Boeing malfunctions, Olympic games, two white guys competing for the White House — have we all plummeted backward in time to 1996? The déjà vu is deafening at the multiplex, too. There, Americans have made like their ancestors and flocked in great numbers to a new blockbuster about flirtatiously mismatched storm chasers racing across a wind-ravaged heartland. Twisters, a belated, standalone sequel to the Jan de Bont disaster flick of yore, is the latest evidence that the ’90s are back in a big way, especially on movie screens.
Just look at the other major Hollywood production opening later this month. Deadpool & Wolverine may be mired in the multiversal nonsense of contemporary superhero cinema, but its roots extend further back — namely to, you guessed it, the 1990s, when Rob Liefeld introduced the Merc with a Mouth, a sardonic quipster assassin who spoofed the whole “extreme” jacked-up spirit of then-contemporary comics, while also embodying the post-modern sarcastic remove of that era’s pop-culture in general. Seeing Hugh Jackman done up in Wolverine’s iconic yellow uniform for the first time could also cause some major flashbacks — the same provoked by this year’s hit throwback X-Men ’97.
The movies of 2024 aren’t simply drawing inspiration from the ’90s. A growing number of them this year are actually set during that bygone decade. Longlegs, the horror sensation of the moment, takes place in 1993 — a timeframe most obviously signposted via the hilariously oversized portrait of Bill Clinton that hangs in one FBI office. There’s Janet Planet, the feature film debut of playwright Annie Baker, which quietly looks back on a childhood spent in the Massachusetts of ’91. Even more uncannily reflective of that period is Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, whose haunted suburban dreamland is built on the TV touchstones of SNICK and The WB. And though Ethan Coen is reaching for a more generally retro pastiche of slapstick/screwball fun with Drive-Away Dolls, the film’s plot unfurls sometime in the waning months of last century, on the cusp of Y2K.
All of these movies suggest a shift in the nostalgia industrial complex that powers so much modern entertainment. For ages, it felt like no one in Hollywood could see past the retro appeal of the 1980s. That decade was only eight years in the rearview mirror when Adam Sandler’s The Wedding Singer waxed nostalgic for its music, fashion, and technology. The ’80s flashback party never really ended. Twenty whole years later, Ready Player One proved that our culture was still deeply hung up on the hits of the big-haired, neon-lit, synth-scored yesterday. Call it an advanced case of cultural arrested development. Or, if you want to go deeper still, a reminder of what a long shadow the Reagan administration cast over the country and the world.
Are the eternal 1980s finally coming to a close? Twisters, Longlegs, and their ilk suggest a shift toward slightly later 20th-century obsessions. The ’90s revival train is certainly powered in part by a Gen Z fascination with the decade. Baggy jeans and bucket hats are in again. So, too, are the super sounds of the alt-rock renaissance: The Batman helped put Nirvana back on the radio, Lana Del Rey boosted Sublime with a hit cover, and TikTok has created an unlikely new fanbase for Pavement.
If movies are getting in on this ’90s flashback boom, that may be a reflection of their authors as much as their audience. After all, the people who grew up then are now making movies of their own. Baker and Schoenbrun were both children of the ’90s, and that upbringing is reflected in the cultural specificity of their respective movies, very different but equally personal visions of coming of age across the same decade. The washed colors and wood-paneled drabness of Janet Planet, the chintzy show-within-the-movie aesthetics of I Saw the TV Glow — these are analog visions plucked from the elder millennial memory bank. We’re sure to see more like them as the AOL generation continues to revisit its childhood on movie screens.
The ’90s are also, of course, the most recent time a movie can be set without wading into the ways the world has been totally reshaped by the internet. Or by smartphones, for that matter: Just as plenty of horror movies would completely fall apart if the characters had decent cell reception or Wi-Fi, the mistaken-identity hijinks of Drive-Away Dolls are scaled to the technological limitations of 1999, a time of landlines and before social media. Set your movie at least 25 years ago and you get around the plot-complicating matter of everyone having a computer in their pocket. (Speaking of which, Hit Man is not among this ’90s time-capsule wave, despite being based on a true story from the time period. You can tell because the film’s best scene involves an iPhone app.)
One might wonder if these portraits of the not-so-distant past are reflecting (or at least capitalizing upon) a rose-colored pining for that past. It would take some serious blinders to confuse a decade defined by AIDS and Oklahoma City for halcyon days. On the other hand, we are talking about a time before 9/11, before COVID, before Sandy Hook. And the apocalyptic dread of today — a shitstorm of converging political, environmental, and technological disasters — can make even the historically informed nostalgic for yesterday. This boomlet of films taking place in the ’90s could be called a comforting transmission from a world not yet choked by information overload. Sure, Longlegs might get you, but you won’t spend your precious remaining minutes alive doom-scrolling or blocking telescammers.
Maybe the nostalgia is just for a different age of film and pop culture. The ’90s certainly boasted a healthier cinematic ecosystem, where Hollywood was making more mid-budget movies, more movies for adults, more movies period. Longlegs doesn’t just take place in 1993, it also aspires to the thrills of thrillers — like The Silence of the Lambs and Seven — from that approximate moment in genre history. Janet Planet wouldn’t look out of place among the naturalistic, star-free American indies hitting Sundance before the Weinstein-powered spending sprees of a few years later. And I Saw the TV Glow takes its cues from the primetime of the ’90s, evoking Twin Peaks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and — most idiosyncratically — live-action Nickelodeon programming.
Even the special-effects spectacles of the 1990s could be said to possess a human dimension sometimes missing from the event pictures of our here and now. That dimension is definitely part of the appeal of Twisters, a mega-budget sequel that swirls its digital weather patterns around grounded interpersonal drama and solid performances, just like the 1996 original did. The film also echoes a time when special effects still felt special, even if the cyclones of Twisters don’t look as state-of-the-art as the ones in Twister once did. Maybe the whole hook of the new movie is a deeper longing for the rare qualities it’s echoing. It’s a blockbuster for the “they don’t make ’em like they used to” crowd.
Whether ’90s nostalgia will have the, ahem, long legs that ’80s nostalgia did remains to be seen. The earlier decade had a certain alien extravagance — an obscene, sometimes beautiful gaudiness — more retroactively enticing than the earthy flannel and cargo pants of what came after. In a way, the loudly dated aesthetic of the 1980s feels more timeless, like a past version of the future we’ve never entirely been able to move beyond. Let’s just hope the ’90s comeback lasts a few more years before the ’80s get huge all over again — or before a full, inevitable reconsideration of the naughty aughties. Actually, are the early 2000s already back in full force? Looked at one way, 2024 really belongs to Fred Durst and Madame Web.
For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, please visit his Authory page.
