More Superheroic Nostalgia--and How We Really Remember the '90s (Cory Doctorow Reviews Austin Grossman's Fight Me)

After recently writing about Deadpool as a distinctly '90s creation, and the films as an experience of a bit of the '90s in our day, I happened across Cory Doctorow's review of Austin Grossman's just released novel Fight Me--likewise a superhero tale deeply evocative of the '90s in Doctorow's appraisal.

Doctorow's review, as is usually the case with the novels that he covers at Pluralistic, was strongly positive, but rather than the book's merits (or demerits) what really interested me about the piece was Doctorow suggestion that the book can be read as "The Avengers Meets The Big Chill," and his turn from there to considering Generation X from the standpoint of 2024, with, as the evocation of The Big Chill indicates, the generation's activism foregrounded in that.

This surprised me. If the '90s, and the Generation X that was young during that decade, undeniably had its activism--in which Doctorow was most certainly a participant (and remains one, most obviously on the "tech" front)--it would never have occurred to me to compare Generation X's activism with that of the '60s in the way that he does. Recently writing of the period it seemed to me that, in Robert Merton's terms, rather than "rebels," the archetypal nonconformists of the '90s were "ritualists." These are persons who are not out to change the system the way rebels are, but do what they have to in order to get along in spite of not believing in the system--as with the '90s "slacker" going through the motions with ostentatious unenthusiasm, "ironically," for lack of hope that the world could be anything else in that day in which the conventional wisdom held us to be at the "end of history." Moreover, the slacker was themselves only a counterpoint to the prevailing ultra-conformism. (In what other sort of era, after all, could one sell "market populism?")

Indeed, more than any other part of the '60s in that '60s-nostalgia-saturated period, the activism of the '60s seemed far in the past, with that '90s cinema classic The Big Lebowski, for all its characteristic postmodernist superficiality and incoherence (or perhaps because of it) summing up the situation in its juxtaposition of its two Jeffrey Lebowskis. One was a washed-out old hippie who, in spite of having been one of the Seattle Seven on the eve of the Gulf War, shows no sign of any oppositional stance whatsoever as he quotes without irony George H.W. Bush's rhetoric of a "line in the sand" and hangs around a bowling alley with a caricature of John Milius; while the other Lebowski was a Dickensian businessman who despised everything the first Lebowski had ever stood for as a "revolution" that was happily over with "the bums" having lost.

That still seems to me to represent the essence of the '90s that way--but every era has more than one side to it, and if, by comparison with the movements of the '60s protest in the '90s was a marginal thing, the period did have that other side to it, as Doctorow reminds us in his review.