The '90s Are Now a Period Piece — Here's the One Thing the Movies Get Wrong

The year was 1999 and to congratulate my group's project for getting the highest grade in the class, our teacher invited us to have lunch in his room for a week to watch a movie. We chose the Tim Allen/Sam Huntington film “Jungle 2 Jungle,” which features a character played by a young Leelee Sobieski. At age 9, Sobieski was my first celebrity crush, and I accidentally mentioned that I had recently seen “Never Been Kissed” and that “she's so pretty” in the movie. One of the kids in my group was also the class bully, and he wasted no time pounced on this mistake. “Are you a trick or something?” It wouldn't be the last time he called me that, nor would he be the only one to do so. After years of therapy, I fully admit that my years of hypersexual behavior with men in my teens and early twenties are directly related to being terrified that people would know the truth: he was right.

I can only speak for myself, my lived experiences, and the identity intersections I experience, but the 1990s and 2000s were a pretty excruciating time to be perceived as gay, let alone live openly as one. Of course, it's still not great todaybut the casualness, frequency, and social permissiveness of blatant bigotry were endemic. And it wasn't just gay people. anyone who was marginalized in one way or another avoided microaggressions and direct attacks on a daily basis. Hell, there was a whole ad campaign launched in 2008 called “Think Before You Speak” urging people not to say “gay” when they mean “stupid” or “bad.” For example, familiar homophobia was SO ubiquitous that they hired Hilary Duff to star in commercials to tell people to tell people to get over it.

Which is why it seems so strange to me that despite our current obsession with making films set in the late 80s, 90s and early 2000s… the attitudes of the time are degraded to the point of becoming revisionist history.

Period pieces have been around as long as cinema, but the popularity of coming-of-age stories incorporating nostalgia began in 1973 with George Lucas' masterpiece before “Star Wars”, “American Graffiti”. Although it was filmed in the 1970s, the film was set in the summer of 1962. Over the next half century, countless filmmakers told stories attempting to evoke a feeling of yesteryear, notably : their of yesteryear – “Stand By Me”, “Cooley High”, “Dazed and Confused”, “Crooklyn”, “Now and Then” and even “Lady Bird” all took the audience back in time, capturing the charm of a bygone era in addition to less than formidable circumstances that forged many of these characters by fire. It can (and should) be shocking to hear damaging language casually thrown around. Yet acting as if a story's characters operate under the same social norms as when the film is made rather than when it takes place is not only ahistorical, but can have legitimately dangerous repercussions.

For example, the current Trad Wife movement is based on a presentation of heterosexual (and white) gender roles often associated with the 1950s, but it is a 1950s that people in the 2020s imagine based on the idyllic way in which the decade was featured in films. and television. Women stay at home, prepare delicious home-cooked meals, clean the house with full makeup, and raise perfectly polished children. This is the “1950s housewife” trope as many believe, ignoring the fact that many housewives of this period also abused amphetamines to manage their workload at home. This part is conveniently left out of depictions of the time, setting a standard that is impossible for real people to imitate and painting a portrait of America that could just as easily have been created with generative AI.

And of course, people should learning about the past from history books or real-life experiences from those who were alive to witness it first-hand. But Holocaust denial exists despite the existence of Holocaust survivors, and people forget that the Selma to Montgomery march was so recent that it occurred the same year as the Rolling Stones – a band who always tours today – release “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”. For a large portion of the population, what they see on television and in movies has a significant impact on their view of the world and how they remember history.

Let's be clear about one thing: There's a big difference between presenting authentically and thinking it makes you cool to use “edgy” language. For example, in “Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure”, fans often forget the spontaneous use of the insult after kissing and calling each other before laughing about it. In this case, the usage reflects the casualness with which the word was used by everyone at the time of filming – not just hateful bigots. If the film had been made Todaythey would never say it because today's heroes wouldn't say it with a negative connotation, even if the movie takes place in a time that would have been true to the era (I'm looking at you, “mid 90s”), because the point can be made elsewhere.

And this “elsewhere” is about allowing bigots, tyrants, and bad apples to be representative of the true wickedness that actually existed.

As much as I love “Fear Street: 1994” and agree that it is a fantastic release of the year, the fact that two characters are in a lesbian relationship, one being closeted out of fear, but this is never shown. Why the character would be afraid to go out, diluting the impact of this major theme. In Kyle Mooney's extremely funny and hyper-specific 1999 horror comedy “Y2K,” Eduardo Franco's bully character insults just about everyone around him. He shames one of his friends and he constantly fights with people, but when he bullies two best friends by rapping about what losers they are… he never once implies that they're gay or throws a homophobic insult. Eminem is one of the biggest rappers in the world, but are we going to pretend that a tyrannical rap-obsessed teenager in the suburbs wouldn't have dropped an f-bomb on these boys? Even if it took place eight years later, it would have seemed a lot more like the bullying scene in “Superbad”.

I understand the desire not to alienate modern audiences who would object to the language, but sugar-coating the behavior betrays the lived experiences of those of us who receive it and diminishes the memories of those who did not survive it . We don't need to include targeted hatred for the sake of hatred, but if we include characters who spew hatred, we can't pretend it doesn't exist like that.

The inclusion of harsh or oppressive language is also not a mandatory inclusion for a period piece to be effective. In Annie Baker's directorial debut, “Janet Planet,” the summer of 1991 is beautifully captured without the slurs being treated as commonplace language, as the words would not be true to any of the characters in the film. In “Didi”, another coming-of-age film (set in 2008), one character asks another if he is a “Fremont Asian Gangster” (look at the first letter of each word) perfectly reflects the psychological warfare of college students.

Adam Rehmeier's “Snack Shack” includes the chatty, often blunt language of Nebraska teenagers in 1991 — which shouldn't be surprising given how he captured casual language oppression in the Midwest Today in “Dinner in America” – but does so without the script ever feeling like an excuse to swear. One of the best examples is “The Bucket List” by Maggie Carey which remains grounded as an over-the-top 90s sex comedy while keeping the period sincere.

Currently, Generation Alpha and younger Gen Z teenagers have become fascinated with images of high school students in the 1990s and 2000s, romanticizing them as “a simpler time” but without questioning how much was hard for so many people because these moments were usually not documented. This emphasizes entertainment. Cinema has always been both an extension and reflection of the world around us, and being honest about it has always made the art better.

But it is also an act of resilience, breaking a cycle of sanitizing the past in an effort to avoid accountability. It is by being frank about the ugliness of our past that we learn from it, see how far we have come, and recognize how far we still have to go. Pretending that everything was perfect in the 1950s is why Ronald Reagan won his election in 1980 on his “Make America Great Again” agenda and why we are seeing once again another The presidential administration is peddling the same lies.

When I look back on my life in the 1990s and 2000s, the cruelty I faced was a vital part of who I am today and my life story. It would be nice if more films weren't afraid to show this.