What Was '90s Irony Really About?

Not too long ago I remarked that in the '90s there still seemed a certain amount of alertness on the part of society's thinkers about just what condition society was in, and where it was going on--which is to say, in the middle of a nervous breakdown, amid breakdowns of other kinds.

Consider all that was going on. Deindustrialization, the decay of the country's infrastructure and services, the hollowing out of the "middle class." Surging socioeconomic inequality, the polarization and moral panic of "culture war." The growling derangement of a "Greed is good"-"Force works" mentality. The hyper-sensationalization of one crime as idiotic as it was gruesome after another (Amy Fisher! Tonya Harding!), which process included endless made-for-TV movies (Amy Fisher had three all to herself, not counting the three more Saturday Night Live presented us with in a more than usually memorable episode!), and the grist it all offered the mill of an age of "shock TV" and "extreme" everything, and enormous smugness on the part of the edgelords dominating the landscape. (This was the era of Jerry Springer, and Howard Stern, and Quentin Tarantino, and South Park.)

All of this is, of course, far more advanced now, far worse now--and taken quite in stride. But there was less acceptance then. And that seems relevant to the famous '90s irony. Annoying as it often was I wonder now if it was not a sign of society (at least, as represented by some of those who do its thinking for it) being in a healthier condition than it is now, aware of what was going on, and using irony as a coping mechanism--distancing itself from its unfortunate situation, laughing at what was happening to it because it still understood that this was what breakdown looks like, and if it was no great era for valiant efforts to change the world, on some level was still fighting against it.

I have said it before but I will say it again: back then writers could imagine society becoming so sick it would be addicted to reality TV (The Truman Show, EdTV), but reality has gone far, far beyond their imaginings (as all that is evoked by utterance of the name "Kardashian" makes clear, and so too the way people shrugged at the amplification of the concept in The Circle). I think of the underrated sequel to Robocop, which had a bankrupt Detroit being privatized to a corporate goliath whose activities include selling a new model of high-tech policing based on killer robots--a joke then, but in hindsight it stands as prophesy infinitely more accurate than the drivel of the Establishment hacks paraded before us on the nightly news as "experts" (whose misunderstanding of the events of the period and their aftermath was unbelievably risible, and has cost the world dearly).

As all this goes to show, we are past the point at which satire, or even parody, is possible. And I don't think it's a simple caving in to nostalgia to point that out.