Austin Powers' 25th Anniversary

This month was the 25th anniversary of the release of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery in theaters. That anniversary hasn't been a major pop cultural event, but some noticed, with one write-up appearing over at Paste.

In remembering Austin Powers one is likely to recall the character as a James Bond parody, part of a revival of that form in the '90s, but the character was more broadly a piece of '60s pop culture parody, playing off of Swinging London, the counterculture, and much else. The result is that the conception showed the '60s looking at the '90s, at times not only parodically but satirically.

Particularly memorable here was the way that Dr. Evil's brand of scheming had become passè in the end-of-history, Lexuses-over-Olive-Trees vision of life as the end of the century approached. (As his subordinate Number Two tells him, "[Y]ou, like an idiot, wanted to take over the world. And you don't realize there is no world anymore. It's only corporations.")

Another bit, more conspicuous, was the sense of the '90s as a period of sexual repression next to the era he came from. Treated gently, even obliquely, behind it all was the miserable failure to contain the AIDS epidemic, the post-Anita Hill outrage over sexual harassment, and what has come to be known as "political correctness."

This seemed fairly common at the time. Still, now I wonder--in the age of COVID, #MeToo, "wokeness," does the '90s seem as unsexy as it did to many then? Or is it possible that in this period of '90s nostalgia people are looking back at the '90s in some degree the way the '90s looked back at the '60s--in this way, and perhaps others as well?