I saw the amusing Definitely, Maybe last night and was eager to proclaim it our world's first nineties period film. Obviously, we have a lot of movies set in the nineties, but I thought this was the first movie made in a distinctly post-nineties time about the nineties. This morning, though, I'm remembering Primary Colors as an earlier example. Are there others? Any that don't involve Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign? I can't remember if the film version of About a Boy follow the book in using Kurt Cobain's death as a plot point?
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The Nineties
01 Mar 2008 12:45 pm
Comments (67)
About a Boy did not use Kurt Cobain's death in it's ending.
No about a boy the movie doesnt use that plot point
I seem to remember the flashback scenes in High Fidelity having an early 90's vibe (although it may have been late 80's, a la Donnie Darko.)
Primary Colors came out in 1998, so it's not quite a period piece. By that measure, we'd have to include The Big Lebowski, which came out the same year, and was set in 1991. I think it's more accurate a period film, as it deliberately only used late-80s cars and made a number of 1991-specific references.
And you could also claim we've already had 2000s period films: the 9/11 movies like Flight 93 and World Trade Center, although it's hard to say if they were deliberately trying to evoke a separate time. It's funny though, if you look at 9/11 footage or pictures, people's hair and clothes look faintly out of date, much more 90s than 00s.
Wasn't Primary Colors made in the 90s? I remember reading the book more than a decade ago and the movie didn't come out much later.
Oh, and BTW, since you're probably reading the comments, can you PLEASE, for the love of god, turn off the freakin' audio file?
Primary Colors was made in 1998, so it was not made in a "distinctly post-nineties time"* and does not count.
*Even if you are not going by the precise calendar decade, I do not think that "the nineties" as a social period can be considered to have ended before the year 2000. The only milestones that really marked a change of zeitgeist would be the election or inauguration of George W. Bush (indicating he takeover of the state by "movement conservatism") or September 11.
If we are to define a certain period as "the 90s," probably it would be best to start with August 2, 1990 (the invasion of Kuwait) and to end with the inauguration of George W. Bush.
What Philly said. Every time I open the page that "Amateur Hour" audio plays.
Hi, it's John Dickerson from Slate . . .
One of conceits which made The Big Lebowski so great was that it was a period piece set during the first gulf war.
This aggression will not stand, man!
If you are going to include movies that were made in the 90's, then Singles counts as a 90's period piece, and a great one at that. If you want movies made after the 90's, then Black Hawk Down counts. A number of its actors went on to become big stars of the '00's as well: Eric Bana, Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, etc.
What others have said about TBL.
Also, Three Kings was a pretty good 90s period piece.
Ah, the perils of not closing HTML tags. You folks are all smart enough to find Black Hawk Down on IMDB though.
Can't believe we're almost done with this decade and still don't have a name for it other than the unpronounceable "00s."
The "oh-ties"? Or the "zeroes," maybe? I'd go for that.
The Simpsons recently did an episode that flashed back to the 90's and showed Marge in college. It was a re-write of the characters; history in a few ways but it was definitely a 90's "period piece."
An indie movie, Shattered Glass, was also a 90's period piece made in 2003.
I am willing to reveal the location of the ticking time bomb if you will just turn off John Dickerson from Slate.
Lebowski was definately a "period piece", as far as that goes.
Personally, I chart the end of the '90s on election night 2000 when we entered 8 years, two months, and two weeks of WTFery ending with the inauguration of, well, anyone else (presumably at this point Pres. Obama).
Why does it matter when the film was shot? TBL or Primary Colors go to pains to distinguish the setting as a (slightly) different era. Singles (etc.) was clearly intended to be 'the present' at its time of release.
Another great example of humor which plays with the conventions of time period is the classic South Park episode, "Prehistoric Ice Man."
http://www.southparkzone.com/episode.php?vid=218
To Ted: It'll the "aughts," just like last century.
On movies: I think Gulf I movies comprise a separate genre, as does The Big Lebowski. (That, I believe, undebatably created its own genre.) Which means Matt has a good point about period 90s films. There's no way a movie set at an earlier time in a decade could be said to be period--not enough distance. However, the '92 campaign scenes of Def, Maybe I think certainly are period.
I did not see Shattered Glass, but I would throw in Breach about Robert Hanssen as a candidate for period piece.
Wife of DCeiver and I concur. The definitive 1990s period movie is SINGLES.
There are few things more difficult to do on film that recreate recent period and make it seem credible. Anything under 20 years is very tough.
I like "the noughties" for the 00s.
Maybe even "the gay noughties."
Last Days by Gus Van Sant is a fictionalized version of Cobain's death, set specifically in the mid-90s (even has Boys II Men's "I'll Make Love to You"). There's some really awful Jake Gyllenhaal movie also involving Cobain's death too--Highway.
The Simpsons episode (titled "That '90s Show") was hilarious. "This is your cousin Marvin--Marvin Cobain!"
And the definitive 90s period piece is Reality Bites! Nothing beats the soundtrack--a reggae cover of "Baby I Love Your Way"? Hell yeah!
Would Freeway be considered a 90s period piece? How about Election?
Rent is set in a 90s version of New York, which was the present for the original broadway musical, but a period setting by the time the movie was made.
I think there's a little confusion here as to the definition of "period piece." The term refers to a movie that attempts to capture a time other than the present. I think what Matt's eluding to is the difficulty of deciding when exactly that feat is possible.
I think we're at the turning point, like when "The Wedding Singer" came out, when there is enough distance from the previous decade that a movie set then has a distinctly different texture than the present.
As for movies of a period that define that period, Singles is a clear standout. (Light jeans and vests. Lots of vests.) I would also cite "So I Married An Axe Murderer," "Swingers," "Trainspotting," and "Empire Records" as ultimate 90s movies.
I believe "Eternal Sunshine," "Juno," and "Garden State" will be a defining Zeros movies, while "High Fidelity" is sort of bridge movie between the 90s and 00s.
It gets tricky here because some movies have an impact on fashion and music and thus define their time rather than capture it.
Perhaps the ultimate period-capturing and period-defining movie is "Annie Hall," which captures mid-seventies New York AND has period segments in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
Re: the autoplay audio clip.
On another thread, the fix is pointed out. If you are using Quicktime to play, just click the downward-pointing arrow on the right side, hit preferences, and unclick the radio button that says "play movies automatically." It won't play anymore when you load the page.
Would Jarhead count? Three Kings, another Gulf War I movie, just misses the "not made in the 90s" cutoff (1999).
Jarhead. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard and Jamie Foxx.
Set in the late 1990's, Operation Desert Storm, release during the Christmas season in 2005.
I don't think Shattered Glass is a 90s period piece. We know that the events actually happened in the 90s, but there is nothing in the movie that is quintessentially 90s in the way that, say Singles or Reality Bites were.
But of course there is a difference between quitenssential 90s movies that were contemporary films, like Singles or Reality Bites, and movies that look back at the 90s as a period piece (like, say, Wedding Singer looked back at the 80s). I take it that Matthew is not talking about contemporary films.
Agree with Philly--Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, and American Beauty seem so emblematic of the 1990s that it is really hard to say if they started something or finished it.
First: What Philly said. Era-defining movies are not "period movies." Current events movies are also not period movies. A period movie can only be made after the period is over, and must be made with some sense of what that period has come to mean.
With that in mind, Second: The "nineties" as a culturally-understood period ended on September 11, 2001, not before. They begin with the fall of the Berlin Wall. They're defined by a vague (and utterly wrong) sense that history is over, democracy has triumphed, the Dow will get to 30,000, Third Way-ism will rule forever, etc. This is accompanied by the utter dominance of triviality in the news (even more so than now) from OJ to Monica to Gary Condit.
I haven't seen "Definitely Maybe," though with the Tony Blair character it certainly looks like a nineties period piece. Is anyone adapting "Emperor's Children," by Claire Messud? That's a self-consciously "nineties" novel, though it's set in the months leading up to 9/11.
I'd say The Emperor's Children is a 9/11 book rather than a 90s book.
Lebowski, hell yeah! When it came out the instant nostalgia aspect was already funny.
You may be right, Matt, though I think Messud's characterization of the period is basically how we tend to think of the 90s more generally, at least in a few of its essential aspects.
Of course, when decades get defined, there's always some over-simplification going on. And that allows people to point out that the counterculture really got going in the fifties, not the sixties, for example.
Still, the oversimplifications remain relevant cultural touchstones. So with that in mind:
1920s: Jazz Age
1930s: Great Depression
1940s: WWII
1950s: Cold War Conformity
1960s: Civil Rights/Hippies
1970s: Stagflation/Wife-Swapping
1980s: Reagan/Greed
1990s: "End of History"/Bread and circuses
2000s: "Warn on Terror"/End of US empire
Is it possible to go back earlier than the 20s in this fashion? The 1890s have the robber baron thing, but the 1900s? The 1910s (Great War, I guess)?
I'm not sure where it fits, definition-wise, but Wag the Dog captured a lot of what people thought the Clinton years were all about
I know you said those oversimplified things, PMP, but yikes--"Jazz Age" has nothing to do with the craziness described in Hollywood Babylon; "Cold War Conformity" ignores James Dean, Bettie Page, Marilyn Monroe, Playboy; "Stagflation/Wife-Swapping" ignores punk and glam. Some seem more like political touchstones than cultural ones.
And yes it is possible to go back earlier than the 1920s--how about the "Era of Good Feeling"? Was that the first "decade" as such in American life?
All fair points, webslinger-- like I said, oversimplification (and it's not like I thought too hard about each of those descriptions before jotting them down).
Also, for me, Jazz Age (the phrase comes from Fitzgerald) = young, rich, country with loose morals-- and isn't that Hollywood Babylon, too? (I haven't read it.)
Dean/Marilyn/Playboy etc are all important facets of that decade, of course, but I think they fit in somehow with that larger narrative about the decade. (Perhaps it would be better to assign moods to decades rather than describe them as I've attempted.)
Likewise, punk fits in with the general narrative I was trying to get at-- it expresses the angst that come along with stagflation and wife-swapping.
Boy, I must be old! When I hear "90's" I think of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Art Nouveau, and After the Ball is Over.
Interesting, I guess I thought of "Jazz Age" as more an East Coast thing. I think a lot of the seemingly decade-specific ideas cross all boundaries, though: the 20s, 50s, 80s, and 00s are all characterized by gov't crackdowns (liquor, commies, drugs, "security").
gotta go but it's been fun :)
Can't believe we're almost done with this decade and still don't have a name for it other than the unpronounceable "00s." The "oh-ties"? Or the "zeroes," maybe? I'd go for that.
The present decade is properly referred to as "Fiasco."
Others have mentioned the distinction between Zeitgeist-capturing contemporary movies (Singles, Swingers, Wag the Dog; similarly Annie Hall, lots of 70s NYC cop movies like Serpico) and deliberate period pieces ranging from campy to serious (Wedding Singer, Boogie Nights, The Last Days of Disco). I don't think Primary Colors quite counts. It strikes me that you may be wondering when Whit Stillman is going to get around to the 90s; but Whit Stillman doesn't make movies anymore. Perhaps in the ultimate 90s period piece, there will be a scene set on line for a Whit Stillman movie, like the scene on the movie line in Annie Hall.
Re: but the 1900s?
Progressive era. The 1890s: Gay nineties. The 1880s: The Gilded Age. The 1860s were of course the Civil War, but is there a theme for the 1870s? Reconstruction began earlier and ended midway through. Maybe something to do with the West?
nthing Singles, though it's one of those early-mid 90s films that's inchingly 'period', in the sense that it was made as the days of plaid were more or less over: call it 'last-year's-Zeitgeist'. You can also include some of the various 'slacker' films in that assessment.
The early 90s -- pre-Clinton, pre-web, pre-dead-Kurt, pre-dead-Bill-Hicks -- feels like a different period to the years that followed, and the uh-ohs so far have felt like the bad-trip comedown of the later 90s.
The '50s are completely misunderstood. Say "the '50s" to people now and they think "Leave it to Beaver." I'd take the art, music, architecture, popular culture and just-plain-coolness of the '50s over any other decade: Sinatra, Miles Davis, Coltrane, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Brando, Marilyn, Kerouac, Bradbury, Nabokov. All of that sure kicks the hell out of the '60s. If nothing else, the time when rock n roll started has to be the most important cultural moment of the century. Plus it was the decade when American business truly bestrode the world like a colossus. The Civil Rights era started and most of the hardest work was done then.
I'll second the nomination of The Big Lebowski as the first 90s period piece. Yes, it was made in the late 90s, but it's obviously an early-90s nostalgia piece, from the huge cell phones to the Gulf War references.
South Park's Prehistoric Caveman episode should count.
"since you're probably reading the comments"
You must be new here.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned Office Space, which I've always felt really captured the period of the late 90's. It doesn't count as a period piece, obviously, since it came out in 98 or 99, but still.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned Office Space, which I've always felt really captured the period of the late 90's. It doesn't count as a period piece, obviously, since it came out in 98 or 99, but still.
"Rent is set in a 90s version of New York, which was the present for the original broadway musical, but a period setting by the time the movie was made."
Rent is actually set in the late 1980s; by the 1990s, hip restaurants and bars were already starting to colonize Alphabet City.
"2000s: "Warn on Terror"/End of US empire"
"End of U.S. empire"? If one agrees with the characterization that the U.S. is an empire, why would this period mark the end of it? Previous decades saw us shut down our big air base in the Philippines, cede the Canal Zone back to Panama, etc. In this decade, we have added more such outposts, deposed regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and expanded our primary alliance, NATO, eastward.
"I don't think Shattered Glass is a 90s period piece. We know that the events actually happened in the 90s, but there is nothing in the movie that is quintessentially 90s in the way that, say Singles or Reality Bites were."
The early Internet stuff was quintessentially (early-mid) 1990s.
The Hold Steady song "Positive Jam" has a cool summary of each decade from the 20's to the 90's. Each decade gets a line or two that touches on the iconic shorthand, but there are a lot of touches on the decades' undercurrents, and it's got some nice poetic flourishes.
As an act of pure speculation, I wonder what everyone thinks the next decade is likely to be remembered for. Each decade is, at least in part, defined by the era which preceded it. I suspect that many reading these comments see the past seven years as one fiasco after another. Is the reaction to those problems an energized public or one seeking a respite from recent upheavals?
Interesting that our sense of "the 90s" in movies so immediately goes to the early (91-93) grunge & recession era of Reality Bites and Singles, and not the boom of the second half of the decade. We've got a whole bunch of cheesy "80s greed and money" movies, but I can't think of relevant "90s internet boom/ stock market bubble" movies.
I think it's actually pretty simple: the 90s weren't distinctive enough and were sociologically and aesthetically much too diverse to allow for the making of a proper period film. I think this cultural diversification will only grow stronger and that the 80s was the last decade that can easily be defined by a few leitmotifs.
With that in mind, Second: The "nineties" as a culturally-understood period ended on September 11, 2001, not before. They begin with the fall of the Berlin Wall. They're defined by a vague (and utterly wrong) sense that history is over, democracy has triumphed, the Dow will get to 30,000, Third Way-ism will rule forever, etc. This is accompanied by the utter dominance of triviality in the news (even more so than now) from OJ to Monica to Gary Condit.
-Period Movie Purist
That's probably the correct assessment.
For my money, the best period-piece movies are those which portray a sense of place, without confining the actors into such a way as to begin to unravel into parady.
The biggest sign is that the set-designers and costume/make-up artists do not go out of their way to ALWAYS remind you where you are.
One example for me, is Daved and Confused. It in my mind captures the typical 70's town greater than any other movie made specifically to be set into the 70's.
Big Lebowski obviously is another candidate, but, I would argue that the Cohen Brothers have such a warped sense of time and place, that it strays too far out of reality to hold together a the ultimate 90's period film.
If you were to have made Pulp Fiction today, I would hands down say it is the 90's period film. But, that is only because the entire idea of film for so many in this country changed upon the release of Pulp Fiction. Seriously - take a look at the types of films being made before and after PF. Except for less commercial icons such as David Lynch and the Cohen Brothers up to that point (and even then, the Cohen Brothers made odd little gems, but no cohen film has provided a window into what film could be to middle-America until Pulp Fiction came out.
As for other great film period-pieces, the Fish and the Whale perhaps provided a better glimpse into the early 80's than almost any other movie made after the early 80's. Although, really, if you wanted to get a good idea as to how forgetable the 80's were, watch Police Academy 4 and be done with it.
Let me nominate Before Sunrise and Slacker as period-defining 90's flicks
Interesting that our sense of "the 90s" in movies so immediately goes to the early (91-93) grunge & recession era of Reality Bites and Singles, and not the boom of the second half of the decade.
You're right: there's fairly good fiction on the boom years (one half-decent example: Po Bronson), just not much in the way of film. The movie version of The First 20 Million Is Always the Hardest was dire.
Like I said upthread, there's a rough dividing line to be drawn around 1993-4, or perhaps earlier if you consider the lag between screenplay and film release.
I'm comfortable with historiography that bookends its 'long nineties' with the Berlin Wall and September 11, 2001 -- Thomas Laqueur's History 5 course at Berkeley last fall noted that this year's intake of undergraduates were born in 1989 or thereabouts -- but in terms of American popular culture? Nah.
The 90s ended in 1997 when the Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys and N Sync took over popular music. Everything after that was a bastardized coda to everything in the decade that came before it.
About the only movie a lot of people have seen that specifically evokes the 1990s is Amelie (which is set around the time of Diana's death). I don't know that it satisfies the criteria, being sort of sui generis. But it might work for someone who's French.
There are a few movies set around the Gulf War or the post-Soviet era, but those are more localized and probably not from the American culture 1990s scene in any recognizable way. Same for Hotel Rwanda.
I don't think this is unusual, though. The first major movie that could really be said to fit the criteria, but for the 1970s, is probably Sid and Nancy, which wasn't made until 1986.
Hm. The Backstreet Boys/ Spice Girls point might help to explain the decade-division point. 1997-2000 was a fascinating and strange time warranting its own period treatment, a la The Corrections. But period *movies* often seem built around their soundtracks. There's plenty of appropriate alt-rock mood music for a recession era/ slackers movie. But who wants to make a movie about the dot-com boom, the Y2K panic, the year of Monica, etc., set to N Synch? No tolerable era-evoking music --> no period-piece movies.
It also seems to me that the early 90s Miramax/ indie film scene had a lot of movies set in contemporaneous America-- and by the end of the decade, with exceptions like Go and the Parker Posey corpus, we were getting a lot of, well, period pieces-- English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, Elizabeth, Titanic, that kind of thing. Without the era-defining soundtrack movies like Breakfast Club, there's not as much for a later period-evoking movie like Wedding Singers to latch onto, and I'm not sure there were era-defining movies for the boom era.
But someday someone will get around to it-- a scene in which lifelong Star Wars fans express their unqualified excitement at the news that three more movies are coming out ("They'll be great! What can possibly go wrong?"), someone decides that his billion-dollar idea is selling furniture online with no shipping charges (and making it up on volume), a cameo by Giuliani, and a Y2K survivalist played by John Goodman...
At first I thought Be Kind Rewind was set in the late nineties when DVDs were finally taking over, but I soon realised it was set in present day and the characters were just really clueless. I think the movie would have benefited from a late 90s setting. Seeing movies like Ed-TV on their video shelf made me smile.
(which is set around the time of Diana's death)
Speaking of which ... one thing that stood out for me about The Queen was the technology -- the gadgets that instantly screamed "late '90s", like the clunky-looking Toshiba laptops and the Nokia 5100 cellphones.
I agree that there was definately a gap betwen the 1990 - 1995 period and the 1996 to March 2000 (the decline of the DOW).
I think that in general, the early 90's were the last period when technology was still something of a clunky and far-off idea. It was not until the late 90's that everyone seemingly had a cell phone, laptop, internet access etc.. It was before bloggers, e-zines and e-mail was the main way we kept in touch. And as someone who went to high school from 1991-1995, I actually really, really appreciate that time period. I really think those who grew-up through high-school pre 1996 and those who attended high-school post 1996 is the dividing line in terms of generational experiences. For the most part, if you graduated from high-school in 2000, you are much more likely to have common tastes, experiences with someone in highschool now than they do with someone who attended high-school in 1992, each 8 years apart. But frankly, someone who attended high-school in 1992 has much more in common with someone who attended in 1986 than the person in 2000. And this divide I think can be explained by just how explosive communication technology has advanced the human experience.
I'm nominating Jackie Brown, because it captures pre-9/11 airline travel, fashion, mall life and other elements of culture from the 90's, at least in LA (I suppose--I've only visited LA). But Jackie herself is clearly from an earlier time. And it's just a great movie....
"Into the Wild" was such a 90s period piece that they got Eddie Vedder to write songs for it.
And some help with definitions -- a movie set in contemporary times is not a period film, no matter how well it captures the zeitgeist. A period film, by definition, recreates a different time.
So really we're arguing two separate points here -- movies from the 90s that work well as time capsules, and movies from later that are set in the 90s.
And in the "totally getting it bass-ackward" file, Brian DePalma's "Femme Fatale," which is otherwise one of his better efforts, was released in 2002. At one point it jumps forward several years, but we see the Antonio Banderas still using a Nokia 5190, which was already a few years past its prime when the movie came out.
Re: The 90s ended in 1997 when the Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys and N Sync took over popular music. Everything after that was a bastardized coda to everything in the decade that came before it.
You can say something similar about the 80s in terms of pop culture: the first half of the decade was innovative and exciting, notably the early years of MTV and the creative videos it spawned. The second half of the 80s were dreary and tired with nothing more interesting than Madonna's sexcapade acts to enlighten those years. (And remember New Kids On The Block, precursor to N Synch etc?)
Comments closed March 15, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Hey, it's John Dickerson from Slate ...
Posted by Woody Bombay | March 1, 2008 12:55 PM