Opinion – Ross Douthat: There will never be as much innocence as in the movies of the 1990s

On Twitter last week, it seemed like everyone was sharing announcements from GPT-3, the artificial intelligence chatbot capable of answering virtually any question with extraordinary ease, as long as you don’t mind that the answers have political assumptions safely conditioned by a conventional liberalism with a libertarian inflection.

Proving that human minds still have some modest advantage over our robot overlords of the near future, I spent more time thinking about a clearly human-to-human conversation on Twitter than any of the GPT-3 responses that flood my timeline:

Before my thoughts began to turn to political issues, there was the simple shock of recognition. I wasn’t a real fan of Dave Matthews or anything like that, but as a 1990s white guy, I necessarily listened to a lot of three of those bands (Blues Traveler probably less so) in my late teens and early college years. And Bernstein is right that it’s difficult to formulate exactly what made them so distinctive or explain what happened to their vibe.

Perhaps you can say something similar about the Lilith Fair era of female vocalists, a roughly contemporary analogue. But I think the female vocalist’s “vibe” is a little easier to distill than exactly what happens on “August and Everything After” or “Cracked Rear View”.

If I were to describe “Ophelia” and “Motherland”-era Natalie Merchant (two really good albums, by the way) as singing mystical feminist folk, it would be reductive, certainly, but it would say something about her substance. Whereas an equivalent sounding descriptor like “smooth ‘dudebro’ rock” tells you the “who” —who sings it, who likes it—but a little less the “what” of the music.

So is David Grossman’s formulation correct? Is Hootie the soundtrack to Francis Fukuyama’s uncomplicated end-of-history phase, the height of liberal confidence and American might and post-ideological lightheartedness?

I’m not so sure, as I’m not sure there isn’t tension or spiritual unrest in this kind of music. A pure work of art—”it’s the end of the ideological conflict, and I feel good”—shouldn’t it be a little less anguished, a little sunnier than Darius Rucker singing “Let her cry, if the tears fall like rain / Let her sing, if it eases all your pain”? Or Adam Duritz mournfully singing “It’s raining in Baltimore baby / But everything else is the same”?

If we want to get technical, isn’t the theme song to “Friends” — arguably the most Fukuyama popular artwork of all time — or something from the boy band era and early Britney Spears closer to true post-Cold War music?

Still, when I look back on this song, there’s something about Grossman’s analysis that rings true. It’s not exactly the joy at the end of the story that defines the Hootie-DMB-Counting Crows aesthetic, but perhaps it’s what you might call a feeling that ordinary life is enough (a fundamental stabilizing feeling for a liberal society).

That you can have a rich human experience, full of joys and sorrows, without the extreme pre-modern or 20th century stuff, war and God, utopia and all the rest (and without racial division too: the multiracial composition of the Dave Matthews Band and Hootie & The Blowfish is also important here).

That you can be a fulfilled human person only through the ups and downs of seemingly normal American suburban life. That the tropes of the heterosexual male experience of early adulthood, like “the wish to be famous” or “the awesome girl who dumps you” or just “hanging out with your friends and feeling a little sorry for yourself” are all enough as fuel for the strong feelings that make up an interesting life.

And when those feelings get you down you can become depressed in a way that is personal rather than existential – this is just about you, not about everything that’s wrong with life under late capitalism or whatever. whatever.

In that case, the subsequent negative shift in American culture should not be understood simply as a shift from joy to anguish, from happiness to unhappiness—although that is clearly present, especially in the lyrics. It has been a shift in the sense that average American life, in both its joys and its sorrows, offers enough meaning to be worth embracing and celebrating.

In its place is a sense that American normality in any form—whether that means capitalism, liberalism, secularism, heterosexuality, whiteness, or anything else—is inadequate, destructive, or doomed, and that even in their sorrows, the singers of 1990s weren’t awake to how bleak things really are.

Having gone at length to claim a link between Hootie and the end of history, let’s retreat to safer ground and close with a question more suited to my cultural interests: namely, which 1990s films count as “Fukuyama-centric”? Interestingly, they are not the best films of the best modern year of cinema, 1999. As I wrote in a column a few years ago, that year’s offerings actually anticipated all of our current discontents:

“We should have seen the bad days coming. The filmmakers of 1999 did, as Jesse Walker of Reason magazine noted when The Ringer’s Top 100 list was released. ‘Election,’ ‘The Matrix,’ ‘Fight Club ‘, ‘The Blair Witch Project’, ‘How to Drive Your Boss Crazy’, ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’, even (God help us) ‘The Phantom Menace’… It’s all there, all that followed, class anxiety and alienation in the workplace, end-of-history grievances and internet-fueled hoaxes, disputed elections and virtual-reality prisons, and a tottering republic waiting for its Palpatine.”

The best films of the 90s, then, were not end-of-story films. What were they? The wave of Clinton-era teen romances and sex comedies is definitely —from “Beverly Hills Preppy” to “I Can’t Wait” to “American Pie: A First Time I Can’t Forget”— pure celebrations of rich suburban mores, with carnality and romantic sweetness walking hand in hand.

“Forrest Gump,” arguably—perhaps a little too right-wing, but basically a celebration of blithely wading your way through ideological storms and emerging rich and blessed on the other side. “Good Will Hunting,” perhaps—the blue-collar genius starts out as a jaded semi-radical, but undergoes therapy and finally abandons class warfare and joins the meritocracy, albeit on its own distinct terms, with the blessing of best friend (future voter of Donald Trump). “Austin Powers”, definitely — a journey through a post-Cold War world where the revolutions of the past produced an ideal synthesis, freedom and responsibility, a very cool combination.

And finally, the most “Fukuyama-centric” 1990s movie of all: “You’ve Got Mail,” in which anonymous online romance, ravenous corporate capitalism and a rapidly gentrifying New York City provide the backdrop for an old-fashioned cute romance. and cozy domestic bliss.

Yes, the film contains a self-criticism, a Cassandra figure — the Luddite boyfriend played by Greg Kinnear, protesting the technological future. But Meg Ryan’s character goes with Tom Hanks’s corporate capitalist, not Kinnear’s internet alarmist, and the spirit of her quirky old-fashioned bookstore is presented as living inside a gigantic Barnes & Noble-style children’s department run by your former employee.

As a distillation of the hopeful aspects of the end of the story — the best of the eccentric past lovingly preserved within the consumerism of the present — this sequel is hard to beat, all wrapped up in a film that remains one of the best examples of the silver age of romantic comedy. Freedom and responsibility, consumer capitalism and eccentricity, internet dating and real dating… what a time it was!

There will never again be such innocence.