‘Pulp Fiction’ vs. everything else: Why ’90s pop culture became a struggle between irony and earnestness

For this unaccredited historian, the 1990s began on Aug. 8, 1989. That was my 30th birthday, and I didn’t have much going on aside from an advance screening of James Cameron’s “The Abyss.” And a resolution to quit smoking.
I left the preview with a vision of future movies both exhilarating and a little threatening. Would all upcoming sci-fi action blockbusters be accomplished with such technical panache and personal idiosyncrasy? And would they all be so “You never backed away from anything in your life! Now FIGHT!” stressful?
As it turns out, no, because they couldn’t be, of course.
But when I think about the decade that ended with unfounded worries about something we called “Y2K” and barely remember what the fuss was about (apparently all the world’s computers were going to forget to reset at midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, and then they would blow up and our brave new internet and email world would go with it), I put “The Abyss” on one side of what I see as the defining cultural divide of the 1990s. This was the decade in which irony and earnestness were at constant but constructive war with each other.
The irony would arrive in full bloom in 1994 with Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” a diabolically constructed crime thriller/comedy whose every frame acknowledged that it was a construct. A construct made with love, for sure, but one whose self-knowing wink was a part of its charm.
One cultural luminary who wasn’t charmed was the writer David Foster Wallace, whose mammoth footnoted novel “Infinite Jest,” about life and love and death and addiction, was almost immediately lauded as the novel of the decade on publication in 1996. While Wallace was never so banal as to explicitly wave a flag for “the new sincerity” or any other such crusade, he decried Tarantino’s cheekiness while celebrating the surreal American Gothic of David Lynch, while cocking an eyebrow at anything in Lynch’s oeuvre that looked like it might be snark (not that there was a lot).
Another Tarantino skeptic, Spike Lee, felt that the expression of certain racial attitudes in “Pulp Fiction” crossed unacceptable lines. While the two writer-director-actors had an interesting détente for a while — Tarantino even appeared in Lee’s 1996 “Girl 6,” as a creepy director — Lee’s work overall through the ’90s almost entirely could be seen as anti-ironic.
But even anti-ironic expression was subject, somehow, to irony. Nirvana’s 1992 sophomore album, “Nevermind,” was a stunner, and the brashness of its opening track, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” was almost laugh-out-loud funny in its obviousness. But its stance, against the “Here we are now / Entertain us” complacency of post-Boomers, was bracing in its demand for something to actually believe in.
Poor Kurt’s suicide means, among other things, that there’ll never be a Nirvana reunion. But one wonders what he’d make of current concert tours of ’90s-associated artists, like the Weezer/Flaming Lips/Dinosaur Jr. package coming soon to the Scotiabank Arena or the first headline tour of Missy Elliott’s career, which just made a stop there. The notices for Elliott’s shows rave that she delivers impeccable entertainment with no winks, nor irony. Nostalgia trip or no, what she’s putting across is earnest.
Wallace (who famously despised the put-ons of the Beastie Boys) would likely approve. In his philosophy and esthetic, a stance against irony was not a way of evading that life was complicated and getting more so. Critics and readers expressed some confoundment at his voluminous footnotes, but as the 1990s wore on and the internet became more and more crucial to communication and culture, Wallace’s method could remind one of a web page with multiple tabs open.
The internet changed the way we think — can we now recall a time in which our minds weren’t in a state of constant cross-referencing? Can we remember when we used printed atlases rather than a GPS, or Google Maps? It’s difficult.
Similarly, in the mid-’90s, editors at magazines and newspapers fretted about what was then called “new media,” while executives seemed to shrug. But within a couple of years, the corporate question “What’s a blog?” became “HOW’S THAT BLOG COMING ALONG?” And now, we are almost back to “What’s a blog?” again.
It’s undeniable that the rise of the internet has mutated our attitudes in certain respects. Because we can speak to each other instantly over a variety of platforms both private and public, it’s arguable that overall mindfulness has taken a hit from which it’s not going to be easy to recover. The ’90s ushered in the contemporary condition in which the questions “Does this need saying? Does it need to be said in this way? And does it need to be said by me?” are almost never asked.
We live in a Tower of Babel the likes of which we never precisely imagined. And sometimes it can be … fun?
Glenn Kenny is an American film critic and historian; his latest book is “The World Is Yours: The Story of ‘Scarface.’”