his opponents on the pettiest of pretenses, and his jihad against any traitorous sign of bipartisanship or collegiality in the capital are why, today, Republicans in Congress routinely, reflexively kill veterans’ benefits and funding for food stamps out of righteous spite and fix their bayonets to the battle cry of “Benghazi!” Racial polarization resurged with a vengeance in the 90s with the release of the brutal footage of the nightstick beatdown of Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police Department and the rioting, looting, and burning that followed the acquittal of the accused officers. The sight of construction truckdriver Reginald Denny being dragged out of his vehicle at an intersection, kicked, punched, and skulled by a brick (producing severe brain damage) is as hard to watch now as it was then. That explosion occurred in 1992, and the 90s still had the O. J. Simpson murder trial ahead, whose outcome wouldn’t be anyone’s idea of a healing moment.
The National Geographic documentary does an O.K. job evoking the split-screen perception of race in the early 90s, juxtaposing the raw news footage of the unleashed fury of the L.A. riots with the reassuring, upscale, malted-milk affability of Will Smith in the smash sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. But showcasing social change as a mirror reflection of pop culture and vice versa can be problematic, reducing recent history to a series of flash cards. When Roseanne takes credit in “The ’90s” for the election of Bill Clinton, citing her sitcom’s biting, populist appeal (never mind how sugarplum’d the series was with guest stars), it testifies to her megalomaniacal bluster more than it adds to any understanding of the Bubba Ascendancy, and she’s hardly the only big-name talking head here adopting the role of amateur sociologist, spouting banalities and dubious pronouncements as if blowing smoke rings. The pop-cultural artifacts on exhibit are often amusing but sometimes of questionable salience. I confess—forgive me, Father—that I had forgotten that white rapper Vanilla Ice and Madonna had dated in the Paleozoic era. Now that the documentary has reminded me, I can’t wait to forget all over again, though it is funny that even Vanilla Ice was icked out by Madonna’s crotchy Sex book.
Nostalgia isn’t the worst narcotic, but it used to feed a different vein. It was both generational and individual, a distillation of personal experience as unrecoverable as blushing youth. When F. Scott Fitzgerald, the dewiest prose lyricist of the Jazz Age, peered back at the reckless abandon and champagne fizz of the 20s through the clouded curtains of the Depression-era 30s, he elegized himself, Zelda, and the rest of his strewn generation for who they were and what they did. Sixties nostalgia operated that way too, the pang of regret over who so many of them were (rebels, hippies, wanderers, crusaders) and what they became (reactionaries, office drones, commuters, cynics). In our media-saturated age, when every couch potato is king, this mode of nostalgia no longer applies. It isn’t about who we aspired to be as fledglings leaving the nest—full of hopes and dreams and boogying hormones—but about what we watched, played, listened to, downloaded, and identified with as junior consumers. Before the Web became our neural extension, when print and celluloid held reign, the passage of time and the discrimination of critics and enthusiasts winnowed away the flotsam and jetsam of the past, allowing its true achievements and revelatory visions (even those unheralded or derided at the time) to surface and radiate. The Internet, however, is an inexhaustible suction pump that indiscriminately dredges up the dreck along with the sunken pearls. Search engines are scouring devices, algorithms have no taste buds, and monster Web-site aggregators such as BuzzFeed—which one writer called the Hellmouth of 90s nostalgifying, with its inane quizzes (“Which ‘Dawson’s Creek’ Character Are You?”) and dipstick listicles (“32 Reasons Christmas Was Better in the ’90s”)—are to curating what hoarders are to connoisseurship. Excess clutter is one of the signs and symptoms of entropy, and our current and future state of entropy was foreseen by an actor-auteur whose name doesn’t often turn up in 90s-nostalgia pieces.
Kevin Costner.
What a decade he racked up. The Academy Award-winning Dances with Wolves, which he produced, directed, and starred in. Oliver Stone’s JFK, as Jim Garrison. The Bodyguard, carrying Whitney Houston in his protective arms. Clint Eastwood’s underrated A Perfect World. Wyatt Earp. Tin Cup, a racy golf comedy which re-united him with Bull Durham writer-director Ron Shelton. For Love of the Game, where he once again took the mound to chuck the seamed horsehide (that’s baseball talk). But the two films of his that were ahead of their times were Waterworld and The Postman. Set in a future where the ice caps have melted and the planet has become a bobbing marina, Waterworld was a Mad Max testosterone thump of apocalyptic tribalism, Costner’s buff, scowlly hero portentously named “Mariner” (an insult to Prince Namor). Costly and unwieldy, the movie was a sitting duck for critical mockery when it was released, but recent news of the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf and the prospect of rising sea levels raises the specter of *Waterworld’*s being our eventual salty fate, assuming everything doesn’t go up in smoke before then. Undaunted, Costner completed his dystopian diptych with the nuclear-wasteland parable The Postman, a critical and commercial disaster about trying to rebuild civil society in a new Wild West one poky mail delivery at a time. I would not make large revisionist claims for either movie—I’m not insane—but in their sprawling, post-empire survivalism they speak a lot more to our horizon view than which boy band made your heart go boom boom boom.