Those Were/Are the Days: Week #22 of 52 Mini-Essays Project
On nostalgia, periodizing the 1990s, and death by internet
Topic Idea: Richard Menke
Many years ago, I invented a little time-comparison game that I like to play when I feel insufficiently freaked out by my own mortality.1 It goes like this: you pick an event from the past, calculate how many years ago it happened, and then figure out what was happening the same number of years prior to your event. For example: it’s been 41 years since Ronald Reagan was first elected. For people in that year the equivalent moment in the past would have been 1939, the year that Germany invaded Poland. We are to the election of Reagan as voters in 1980 are to the beginning of World War II.2 See how freaky? You can also do it with movies or books or anything, really. One of my favorites is The Big Chill: the time between the characters’ college graduation and their reunion was only 13 years—it’s now been nearly three times that long since the weekend in the movie. If The Big Chill had depicted people who had graduated from college 38 years before, they would have been wearing bobby sox and listening to the Andrews Sisters. American Graffiti, which came out in 1973, was set in 1962—a time it depicted with ridiculously intense nostalgia. That would be like making a film right now that was set in the bygone, prehistoric, mystical era of 2010. I think I have Facebook comment threads that are still going from 2010.
So when a friend suggested “Periodizing the 1990s” as an essay topic, I immediately (one might say involuntarily) started doing the math. Right now, we are to 1991 as people in 1991 were to 1961—in other words, the setting of American Graffiti. I am pretty sure that when I started grad school I thought of the early 60s as prehistoric times, whereas 1991 was obviously just a few minutes ago. I have clothes from that year. My hair is pretty much still the same. I think that was the last year I emptied the trash on my computer. I hate this game.
As difficult as it is for me to accept, I must assume that Millennials and Gen Z-ers (god help us—they can read!) must think of the 90s as impossibly remote, its denizens like June and Ward Cleaver were to us. When I look back on that decade, though, I fail to see a frame around it marking it as “other.” It just doesn’t feel like the past. I don’t remember anything terribly different about the clothes, for example. Elaine Benes wore a lot of peasant skirts with blazers and Oxfords—that is a look I would still consider sporting. The cars from the 90s don’t seem recognizably old-timey—maybe they’re a little boxier than cars today? But they didn’t have some obvious excrescence like fins or bright chrome trim that clearly mark the cars of the 60s as antique. There was, of course, the sad matter of the “Rachel” haircut, but that is a risk any one of us still assumes the moment she walks into a salon and asks for shoulder-length layers: they may be inadvertent, but I still see plenty of Rachels around, their owners clearly suffering. The music—well, I stopped obsessively following new music around 1998, so I guess you have me there. But the things that occasionally penetrate my consciousness—“What Does the Fox Say?” or Doja Cat’s “Go to Town”—could easily have appeared in the 90s. Auto-Tune came on the scene in 1997, and Cher’s “Believe” came out in 1998, so the music of the late 90s, anyway, has a clear continuity with the stuff those kids today are listening to.
I suppose the fact that I think of the 90s as recent, as simply part of a smooth continuum of time that envelops all of my adult years in the mantle of “the present,” is a clear indication that I am getting long in the tooth. It seems incredible to contemplate, but probably people who were middle-aged in the 1990s didn’t see a huge difference between that decade and the 1960s. Perhaps they thought the cars still looked roughly the same; they didn’t think of their college clothes as hilarious costumes; they felt like JFK had died just a minute ago. Is it possible that this is simply something that happens to everyone as they get older? The decade of your golden youth will never seem remote and other—how could it? It’s during that time that all the neural pathways that constitute your sense of self are formed and solidified. That music, those clothes, that way of communicating (answering machines!), those dating protocols—they’re just ... right somehow, even when they start to seem hopelessly dated.
But I’m sure that by “periodizing the 90s” my friend did not mean “obsessing over how old we’re all getting”; he probably meant something more like “thinking through the ways that the 90s were not a monolith.” So I will trust the process, and assume that upon closer examination the decade will reveal subtle nuances and differences along its length, beyond simply “I could run an 8-minute mile and life stretched before me with infinite promise.”
The first question to ask is whether there are any sharp, clear, catastrophic events that crack the decade into pieces, like the death of JFK does for the 60s. The “mood” of most decades does not take hold at the stroke of midnight on the first year; usually something happens—such as the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst—that clearly indicates that the preoccupations of the previous decade have shifted. (For that reason, the 1960s really took place from 1964-1973, and the 1970s from 1974-1981, the year of the Hinckley assassination attempt.) Some potential candidates I mooted for the 90s: German reunification (1990); the Anita Hill testimony (1991); the O.J. Simpson trial (1995); the death of Princess Diana (1997); the Monica Lewinsky scandal (1998). But unfortunately for them, all of these events happened at awkward points in the decade. In order to be a real Decade Definer, a world-historical event has to happen toward the beginning of the given time span, ideally in the 3rd or 4th year. If it happens too long after the midpoint, it can hardly define the decade, and if it happens too soon (such as German reunification or the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings), then it’s not really necessary—the calendar can do just as good a job.3
But the real issue is that none of these events—as significant as they were—seems like an ineluctably defining moment, an occurrence that yanks the veil of innocence from the eyes of a naïve nation, and after which nothing will ever be the same.4 Of course, we rarely know that we’re experiencing a defining moment at the time; it’s only from the perspective of later years that we can judge whether a particular event really changed everything. (An example of a defining moment that we all knew was happening at the time: 9/11. A supposedly defining moment that turned out to be a nothingburger: Y2K.) When I look back on the 90s, it feels like it was just stuffed with ridiculous spectacles that any self-respecting decade would be embarrassed to claim as its distinctive emblem: the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan affair; the Lorena Bobbit de-penising; the low-speed Bronco chase. From the perspective of the 2020s, it feels like everyone back then was playing at scandal and outrage like a bunch of little kids doing dress-up. It’s impossible to imagine the election of Trump or the Capitol riot taking place in the 90s; those events would have to wait for a more hardened, cynical, embittered populace to come into existence. They would have to wait for the internet.
Well, there you have it. As a card-carrying member of Generation X, not only am I required to obsess over the 90s; I am also legally obligated to rail against “the internet” at every given opportunity. I will attempt to resist that temptation (while noting, briefly, just in passing, that I genuinely believe the world would be a better place had the internet never come into existence)—but I do have to point out that the explosion of the internet is clearly the decade-defining phenomenon I’ve been groping for. In 1990 I did not know a single person with an email account; by the end of the decade I was ordering wedding rings on line. That is a staggering, vertiginous amount of change in a very short period of time. (I think the 2010s might even outstrip the 1990s in this regard: the rise of social media and the smartphone were, shall we say, significant. But I will leave that essay for a Millennial to write 20 years from now.) I might (erroneously?) believe that I could get away with an Elaine Benes outfit right now, but the fact that Jerry, George, and pals never Google anything or create online dating profiles means that Seinfeld will always be sealed off from us in an impossibly remote past.
I think we could do worse than periodizing the 1990s by using the growth of the internet as a yardstick, alongside a consideration of what Americans were watching on TV. Maybe it’s the pandemic lockdown talking, but this method strikes me as perfectly representative, neatly encompassing all that needs to be said.
1990
The Internet: Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN develop hypertext markup language (HTML) and the uniform resource locator (URL)
On TV: “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Twin Peaks,” “Law & Order,” “Beverly Hills 90210,” “In Living Color,” “Northern Exposure,” first appearance of the “I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up!” ad
Diagnosis: Southern California stands in for our collective innocence. We don’t fully understand what’s about to hit us, but we understand on some level that it will be debilitating in the long run.
1991
The Internet: CERN announces the World Wide Web to the public
Researchers rig up a live shot of a coffee pot so they could tell when a fresh pot had been brewed; later connected to the World Wide Web, it becomes the first webcam
On TV: “Home Improvement,” “The Jerry Springer Show”
Diagnosis: We become convinced everyone will be famous.
1992
The Internet: The first audio and video are distributed over the Internet
The phrase “surfing the Internet” is popularized
On TV: “Mad About You,” “Melrose Place,” “Absolutely Fabulous”
Diagnosis: Peak whiteness. Offhand choice of surfing metaphor will define collective experience for the next three decades. Everything, even Southern California, now slipping into degeneracy.
1993
The Internet: CERN places its World Wide Web technology in the public domain
Mosaic graphical web browser launched
The number of websites reaches 600
On TV: “Late Show with David Letterman,” “The X-Files,” “Beavis and Butt-Head,” “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” “The Nanny,” “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” “Frasier”
Diagnosis: Can women save us from what is out there? Probably not. We double down on patriarchy.
1994
The Internet: Netscape Navigator 1.0 web browser is released
Microsoft creates a Web browser for Windows 95
Yahoo! is created
The White House goes on-line
One of the first known Web purchases takes place: a pepperoni pizza with mushrooms and extra cheese from Pizza Hut
On TV: “Friends,” “ER”
Diagnosis: The seeds are firmly planted: time-wasting and shopping are to be our future. TV resists its inevitable fusion with the internet by aggressively depicting people who don’t use computers. Spoiler alert: this strategy will not succeed.
1995
The Internet: 18 million American homes are now online, but only 3% of online users have ever signed on to the World Wide Web
Compuserve, America Online, and Prodigy begin to provide Internet access
Amazon, Craigslist, and eBay all launch: the first item listed for sale on eBay is a broken laser pointer, which a collector purchases for $14.83
Internet Explorer launches
Java is created
The first online dating site, Match.com, launches
On TV: “Star Trek: Voyager,” “The Wayans Bros.,” “Xena: Warrior Princess”
Diagnosis: The new new frontier is a different marketplace for the same old shit. All hell breaks loose.
1996
The Internet: Netscape Navigator 2.0, the first browser to support JavaScript, is released
Hotmail is commercially launched (it is later purchased by Microsoft and is now known as Outlook.com)
Congress passes the Communications Decency Act
A 3D animation dubbed “The Dancing Baby” becomes the first viral video
On TV: “The Crocodile Hunter,” “3rd Rock from the Sun,” “Spin City,” “The Daily Show,” “Judge Judy,” “Everybody Loves Raymond”
Diagnosis: The death rattle of the sitcom; all possible scenarios now depicted, explored. Judy and Raymond in a battle to the death over the sex-gender system. Microsoft wins.
1997
The Internet: Tim Berners-Lee is awarded the Institute of Physics’ 1997 Duddell Medal for inventing the World Wide Web
Internet Explorer 4.0 is released
Jorn Barger becomes the first person to use the term “Weblog” to describe the list of links on his website
On TV: “South Park,” “King of the Hill,” “Teletubbies,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
Diagnosis: Sweet innocent fools. We still think it’s fun. One day every girl will be a slayer—but then there will be Instagram.
1998
The Internet: Google is founded
The OED adds “spam” and “digerati” to the dictionary
On TV: “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,” “Dawson’s Creek,” “Will & Grace,” “That ’70s Show,” “Sex and the City,” “The King of Queens”
Diagnosis: It’s now okay to be gay and also to be heterosexual. One of the last times foreshortened nostalgia will be possible on TV; soon it will exist only in search engines.
1999
The Internet: Napster launches
On TV: “Family Guy,” “The Sopranos,” “Futurama,” “The West Wing,” “Freaks and Geeks,” the first appearance of the GEICO Gecko
Diagnosis: What can we not glamorize? We reach into each other’s computers to take things. Soon enough we won’t be able to tell the U.S. President from a mob boss. These things are all connected.
Of course I have since discovered that many other people play this same game, and that I did not invent it. Just last night a friend spontaneously started talking about her version of this exercise with no prompting from me. But for years I thought it was my little secret.
Or to Lou Gehrig’s speech in Yankee Stadium or the last public guillotining in France.
If pressed, I guess I could say that the 90s extended from the inauguration of Bill Clinton in January 1993 to the September 11th attacks in 2001. But then my essay would be over, and I probably should try to write something slightly longer.
I also considered the widespread use of anti-retroviral therapy for HIV, but it turns out AZT was first used in 1987, and the development of combination therapy took place gradually over the course of years.
The first essay I ever wrote that was intended for a public audience was around 1983, when I was an undergraduate, and it was an analysis of 1970s nostalgia for 'the Fifties' (obviously that began with American Graffiti, set in 1961, but a major premise of that movie was that 'the Fifties' wouldn't end for a few more years). I doubt that essay was very good. But ever since then I've been reasonably alert for the cultural markers of that rolling wave of nostalgia--for the 60s, the 70s (! for anyone who actually lived through them), the 80s (comparatively brief and feeble, for reasons that could bear more study); and now certainly for the 90s.
I agree with most of what you've said here, notably two main points. First, that decadal periods are defined by significant cultural-historical moments which rarely line up with the calendar years (though 1980 featured a whole series of epoch-changing events, and I would also argue that the disputed 2000 election was a very significant and epoch-changing trauma that we'd likely remember as such had it not been shortly overshadowed by 9/11). Second, it is indeed very difficult for us (or anyone) to disentangle their own generational perspective from what might be a more objective periodization--say, something that cultural historians might agree on in a hundred years, assuming there are any around.
But I don't think the latter task is impossible, even while we're still living our lives. I'm a 20th-century Americanist, by research specialty, so maybe I have to believe this. But I actually think one reason that 'the 90s' doesn't seem really discontinuous from the present, for you, is that epoch-changing events were actually comparatively fewer, and lower intensity, in that decade, than in pretty much any other we've lived through, at least from the perspective of white middle-class Americans. The overwhelming majority of Americans believed that 'the Sixties' were a convulsive, revolutionary time, for better or for worse. They believed that during the 60s, and ever since. Dynamics from the 60s AND reactions against these built through the 70s, and very clearly came to a head by the early 80s. I don't think any sentient American in 1984, of any generation beyond (maybe) the very oldest, thought they were living in essentially the same world as 1964.
But the 90s...eh. Obviously the internet, in retrospect, but almost nobody experienced that as a sudden trauma (or revolution) -- that was a classic frog-boiling-in-the-pan thing. The essence of the Clinton presidency was a kind of centrist normalcy, and as you say, the 'scandals' and sensations of the day--Tanya Harding, Bobbit, even Monica--were pretty weak sauce. Clinton's whole second term was a triumph of Nothing Happening. I mean I guess Kurt Cobain became The Voice of His Generation and then blew his brains out, but seriously. I have no idea what historians will write about the 90s.
All that said, I love this essay and I would also love to see what other people wrote in response to this prompt.