Poured Over: Chuck Klosterman on The Nineties

“The 90s were the last decade of the 20th century, but in many ways they were the last decade that we’re ever going to talk about as a decade…” Chuck Klosterman has been challenging how we think, see and hear since his first book, Fargo Rock City, in 2001 to 2016’s But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past. He joins us on the show to talk about his new book, The Nineties, Gen X, the end of monoculture, the rise of independent moviemaking, The New Sincerity, Nevermind + Exile in Guyville and more.

Featured Books: The Nineties, Fargo Rock City and  Eating the Dinosaur all by Chuck Klosterman.

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus eps on Saturdays) here and wherever you listen to podcasts.

From this episode:

B&N: …there’s this intersection of these big monstrous big budget films, and then essentially films that you could argue Tarantino are driven by video store culture, which doesn’t exist anymore.

Chuck Klosterman: Well, that is true. You know, I mean, you look at the early part of the 90s, particularly say 91 – 92 – 93. That was the idea, that this is like the independent film explosion, it was now real possible to make a film without a studio that would be experienced by people in the same way a major film from MGM or whoever, like, you know, Sony. Whatever would be the technology had sort of equaled the playing field. Also, video store culture was a big part of this because it was now possible for somebody in Gary, Indiana to have an encyclopedia kind of complete understanding of film, based on his or her own judgment. Like it wasn’t even like a film school tutorial. It was like, well, you can just go in the store with 8,000 titles, randomly watch things for $2.99, build your own aesthetic, and then make a movie. What is interesting, then is that by the time we get to the end of the 90s, and the release of Titanic, it all kind of shifts back real dramatic. Pre-Titanic, the idea was starting to emerge that you don’t want to spend too much on a movie; what movies are making at the box office was not moving up as fast as the cost of creating these epic blockbusters. James Cameron makes Titanic, goes way over the 100 million dollar mark. It’s a three hour movie, so they can only play it once a night . It seems just destined to fail. But it becomes the biggest film of all time, certainly in the moment. And then there’s almost a monster recalibration of how this should be, that what you can sort of produce and earn, when you swing big, became sort of the center of the industry. And now 20 years later…there is no middle class for film. Now. It’s like a real small indie movie that maybe immediate you see on your Netflix immediately, doesn’t even maybe play in a theater, or kind of a Marvel movie or whatever, which is built off this idea of what the potentiality of Titanic sort of illustrated.

B&N: So we’ve got the internet, we’ve got Napster, we’ve got all of these moments where it’s just like, What is going on? …capitalism is driving some of it. But you also talk about a moment that we had in the 90s, and Gen X cynicism, whatever we want to call it. But there’s a moment that you describe as being New Sincerity. Can we talk about where that came from, and how that came out of this sort of chaotic other stuff?

Chuck Klosterman: The New Sincerity has been applied to many different idioms of culture, kind of intermittently, starting in the 80s. Like there was a there was a New Sincerity movement in music, sort of around Austin, Texas–none of those bands really became successful, but that’s what it was called. And the idea of using kind of ironic distance as an artistic tool was cheap, that somehow the idea that you could love something but not really care about it was a problem for the consumer of art, then it was kind of briefly like a New Sincerity idea in filmmaking. Kevin Costner would often be used as an example of this…the relationship between the artist and kind of almost like their real life intent was really critical. We now think of the 90s is this period where the only sort of comedic style was irony, that ironic distance kind of informed everything. And you see this in lots of ways. I mean, a band like Pavement, for example, you can look at Pavement and say like, well, this is the best band of the 90s. But you could also look at them as like, they don’t even care. I mean, there was a Beavis and Butthead clip where they’re watching a pavement video. And like Beavis is saying, like the band’s not trying. Part of what made them attractive was that they didn’t seem to be trying, they seem to almost be commenting on people who tried too hard. The 90s were a bad time for people who tried too hard. …It was like, if you’re using irony, and you’re using emotional distance, that’s a crutch. And you should not reward an artist for being able to be interesting without being emotionally invested, you know, and then it kind of comes in goes, I mean, it would be in some respects, you could look at the way the culture is now. And though it’s not named that I think that there we probably are in a New Sincerity period now. (But we don’t use that term the way we used it then.)