"It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool...We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naiveté. Sentiment equals naiveté on this continent."

–David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

It's hard to imagine ’90s movies without irony. Or ’90s indie/art movies, anyway. The Hollywood machine as always was largely unaffected by the affectations taking root on its fringes. You couldn’t find a film less ironic (or less intentionally ironic, at least) than Titanic, not to mention all of Steven Spielberg’s big important issue movies. Forrest Gump had a patina of irony, but sadly it really wanted to be taken seriously.

But in Amerindie land, the territory bounded by NYU and UCLA and headquartered at Sundance, irony was the decade’s defining aesthetic, the hallmark of hipness. I’m not here to praise indie irony, nor to bury it. It’s already on the fade, the inevitable victim of a kind of moral anorexia. With no sense of purpose apart from commenting on their own purposelessness, the genre has collapsed on itself, a hall of mirrors arranged around a void.

It’s become conventional wisdom to blame it all on Quentin Tarantino, but that’s not entirely fair or accurate. Tarantino maybe embodied the trend more than anyone else, but what he really did was codify and pop-ify tendencies that reached back at least to David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Alan Rudolph, and Alex Cox in the ’80s. (Although Jarmusch, iconoclast that he is, made his least ironic movie during the 1990s, the overlooked Zen western Dead Man). Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction married those directors’ self-conscious genre implosions to Tarantino’s own unbridled passion for pop culture.

And that passion is what sets Quentin apart from the wave of mostly pallid disciples that came after him. In Reservoir Dogs, you might suspect the filmmaker doesn’t really care about the characters or the story, that he’s using them as part of an elaborate joke; but Tarantino at least cares about the joke. The movie knows it’s a movie, it nods and winks at its self-awareness, but it also genuinely loves being a movie. The same is true of the best parts of both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown.

You can’t say that about a lot of the decade’s indie detritus. Take, for example, The Opposite of Sex. Overhyped and overpraised on its release, the film introduces itself and its characters via obnoxious, self-conscious voice-overs from Christina Ricci as the bad-ass Lolita at the story’s center. She warns us at the beginning, "If you think I’m just plucky and scrappy, and all I need is love, you’re in over your head. I don’t have a heart of gold, and I’m not going to get one." Which of course clues us in that that’s exactly what’s going to happen, but is somehow supposed to disarm the cliché by acknowledging it on the front end. Irony, you see. But what that self-awareness does is actually indict the movie. If you know you’re a cliché, you can’t escape that reality by merely admitting it. The awkward distance created by Ricci’s intrusive commentary only prevents the audience from developing any particular interest in the characters, since we’re kept so irritatingly aware of their place as familiar types inside a familiar construction.

Another casualty of its own coolness was Go, Doug Liman’s hyperactive kids ’n’ crime compendium. Although it starts off well–not many movies ever bother to show us real people working real jobs, like the gaggle of supermarket clerks the film revolves around–its intentions become clear as soon as it makes its first clever temporal and narrative shift. This is essentially a younger, gentler Pulp Fiction, complete with interwoven storylines and overlapping characters. The characters we actually get interested in, especially Sarah Polley’s hard-bitten rave girl and Timothy Olyphant’s seductively menacing X dealer, fall by the wayside of the film’s plagiarized cleverness.

You can’t watch Go and not think of Pulp Fiction, just as Liman couldn’t have possibly made it without thinking of Pulp Fiction, which raises the question of why he bothered at all. Why make a smirky film that is essentially an ironic homage to a film that was a smirky, ironic homage in the first place? The lack of purpose becomes painfully apparent in an extended middle sequence where Jay Mohr and Scott Wolf are invited to dinner by a creepy FBI agent. At first, the film suggests the agent and his wife are going to be revealed as that least shocking of ‘90s stock types: the squeaky clean but sexually perverse suburban couple. But then, in the punchline, the movie throws a change-up and shows they’re actually squeaky clean salespeople for an Amway-style company. In other words, Go’s idea of cultural commentary is to play sleight of hand with equally trite scenarios, substituting one for another at the last minute, implicitly acknowledging the vacuousness of both.

The constrictive cool has taken root in the heads of more than just young filmmakers. Film critics and reviewers seem equally co-opted. Modern movie commentators lash out at "naiveté" the way their ’50s forebears used to go after "immoralism." The best example was the reaction to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. The film isn’t a masterpiece, granted, but a lot of the critics who attacked it seemed most concerned with Kubrick’s unworldliness; accustomed to movies like The Opposite of Sex that assume everyone has seen and done it all before, they couldn’t stomach the central innocence of the two main characters. And it’s not even as if they’re all that innocent; they’ve flirted with sexual infidelity before, they just haven’t done it. They can still be shocked and shaken–which by extension means we can be shocked and shaken too, however much we think we know. To an audience used to having its superficial cynicism flattered rather than challenged, that may be an unforgivable affront.

But they may have to get used to it. "Irony" as a genre, as a point in and of itself, seems to have played out, or at least relegated itself to the teen market. The best American films of the last few years have been willing to make their stories count, to matter. Permanent Midnight took the ‘90s fixation with heroin and shot if full of painfully funny humanity. Affliction stripped violence, domestic and otherwise, down to its conflicted human roots. Three Kings refused to cut away when the smart bombs hit. American Beauty started off looking like satire and ended up reaching for transcendence. What the directors of all those movies know that the hip young things are still learning is that if you tell people often enough that what you’re doing doesn’t mean anything, they’ll eventually start to believe you.

First Published: Spring 2000 • PopCult

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