In looking back at the pop culture of 1999, there’s a somewhat of a glaring contradiction, as author Ross Benes points out early on in his new book, 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times.
The year 1999 is widely remembered as one of the best years in memory for movies, as it gave us The Matrix, Fight Club, Eyes Wide Shut, Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, and that year’s somewhat ill-remembered Best Picture winner, American Beauty. That year’s cinema was even celebrated in Brian Raftery’s book Best. Movie. Year. Ever.
But as Benes points out in the book, 1999 was also the year that what he calls “low culture” came of age amidst an overall coarseness in the culture. The key touchstones are WWE’s Attitude Era, the heyday of The Jerry Springer Show, the arrival on the scene of Insane Clown Posse, Beanie Babies and the other speculative assets that led into the dot com bubble, and cultural breakthroughs for both Internet porn and violent video games.
Benes then tries to draw a straight line from the rise of each of those things that led to the state of affairs today, in many cases showing that coarsening led to the rise of Donald Trump. Trump, in 1999, even flirted with a run for the presidency.
Each of those subjects gets its long chapter in the book, and of those, the porn one is probably the most compelling, mostly because the way porn suddenly became available, entirely for free, to the entire public, has been underexplored as a subject.
Well Worn Material
Overall, the book is a compelling narrative, dealing with some fascinating subjects that it’s enjoyable to look back on. However, most of these things have been fairly well-examined already, both in books and documentaries, and Benes doesn’t always have all that much to add.
In recent years, the fact that the culture of the late 1990s was, retrospectively, kind of disgusting has become a staple of streaming docuseries. This began with Framing Britney Spears, which had as a major subtext that the culture of the late ‘90s was vicious and sexist, and this has been followed by subsequent streaming docs on Woodstock ’99, and more recent ones specifically about Girls Gone Wild and the Springer show
Some of the other subjects are also fairly well-examined already. Nathan Rabin has already been all over the Insane Clown Posse phenomenon; while it’s fascinating that ICP went from laughingstock to almost respectable over a long period, that’s kind of old hat by now- and besides, the change in reputation over time of ICP’s longtime rival Eminem is much more fascinating.
And Benes’s thesis about WWE and the Attitude Era, and how wrestling’s concept of kayfabe is all over the Trump era, isn’t especially different from what Josie Riesman wrote in her Vince McMahon biography Ringmaster.
And while the chapter about video games is valuable in that it shows the ridiculous hypocrisy of those who spent the late ‘90s trying to blame video games for the Columbine massacre and get them banned, I’m not sure why the chapter never mentions Gamergate, especially considering how that foul movement is widely seen as having inspired the modern alt-right.
Despite those misgivings, those who were around in the 1990s will likely find much to enjoy in this book.
