'The Nineties' by Chuck Klosterman
After one of the most creative periods in American filmmaking, the “New Hollywood” of the ‘70s, the movies of the decade that followed often seemed contrived by contrast. But in the ‘90s, energized by a new generation of indie (or quasi-indie) directors, film reemerged from its multiplex doldrum. The decade’s roster is impressive: Quentin Tarantino, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, Sofia Copola, Darren Aronofsky, Christopher Nolan, Danny Boyle, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson and yes, the director who helped launch the ‘90s new wave with the success of his 1989 film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape.
Essayist Chuck Klosterman summarizes the context for the rise of the indies in the movie chapter of his latest book, The Nineties. His tome’s subtitle, A Book, nods to that decade’s prevailing cultural theme, irony. “It was a confusing time to care about things,” Klosterman quips. The decade was a long holiday in between the Cold War and the War on Terror with the “culture war” as a sideshow for most Americans (unless you were an evangelical fundamentalist or running a grant-funded arts center). Politics in the ‘90s was a choice between Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum and staying home come election day.
Among the many points Klosterman considers is the gap between the cultural stereotype of Generation X as they came of age in the ‘90s and the cultural reality experienced by most of that generation. He uses pop culture metrics to measure the distance between perception and reality. The aggressively GenX series on ABC, “My So Called Life,” was cancelled after one season while NBC’s mainstream “Friends” lasted 10 years. And yet, he concedes, Nirvana’s Nevermind (selling 10 million copies) defines the zeitgeist, not the eponymous debut by Hootie and The Blowfish (21 million copies sold).
The indie rock scene from which Nirvana rose had its parallels with indie film culture. Fortunately, its leading proponents were less troubled by the idea of stardom than was Kurt Cobain. More than anyone, Tarantino embodied the stereotype of the ‘90s indie director, amplifying a fact that Klosterman nails: “No movie or director influenced nineties film culture as much as the advent and everywhereness of the video store.” By the ‘90s the price of a VCR became accessible and the cost of renting (as opposed to owning) a video amounted to spare change.
With no algorithms to lead customers down their own familiar paths, visiting a video store was often an adventure, a crapshoot, a treasure hunt. Customers could educate themselves on film history, finally watching old movies without commercials at a time of their own choosing (rather than TV’s late show). And all sorts of films that never screened in most places, or were relegated to drive-ins, became available. Suddenly budding cineastes could feast on European or Japanese art house, Hong Kong action flicks, exploitation movies and overlooked genre nuggets.
“Video stores invented a new kind of independent director that became so pervasive,” Klosterman writes, “it instantly became a caricature: the fiscally insolvent, vociferously unglamorous dude (and it was always a dude) who used his video store experience to build an encyclopedic, unorthodox, pretentious cinematic worldview.”
Tarantino was the most notorious autodidact to emerge from the long aisles of the video stores, albeit he hungrily devoured films in theaters long before he owned a VCR. Unlike the towering auteurs of previous generations, his films presented no particular philosophy, ideology or outlook and were not made to measure for their box office potential. That they were successful was an indicator of the ironic mood of many moviegoers. Reservoir Dogs (1992) and the films that followed represented the logic of a world where “the volume of manufactured consumer art had exponentially increased. The volume was now vast enough to replace the natural world in totality,” Klosterman writes. In other words, Tarantino and many of his generational peers made movies about making movies, their references linked only loosely to the world beyond the darkened rooms where films are run.
Klosterman adds that this ‘90s aesthetic has become unfashionable in the present 20whatever decade—a time of unfiltered anger, self-righteousness, paranoia and the hunt for micro-aggressions as the world disintegrates on all sides from violence and ecological collapse.
The Nineties: A Book is published by Penguin Press.
