90s Movies and Masculinity
By Ally Di Censo
Lately, I’ve been stuck in the 1990s. I’m not quite sure why this wave of nostalgia has suddenly hit me. However, I now find myself reconstructing the lyrics to *NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” with my friend as we scurry from class to class. During my free Fridays, I’m sucked into morning reruns of Sabrina the Teenage Witch as I huddle on the couch in my pajamas. I’ve been poring over my old Baby-Sitters Club books, laughing at the crazy fashion. Of course, mature college student that I am now, I’m also listening to quality 90s music that I was too young to know about or appreciate back when I was little, like Nirvana and Oasis. I think this desire to reminisce about my childhood stems from the fact that I am currently a senior and in an unpredictable, transitional stage. There’s something comforting about reliving the time in your life when your biggest problem was mastering a choreographed dance to “Wannabe.”
I decided to channel this 90s energy into something academic, so when I upgraded my US Popular Culture class to the Honors level, I chose to center my extra project on the theme of films from that decade. I’m really into gender history, so my project is especially concerned with the depiction of masculinity in these films. In conducting my research, I discovered a whole side of the 1990s that I did not realize existed when I was a pre-adolescent girl at the end of the decade. So many films from this time period are about alienation and disillusionment among the young white-collar male community. For example, in 1999’s American Beauty, a satire set in a California suburb, the male protagonist feels deadened by his office job and both his wife and his daughter believe him to be weak, pathetic and ineffectual. Fight Club, from that same year, also centers on a protagonist who works in the corporate world, only he finds a way to reclaim his masculinity through underground brawling clubs. Of all the films I am examining, Fight Club is probably the one that’s the most popular today—I remember it was huge in my high school—so it obviously struck a chord with audiences. In addition, the protagonists of these films, such as the characters in 1997’s In the Company of Men, often blame their problems on women. These movies offer nightmarish visions of a misogynistic world.
I’m still examining why the disillusioned male was such a potent figure in late 1990s films. The influence of consumerism and commercialism seems to be a motif running through all of these movies, and that is something I clearly remember from that decade. Among my ten-year-old classmates, there was always a competition over who could collect the most Beanie Babies, Tamagachis, or Pikachu cards. I know consumerism still exists, of course, but I feel as if it was more bombastic in the pre-Recession 1990s. In any event, this project is teaching me the complexities of a decade I used to identify solely with boy bands and overalls. It’s time to treat the 90s with as much historical attention as we treat other decades. Movies are a good place to start.
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