Mid 90’s is An Uncomfortably Accurate Portrayal of Adolescence in the 90's
Fuck. Shit. That was dope.
The fear started when I was merging onto the freeway. It crept up my spine and tip toe’ed around my forehead. Soon my whole body felt like it was clamped into one of those heavy duty operating tables used to examine mutants and superheroes. My eyes darted around. I could taste metal. It was then I realized that the fear crawling under my skin like bot fly larvae was originating from my empty left pocket.
I’d forgotten my phone.
I was only going to the grocery store, sure, but without my cyborg extension I felt inept. What if I had a thought worth noting? How would I remember it? What if I saw a funny license plate and wanted to mock it on Snapchat? What if I had to check the weather? What about current events? Sports? Memes? I’d be an untethered cretin by the time I got home.
I confronted my anxiety carefully, my figurative arms extended, palms open, like it was a riled-up tweaker, or feral cat. “Wooosah,” I whispered. Putting more and more emphasis on the “-saaaah” each time. Gradually I talked my anxiety down. With each breath it inched farther back toward my pocket until, finally, it tucked out of sight. I came to my senses behind the wheel, going 85 and weaving past a semi truck.
As I scanned traffic ahead of me, everything slowed down. The world took on a subtle vibrance. My grip on the steering wheel loosened and the white around my knuckles turned pink. My gaze widened. A sense of weightlessness cushioned my limbs. From somewhere I could hear angelic violins. I took the off ramp.
At a red light I rolled the windows down and the smell of burgers on a charcoal grill drifted in along with the sound of skateboard wheels on pavement. Movie scenes began flashing before my mind’s eye, all of them similar: A newly free man walks out from a high security prison. Grinning hesitantly, he squints and holds up a hand to shield his face from the sun. Towering metal gates clank shut behind him. He hops in a friend’s car—always a convertible—and shuts the door exhaling as the car peels off. The light turned green and I hit the gas.
I turned up the radio. It was tuned to the Mexican station. The rapid staccato of the DJ’s Spanish reminded me of playing Grand Theft Auto San Andreas as a kid. I thought of those carefree afternoons while I drove. Through my windshield the world became a no-holds-barred playground, free of consequences. Should I steal that candy painted muscle car? Maybe I’ll rob that pedestrian, get a couple stars. Oh wait, I know a cheat code for a rocket launcher!
I browsed my surroundings like a three dimensional Eastbay catalog for criminals and realized that it wasn’t the allure of breaking the law that was egging me on. Instead it was a general feeling of confidence, completely irrational confidence. Illegal or otherwise, the world felt in that moment like my proverbial oyster. I was high on the feeling of being off-leash. My phone was gone and with it any sense of limitation. I ran a stop sign.
That’s when the flashbacks hit. I don’t remember the last ten minutes of the drive to the store other than the ultra-vivid visions from my childhood. They were full body memories. I fell from one to the next, each one catching me only momentarily before I ripped through it like a bowling ball dropped from a tall building through a series of awnings. The one thing all the memories had in common? They were from the years 1994–1999. I turned the car off and found myself parked in a busy grocery store parking lot.
The flashbacks stopped, but for the rest of the day I was buoyed by a feeling of discovery. The future glistened under a translucent coating of optimism. I took the long way home from the store, just because.
By the next day, that feeling was gone. In its place was the occasional, feeble jolt of adrenaline whenever my phone would vibrate, and the reptilian satisfaction of making those little red push notifications disappear.
That I-don’t-have-my-phone feeling—uneasy ineptitude matched by a thrilling sense of being unbounded—didn’t come along again until I watched Mid 90’s. Mid 90’s is built on that feeling.
It’s easy to credit Jonah Hill for the subtle (and not-so-subtle) details that make Mid 90’s feel like a time machine: The way the movie’s framed, the tube TVs, the Blockbuster references, the general lack of adult supervision, the 40oz malt liquor bottles, the fitted baseball caps, the liberal use of homosexual slurs, the disc-mans, the soundtrack, the Slurpees, the ephemeral notion of becoming a sponsored skateboarder, the allure of landing your first ollie, the bulky camcorders, the oversized clothes, the caricatured Chinese restaurants and, yes, the lack of cell phones.
What makes Mid 90’s impressive though, beyond capturing the gestalt of the era, is the bluntness and matter-of-fact-ness that it slaps you in the face with. Stevie (the main character of the movie, played by Sunny Soljic) simmers with the confusion and excitement and fear and self-consciousness of adolescence. Coughing on his first cigarette, he tells his friend he’s not used to that brand of smokes. On his way home later that day, he washes his mouth out with soap from the gas station bathroom, trying to scrub off the smell of tobacco. Mid 90’s feels like a never ending procession of moments that make you cringe and laugh and want to reach through the screen and shake some sense into Stevie and his friends. I imagine rewatching my own teen years would feel the same.
The band of hooligan skaters Stevie starts running with provide more than enough encouragement to fuel his self-destructive experimentation. As a team they take on the world, or at least their little corner of suburban California. They do about as well as any group of quasi-delinquent, hard-luck teenagers can be expected to. They make a mess of growing up—a social slam reel—and how they navigate their brutal crucible is both surprising and inevitable.
Mid 90’s pins us down and forces us to relive our teenage awkwardness. It also animates the thrill of discovery characteristic of those years. It’s a movie about being raised by your peers, self-inflicted pain, finding boundaries by slamming into them, other people’s approval, the weird ways that young men express themselves. At it’s core, it’s a movie about resolving the tension of not knowing who to be. A tension that eases up as we get older, but never goes away completely.
