Still Waiting on '90s Nostalgia

I have, from time to time, remarked the hints of a belated interest in '90s nostalgia (in the feature film version of Baywatch, or the sitcom Schooled, for example), but by and large these have just proven flickers (the Baywatch film was no blockbuster, Schooled cancelled after a mere two seasons), while a glance at the line-up of films initially scheduled for release in 2020 made clear that where nostalgia was concerned the '80s, after all these years, remained king.

And so I found myself thinking about the faintness of '90s nostalgia to date, developing some thoughts I had earlier a little further. It seems to me that one can simultaneously say several different things about the '90s--each true about different aspects of it, and altogether meaning that the era lends itself less well to nostalgia.

#1. The '90s Never Happened.

To the extent that people imagined the '90s would, in politics, values and the rest represent a break with the '80s--a reaction against Reaganomics and neoliberalism and neoconservatism and Cold War, a shift of our thinking in a more socially and ecologically conscientious, internationalist, de-militarized direction, or even a rebirth of countercultural radicalism ("Once we get outta the 80's, the 90's are going to make the 60's look like the 50's" '60s radical Huey Walker promised in Flashback)--the '90s never happened, amounting instead to a brief and quickly crushed hope that I suspect few even remember. What happened instead was that the '80s simply went on and on in this respect, the right pressing rightward rather than retreating amid the "end of history." (A glance at the Clinton administration's record of social and economic policymaking--government budget-cutting, welfare "reform," deregulation for finance, low taxes on the rich, Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve, free trade, etc., etc.--certainly, makes it all too clear that it was a "continuation of Reaganomics by other parties.") And we cannot be nostalgic for what never happened, can we? (Indeed, it seems to me to say a lot that those things of the '80s for which we see nostalgia are, by and large, the things of childhood--while those who express a dissenting impulse, for lack of anything else, still look back to before the '80s, as we see in films like Roman J. Israel, Esq., or Joker.)

#2. The '90s Did Happen, But Was a Transitional Period Rather Than a Distinct Phenomena of its Own.
I have certainly had this impression thinking about film during this period--the action film in particular. We all know the distinctively "'80s action film" Hollywood turned out in that decade--Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris and Rambo and Die Hard and the rest. And we all know the sort of action film that has prevailed in the twenty-first century--dominated by superheroes and their heroics, with Spiderman, Batman and the Avengers delivering one billion dollar hit after another. But what about the '90s? Close examination, time and again, has convinced me that it was a transitional era where people still flocked to see Schwarzenegger in Eraser, while Hollywood, in spite of the early success of the Tim Burton Batman franchise, was making mostly second-string superhero movies, and Independence Day was novel enough to be a major event (while two decades later its sequel was predictably lost in the ever-larger summer crowd).

#3. The '90s Happened--it's the Period After the '90s That Didn't.
Perhaps the most unambiguous change in the sort of details of daily life that nostalgia-hawkers interest themselves in is perhaps what people call "technology." Yet, what in the heady '90s seemed to be the beginning of a new wave of digital wonders can, in hindsight, seem like the climax. Personal computing, Internet connections, cellular telephony all exploded then--and while they have got cheaper and more portable and faster enabling fuller exploitation of their potentials, it seems that nothing since has been quite so radical. Indeed, much of what was expected to follow soon--bodily immersive virtual reality, telepresence, self-driving vehicles and other equally dramatic artificial intelligence aids to daily living--proved rather further off than imagined, things we are still waiting for now two decades on, with "digital personal assistants" like Alexa still for the most part a novelty, and many still feeling themselves in a position to express a "Git a Hoss"-like disdain for the idea that cars will drive themselves anytime soon. The result is that rather than being in the '80s we remain in the '90s--and equally cannot get nostalgic for what never departed.

Of course, none of this means that there are not things that I look at and find to be particularly "'90s." Thus does it go with, for instance, those syndicated action hours one can still see rerun on channels like H & I (for now). They offer a style of entertainment not quite so available before, and clearly vanished since. Yet such items strike me as sufficiently minor as to leave those building entertainment out of nostalgia little to work with.