Rummaging through my e-mails, I came across an advertisement for A24’s upcoming film Y2K (2024). Along with an old school website fixed with AIM and jokes about dial-up, there was an additional link to YouTube to watch director Kyle Mooney do a kitschy throwback video. Through a fisheye lens, he tried to act like a teenager from 1999 with every flashy edit known to the time. Every transition included the radical, edgy teen slang of “Let’s do this shit!” and there was this over-emphasis on how different things were 25 (!) years ago. Yes, there’s jokes about downgrading cell phones and how everyone rode skateboards. He quotes South Park several times and ends by wandering around the mall.
Like teens in the 90s, I was skeptical to this marketing to the point that I had to look up more on Mooney. To my surprise, he would’ve been 15 at the time. Given how forced and ribbing you with nostalgic novelty it all was, I was convinced he was a lot closer to Gen-Z. Then again, anyone at the age of 15 was a try-hard who never really was as mature or cool as they want to believe. It’s the type of cringe you spend the rest of your life trying to escape. Even the fact that it felt earnest felt strangely inaccurate to what I knew of Gen-X’s sarcastic defiance of elders. Compared to other modern throwbacks like Jonah Hill’s Mid90s (2018), the Fear Street series, or Charli XCX and Troye Sivan’s music video for “1999,” there is something about this Y2K advertisement that struck me as “not getting it.” This had the design down pat, but the only thing it got right was that the malls were a hallowed meeting ground for different minds.
Then again, I look at the trailer for Y2K and recognize how different it was from my experience. Much like Mooney, I was there on New Year’s Eve to count down the final hour of the 20th century. I was aware of this nationwide paranoia that computers would magically crash because everything was set back to zero. While media would like to hyperbolize it because of how well it fits with the technophobic thrillers of James Cameron that were popular at the time, I can’t be totally sure because my December 31, 1999, was not spent at a party. It wasn’t even indoors. Hell, it wasn’t even on land. For reasons that I can’t be entirely sure of other than my dad was having a love affair with a newly purchased boat, we spent that midnight on the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California. A cruise ship circled the area playing Will Smith’s “Will2K” on repeat waiting for the hour to come. Then again, when you’re that removed from civilization, midnight could’ve come an hour early because dark is dark. I guess maybe you could argue there’d be fireworks and grandeur, but I can’t recall anything but a cruise ship playing “Will2K” while we sat around in the dark.
Despite being born in 1989 and living through every last hour of that decade, the 90s are a big mystery to me. I’ll take any chance to latch onto memories from the time, though they’re far from what the media likes to glorify. By the time I was on that boat, I was 10. There wasn’t any chance to experience the youthful frivolities of teenagers. We were still the young dweebs feeding off of Disney Renaissance and not quite being allowed to watch the adult TV-14 programming on Fox. This isn’t to say that I didn’t occasionally find myself watching the illustrious 8 PM line-up, but you can’t be sure that I’d understand it. Why was I watching the Jack Nicholson film Hoffa (1992) one night? It’s because it was on. Why did I catch reruns of The X-Files? Because my dad was in the garage working on things. Most things outside of my demographic were through osmosis, and even then you’re talking about Boomer parents who had that “classic rock that really rocks” taste in music and were keen on letting us have some innocence. We’d have Radio Disney, but Aaron Carter was too much. While Britney Spears towed the line, the day they saw the “I’m A Slave 4U” music video, they commanded my sister never to buy the record. To say the least, my 90s was a lot more vanilla than the grunge-scented nihilism of skateboarders and backwards caps. We didn’t even have cable.
To put it bluntly, the 90s is a decade I mostly have come to appreciate in retrospect. Like any significant art, it was hard not to notice its rippling impact over the subsequent years. Unlike now, I think the media that really left a mark was stuck somewhere in the conversation for a long time. By the time I was 15, the year was 2004 and I had spent middle school hearing friends talk about how cool they thought The Matrix (1999) was. The big comedians of my high school years (Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, etc.) had gotten their start in the decade prior, meaning I was often dipping my toes into old films whenever they popped up on cable. I used to get TV Guides and figure out where an airing was only to tape it. Given that a lot where at 3 AM, I remember manually programming the VHS player and hoping nobody changed the channel. This is all to say that despite not being familiar with the 90s, I had the didactic heart of the era even as culture was shifting into a DVR/online piracy age.
I existed on that fine line between being able to freely access the pleasures of the time and not quite being there. A lot of my mentors were the generation who had a more romanticized vision of the time. My bass teacher had a Rolling Stone magazine from the month that Kurt Cobain died. He kept it in his collection as some personal heirloom. My Freshman English teacher was in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” music video. In high school, I had a friend who would recap Beavis & Butthead episodes with accents and quote The Cable Guy (1996). There were these things that had to be tracked down. You had to go to the record store. You had to check the cable. You had to hope that your parents were lax enough to let you access it or, at very least, get it past security in the hopes of discovering worlds beyond your comprehension. While the internet was a thing that was even more expansive and strange than it is today, you still wanted to explore the past through the analog medium it spawned. The 90s were akin to how certain generations looked at the pyramids of Egypt and knew the only way to know about it was to investigate.
A major reason that I am supportive of “dated” art is because I feel like there comes a point where your audience will want to understand a time. For as appealing as it is to make something that is “timeless,” it feels absent of being personally flawed in a way that every decade is. We need to accept the awkwardness of dialogue and behaviors if just to recognize that society has evolved. Given that art is, at best, most symbolic of public ideologies, I want art that feels rooted in its own sensibilities. I need Scream (1996) to be self-aware. I need She’s All That (1999) being a tad sexist just to reflect what messages teens were sold. Even the more harmless details like clothing thrills me because it makes a statement that this is what mattered to people of the 90s.You have to wonder what Wild Things (1998) and Cruel Intentions (1999) meant to the larger discourse and why the sensuality has grown increasingly less exploitative in the decades since. I’d even argue there is a need to study the subversive takedown by Gregg Araki as he took the Beverly Hills 90210 cadence to its most absurd limit in Nowhere (1997). You can see it as kitsch, but it all feels reminiscent now of a time in ways that more concerted art fails to even reach.
On a deeper level, I want to know what it felt to be alive in the 90s, and I don’t know that the contemporary lens fully captures that perspective. I think part of it is simply that time erodes the worst elements in favor of a glossy centerfold of dreams and only *slightly* confusing fashion. Y2K isn’t the first media to use the subject to make a horror comedy (even King of the Hill did that). With that said, I see the teens of the film and I see that centerfold vision. Part of it is just that cinema is meant to entertain, and I’ll forgive Mooney’s vision if it’s funny. However, the advertisement video felt a bit too try-hard in ways that I feel Gen-X would sniff out as a narc. David Foster Wallace would write a whole essay on how it failed to reflect the ideals of his generation in more academic terms than I ever could. Maybe it’s because I was 10 in 1999 and wasn’t actually “there,” but something feels fake about what’s being sold to me. Even if I found aspects of Mid90s lacking or tailored, I give Hill credit for embracing the grotesquerie of teen boys who have nothing better to do than shout homophobic slurs.
A few years ago, my sister showed me a TikTok video that updated the Bowling For Soup song “1985” to be about the year 2005. The suggestion was that we were as far from the “1985” song was as it was from the year in question. I never once questioned the references in the Bowling For Soup song. Maybe it was because I wouldn’t be born for another four years. However, I found myself hearing “2005” and becoming immediately annoyed. It wasn’t some “I’m old” reasoning, but I was able to pinpoint everything the song got wrong. Maybe it was because 2005 was prime high school years for me, but I was especially bothered by Juno (2007) being included knowing it was jumping the gun. It got me thinking… what else was inaccurate? Given that Fall Out Boy took it as a chance to say “hold my keg” with the “We Didn’t Start the Fire” sequel song, I don’t know that anything anymore has a rhyme or reason.
Even as I’ve formed this fondness towards the 90s through the datedness, it’s hard not to notice the parallel conversation that’s forming. Unlike how people embrace the cheesiness of the 80s and accept its bugs as a feature, there is this push to make the early 90s debate focus around the ways that it wasn’t as flawless as people would think. Sure, it was always the edgy cousin of the decades with a love for dangerous stories like Twin Peaks or Natural Born Killers (1994), where its biggest music icon committed suicide and a football star was on trial for murder. There was always some element of the 90s that fought against the family friendly image. Maybe that is why people seem more keen on not giving it the Norman Rockwell treatment and just accepting that “this is flawed” and actually wanting to discuss why.
I’m thinking of how the media manipulated the Britney Spears narrative and how the conservatorship talk lead many to comment on the paparazzi’s misogynistic views of women in general. It was there in the miniseries Pam & Tommy that sought to sympathize Pamela Anderson as another misunderstood figure. Add American Crime Story’s seasons on O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky, and you’ll find other ways that the system has disappointed the larger public. There was even a point where multiple Woodstock ’99 documentaries were released showing how the rise of nu-metal and angry white men media lead to one of the most disastrous music festivals in history. All of them have deeper subtext worth exploring, but they showed an America that wasn’t exactly in the best place in 1999.
In my heart, I want to believe that all of this will lead to a nuanced discussion of what the decade meant in a larger sense. I’m not expecting Mooney to address any of this in Y2K. If anything, I’m expecting it to have the youthful naivety that I had at 15, where you have the entire future ahead of you and are shocked when that future is dangerous. I’m not opposed to the crux of this piece, even if it feels less directed at a Millennial audience, but more the Gen-Z generation who heard “Something in the Way” from The Batman (2022) and went out to buy a Nirvana tee from Target. As someone with their own romanticism for decades I didn’t live through, I’m not opposed to celebrating the past. The bigger trick is not to be an elder who won’t immediately correct them. At best, roles have shifted and I’m now the mentor who has to share stories of the 2000s. I have to convince them that I find more in common with I Saw The TV Glow (2024) and Didi (2024) than Y2K. It’s not all a flashy ad with buzzwords. Sometimes you’re just bored and relying on the arbitrary for meaning.
Which is all to say, I’m still unsure if what I want from the 90s is escapism or reason. Maybe I want a teeny bopper phase that never was. I’m not discrediting my high school years in the 2000s which had their own benefits. However, I hear the slightly older crowd (read: 40-year-olds) share stories of the 90s and I wonder what life would’ve been like if I had the same opportunities and embraced technology that wasn’t as safe or as convenient as it is today. Maybe I miss didacticism because of my animosity towards AI and this push towards impersonal, centralized visions of art. For as much as I don’t want to be the one who decries the future as being worse, I recognize what was so great about the 90s. I also am capable of watching Ace Ventura (1994) and wincing at the poor decision making of its writers.
That is why I believe it’s important to be somewhere in the middle. Not everything needs to be a lecture, but it’s important to not ignore that progress isn’t immediate. If you don’t look in the rearview mirror and notice what’s different, did you actually progress? Again, I don’t think that Y2K needs to address any of this, but its release allowed me a chance to dig into a lot of feelings I’ve had over recent years. I’ve turned to the media to understand its naivety and discover truths hidden in plain sight. I listen to the music and notice commentary where people thought it was crass posturing. Like myself, part of the 90s misfortune is that it could only be understood once it was all over. While you can’t help but get caught up in the good times and wacky fashion, you only appreciate it when something new's replaced it. You’ll spend the rest of your life trying to capture that feeling again. The Mooney advertisement saying “Let’s do this shit!” feels embarrassing. With that said, I’m glad it is. The 90s were cool, but not that cool.
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