We Are Stuck in the ’90s Again

T he Canadian folk-pop band Moxy Früvous sang of being “Stuck in the 90’s” even while they were still in the first half of the decade. Being Canadian folk singers, they imagined the decade they lived in as a right-wing dystopia in which broadcast political opinions amounted to little more than saying that the “homeless are stupid.” While daydreaming about a country that was uniformly left-wing, and punching at the likes of Pat Buchanan and GameBoys — two things on screens, not exactly in power — they lamented the lame lifestyle of punching the clock. They sing,

Riding the bike to his foreign car

Burning his mind in his VCR

Reluctant to find he’s stuck in the ’90s again

I’ve always been convinced that nostalgia is always for the last time you weren’t financially and administratively responsible for your own life. Someone else was paying the bills and filling out the forms. For a lot of Boomers, this was in the 1950s or ’60s. My last days like this were in the late 1990s. But then I look back and see that, even in my 1990s, people with their lives ahead of them already felt stuck. In Noah Baumbach’s 1995 coming-of-age comedy Kicking and Screaming, Max, played by Chris Eigeman, finds himself in paralysis just four months after graduating liberal-arts school: “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday,” he explains, “I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I can’t go to the bar, because I’ve already looked back on it, and I didn’t have a good time.”

Maybe these words were prophetic. There is a sense in which our culture has been frozen since the 1990s. The internet and paid cable TV really got to work on resegregating, silo-ing, and deconstructing what had been a common, mass popular culture. It was thrown to flinders as people bought multiple cheap TVs, and then Napster, the iPod, and the iPad tore it up in a BitTorrent. Eighty-three million viewers had once tuned in to see who shot J. R. in 1980; 76.3 million tuned in to watch Jerry Seinfeld and his friends put in the slammer in 1998.

Now, Seinfeld producer and writer of that finale, Larry David, has relitigated that episode in the finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which was watched by just 1.1 million people.

David isn’t the only one re-feasting on the 1990s. There’s something about broadcast television that doesn’t work in the absence of a truly popular mass culture in which a huge share of a nation’s people are watching and listening to a lot of the same things at roughly the same time. You can see this in recent episodes of Saturday Night Live. The show is just coming out of one of its critical nadirs and starting to win plaudits again. But in just the last few episodes, it has been surprisingly dependent on cultural references that are a quarter century or more out of date. Last week’s episode with Ryan Gosling featured skits about Beavis and Butthead (1993–1998) and Erin Brockovich (made famous by the 2000 film). Other recent episodes have featured references to Jumanji (popularized by the 1995 film), Moulin Rouge! and its soundtrack (2001), and AirBud (1997). The Shane Gillis episode had a skit based on Forrest Gump (1994). What stands out is the obscurity of more contemporary cultural artifacts that SNL sends up. A sketch making fun of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts proves the rule: A satire for a large audience needs a culture with common references, and that culture died at the turn of the millennium. This also explains why, for the past two decades, broad comedy has over-relied on politics.

We’ve been wading up to our hips in ’90s remakes and revived sequels, like Point Break (1991/2015), Flatliners (1990/2017), Scream (1996/2022), Robocop (1987/2014), The Lion King (1994/2019), Mortal Kombat (1995/2021) Power Rangers (1995/2017). The show Baywatch (1989) got turned into a 2017 movie featuring The Rock. The CW show Charmed (1998) was rebooted in 2018. Soon we’ll get the full flood. We’ve got a Netflix remake of The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Crow (1994/2024) is coming back. They’ve even remade the terrible animated X-Men series, which was only memorable for its theme ripping off a Whitney Houston riff. Its nostalgia is literally in the title, X-Men ’97. I’m worried someone is going to try to make Jim Carrey simultaneously reprise Ace Ventura, The Mask, and The Cable Guy for some triple-feature Barbenheimer stunt.

Our dominant political metaphor — the red pill — is a 1990s artifact. And I even caught myself thinking last week, “O. J. Simpson died. Those were some good times, weren’t they?” Anyway, we’ve made some changes since the 1990s, though I’m not sure all of them are salutary. Moxy Früvous imagined Pat Buchanan shouting at the homeless to get a job 30 years ago. Now, their progressive government offers the homeless the option of medically assisted suicide. Whatever brings housing prices down in Hamilton, right? Enjoy the quietus and a few last laughs remembering Forrest Gump.