October 30, 2023 - 10:00am
The passing of Friends star Matthew Perry this weekend was haunting in that way not all celebrity deaths are, even celebrities who die young. It’s like when, 20-odd years after you graduate, you hear that a school friend has died. “He died too young,” you might think — but still, it’s been 30 years. In the space of three decades, someone’s bound to die: you’re not 17 anymore. Similarly, the Nineties — that decade which for many of us still feels like yesterday — ended 24 years ago. It’s not 1997 anymore; it’s not even 2000 anymore. It’s 2023, and we haven’t entirely come to terms with it.
People have been saying, “The Nineties are back”, for at least a decade. Nostalgia for the period seems as impossibly long and winding as sentimentality for the Eighties did in the 2010s, the Seventies in the 2000s, and the Sixties in the Nineties. Indeed, the entire 20th century seems to be marked by a desire to process the past through nostalgia.
There are many theories for why we’re always looking in the rearview mirror, why we seem to be stuck in this trap of perpetual longing for what’s already happened. The venture capitalist Peter Thiel has often commented on the present moment’s lack of innovation. Others like Mark Fisher and Franco Berardi, who Fisher cites in his book Ghosts of My Life, talk about the “cancellation of the future”. And on X/Twitter, it’s become something of a meme to say, “culture is stuck.” Yet these theories, while not totally without merit, minimise, or even straightforwardly reject, what is new, taking for granted that nostalgia is not the same as a denial of the future.
Consider the recurring complaint that there are no truly “new” movies. Haven’t we always been stuck in a never-ending loop of sequels and remakes? How many times has A Star Is Born been made, to give one example? (Four.) Aren’t we always retelling the same stories, over and over again, with each re-telling offering its own unique inflection, right back to the oral tradition of antiquity?
It’s human nature to be constantly making sense of the past, and it’s through our recapitulation of the cultural products that preceded us that we’re able to create something new. Are we recycling yesterday, or are we rewriting and remixing it, creating something fresh from prior experience? Folk songs reappear and are reimagined over hundreds of years. Epic poems become operas and then films and then young adult novels, each saying something specific about the era in which they were created.
We may not like the cultural products of the 2020s — or the 2010s or the 2000s, for that matter — but that doesn’t mean they aren’t distinct. To say we’re in an era of remixing is just another way of describing the method by which cultural innovation has always worked — it’s not an indictment on our ability to express ourselves in new ways.
And so what is haunting about Matthew Perry’s death is not that the Nineties are over. Rather, it’s that we have now processed the decade. We’ve worked through our catharsis, and can begin the process anew, this time with a more recent piece of our past.
Katherine Dee is a writer. To read more of her work, visit defaultfriend.substack.com.
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SubscribeMatthew Perry’s death has summoned forth a vast flock of showbiz reporters determined to track down anyone remotely connected to Perry in order to elicit a declaration of how ‘devastated’ they are by news of the former Friends star’s death. This is followed closely by opinion pieces ‘analysing’ the cultural significance (or not) of the Friends sitcom. Regrettably, UnHerd has joined that herd.
Let’s face it, the process of being a human being on earth has not changed a whole lot since inception. Sure, technology has changed how we do things, but we are still human beings who harbor the desire for a few basic needs to survive. Some of us have varying levels of desire for some of those needs, but we are still just as human as Adam and Eve were, which makes the Bible such a reliable and still relevant source of information on the human experience.
Sorry to hear this first thing in the morning.
There’s a theory that our memories are not ‘film clips of the past’ but rehearsals (and re-rehearsals) of our responses to past events. So (generally) tedious and nasty bits are rehearsed away leaving only the good bits. The rehearsals may even be memories of what people told us and therefore not ‘true memories’ at all.
So after a generation or so the memories become ‘polished’. The music of the 60s was great… except for all the dross we discard. TV programmes we raved over (e.g. Monty Pythons Flying Circus) seem far too dated to be funny.
Dad’s Army still works though.
Dad’s Army works because it is quintessentially English, real or imagined makes little difference. Fraser is an Englishman’s idea of a Scotchman. Python always had ideas above it’s station and too many references to contemporary mores.
News flash. Three years is the going rate for an unsolicited kiss.
More self-reflective than narcissistic, the 90s. Driven by new digital communication technology, today’s narcissism has been amplified to the point of psychosis.
And incoherence. Access by everyone to everything all the time – we’re not wired for it.
I am amazed of the enormous reflection in all the MSM about him. Absolutely OTT. There are so many important issues to deal with…