Review of the Day: The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

Chuck Klosterman’s book is, as the title suggests, a series of essays about the nineteen nineties, especially the cultural events of the decade. These topics include sports (the 1994 baseball strike), computers and the Internet, O. J. Simpson, important books and writers of the decade.

I have been reading Klosterman’s book and discussing it with my friend, Rand, and this last topic was one we spent some time discussing. Among the important books Klosterman identifies were: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, Mark Leyner’s Et Tu Babe, and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. 

My friend and I spent time thinking about other candidates like James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (or quite a few other Roth books), David James Duncan’s The Brothers K, Steven Millhauser’s The Barnum Museum or Martin Dressler — does anyone still read Millhauser?, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, and George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice — the first two books were published in the nineties, Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible.

Personally, I thought all of Klosterman’s essays in this book were worth reading. 

However, in this review I will focus on one chapter or essay titled “The Movie was About a Movie.” This essay is about the importance of VHS or videotapes and video rental stores like Blockbuster or Hollywood Video (not mentioned in the essay) and the effect the rental experience had on movie culture. 

On pgs. 107-8 Klosterman writes:

No movie director influenced nineties film culture as much as the advent and everywhereness of the video store. It altered everything about how movies were consumed and considered, spawning a new type of working-class cinephile who would come to dominate critical thought about the entire medium. Here again, the origins predate the nineties: The first American video store opened in Los Angeles in the late seventies. The first Blockbuster Video appeared in Dallas in 1985. The immediate popularity of movie rentals was not surprising to anyone. It was something people had awaited from the first moment VCR technology was described. What was not anticipated, how that experience would shift the way people thought about the art form, particularly for those who turned the VCR into an autodidactic means for the reconstitution of history.

Klosterman goes on to identify several filmmakers who came of age in the nineties, partly as a result of being able to easily watch movies rented from the local video store including:

• Kevin Smith’s Clerks
• Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting
• P. T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights
• Jane Campion’s The Piano
• Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich
• Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides
• Darren Aronofsky’s Pi 
• Christopher Nolan’s Memento
• Spike Lee’s Bamboozled

There is one filmmaker and film not mentioned by Kosterman: Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman. The picture is notable for several things: it was written and directed by a woman, she was a black woman and she was an out lesbian. 

The plot of Watermelon Woman goes something like the following. A black lesbian woman named Cheryl who works at a video store in Philadelphia becomes obsessed with a woman she sees in a 1930s movie called Plantation Memories and only identified in the credits as “the Watermelon Woman.”

So, Dunye’s picture is the story of a woman making a movie about an out black lesbian as we watch Dunye play an out black lesbian making a movie. The Watermelon Woman is a landmark in new queer cinema and, at least in my opinion, an excellent example of nineties indie movies that is not watched or talked about enough now. I will end this brief section by noting that Dunye’s picture is streaming on the Criterion Channel now and also note that Criterion also offers quite a few extras that could be watched with the picture.

Not many people saw The Watermelon Woman when it came out. In contrast, the best known film director to have been heavily influenced by movies he saw on VHS rented from his local video store was Quentin Tarantino.

Klosterman devotes considerable time in this essay to the first three pictures Tarantino wrote in the 1980s while working at a video rental store called Video Archives. The three pictures are True Romance, Natural Born Killers, and Reservoir Dogs. I saw all three of these pictures on the big screen in the early nineties and loved them at the time. However, I would find it difficult to be anywhere near as enthusiastic about them in 2025. In addition to their depictions of violence, the more you know about film history the more you realize how many ideas Tarantino borrowed elsewhere. Personally, I would rather spend more time on true originals like the films of Jen Luc Godard.

One of the points that the author makes in several of his essays is that we as individuals and as groups like newspapers, magazines, and websites, had one way of interpreting events at the time and often a radically different way of interpreting events more than two decades later. 

Consider the subject of a later chapter, how Americans interpret the presidency of Bill Clinton. Here is what Toni Morrison said about Clinton in an article in the New Yorker on 5 October 1998:

“This is our first black president,” it was written of Bill Clinton. “Blacker than any actual Black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of Blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food loving boy from Arkansas” (p. 300).

Here is what Klosterman writes in 2022:

Clinton made mistakes. As years have passed  and society has shifted, those mistakes seem worse and worse. There’s growing evidence that his overall legacy will be closer to the portrait painted by Gingrich, radio host Rush Limbaugh, and other conservative critics widely viewed as obsessive and unfair for most of the nineties. One can imagine a not-so-distant future when an indoctrinated young progressive will learn about Clinton and wonder how and why this man was twice elected president. Yet when Clinton was the president, the country seemed good, economically and otherwise. He was clever and competent. He loved the job and the responsibilities that came with it. Clinton instinctually reflected the ambivalence of the era in an optimistic way. Relative to the rest of the twentieth century, the nineties were a good time to be president, and he was a good president for good times (p. 301).

Library hardcover and Audible audiobook. 370 pgs. 28 August 2025.