The Nineties
Of all the decades I lived in, the 90s were my favorite. Not just because I was a kid—I didn't even care much about that. I always wanted to be an adult, I always wanted to be able to do more and be able to be taken more seriously.
The reason I can tell the 90s were so great is that during every decade of my life, some portion of it has been devoted to returning to the 90s and appreciating more about it. If I could time travel, the 90s would be the decade I'd be returning back to the most. Because I can't, I just watch more movies and shows from the 90s that I missed, or revisit ones that I adore.
The best way I can describe the 90s is that the 80s were like the NES—some greatness, but obvious limitations. The 90s were the SNES and N64—between the two of those, the possibilities were endless. It was everything you needed. And with the death of Nintendo cartridge gaming in 2001 with the release of the Gamecube—just a few months after 9/11 here in the US—that was the death of the physical world as it was best.
(I loved the Gamecube, don't get me wrong, but I loved it more in that it made post 9/11 a little more tolerable, and less in that it was objectively great—though the controller was fantastic.)
The early 2000s were only great in that the energy of the 90s was still somewhat around—fading, but still accessible. Then, from 2010 on, the world has been a cultural ghost town. I started making feature-films in 2010, and I still make films to this day, and I love them, but I'm making them amongst rubble. Were I to have been making them in the 90s, or the 00s, I'd have been making them amongst some of the greats, and I do believe that I would have been their contemporaries. Now the great artists of the world are just nomads roaming around a post-apocalyptic wasteland. We're contemporaries only in that we're still creating despite a lot of our lives being devoted to just trying to survive.
A morbid post, but a necessary one.