In The Nineties We Had Hope, Part 2
We Were Warned. . .
Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 landmark work The End of History and the Last Man is often referred to as a triumphalist work, a victory lap for the Western liberal democracies over all other ideologies at the end of the Cold War. Like many important works, this bit of “common knowledge” illuminates less the substance of the book, and more the sad truth that most people in the commentariat don’t read the books they cite. Yes, Fukuyama was making the argument that the future would lack global conflicts because of the fall of communism and the rise of liberal democracies around the world. Though the tone and tenor of these chapters are more clinical/diagnostic than triumphalist; roughly half of the book reflects the first half of the title: The End of History.
Regardless of how prevalent or common this misconception is, what is glaringly clear for anyone who has read the book, is that what is most misunderstood is the entire second half of Fukuyama’s thesis (and book), related to the second half of the title: The Last Man. As history has turned, Fukuyama has updated the first part of his thesis several times. The End of History thesis would seem to demand an update, given certain nations “backsliding” so to speak, into authoritarianism. However, as far as I know, he has not updated The Last Man thesis.
There are likely several reasons why the second portion of his thesis gets such mild observance and short shrift from both advocates and critics of Fukuyama; the book's Wikipedia page, for example, gives no reference to “The Last Man” at all. It simply (predictably, stupidly, like most Wikipedia pages) focuses only on “The End of History” in summary; its supporters, detractors, and Fukuyama’s own evolution in perspective as the decades have passed are also present. So where is the Last Man himself?
The totality of the book is founded on Hegel’s philosophy of human consciousness and Universal History. it was inspired by the neo-Hegelian Alexandre Kojève, and responds to Marxist and neo-Marxist (what might be termed, post-modernist) positions (not surprisingly, Fukuyama’s ideas gave crypto-marxist and master of all pseudo-intellectuals, Derrida, the vapors). I am not Hegelian enough, nor more generally, philosopher enough, to really unpack Fukuyama’s entire argument in this modest essay. However, I do think “The Last Man” chapters are fascinating, and I will do my level best to do them justice as I interweave Fukuyama’s prescience with my own conjectures concerning the end of the 1990s.
Fukuyama begins the exploration of The Last Man with the premise that when History “ends,” and Liberal Democracies reign supreme. Humanity itself, having struggled against the pressure of constant threats of rival cultures and ideologies for its entire history, will lose something essential to itself in the plenty and leisure of a world without struggle. A compelling metaphor could be average air-pressure on the human body. Air exerts about 15psi everywhere on the human body at all times on the planet earth. The weight of air is something our bodies have evolved to endure by exerting outward pressure in order to negate the effect of the air pressure. If the air pressure disappeared, in a vacuum, say, or on a planet like Mars with a psi of under .1, our bodies would begin to expand; a slow-motion explosion of ourselves against the void. (See the movie Total Recall for an FX artist’s conception of the results of such an explosion–if you can bear to watch the gagging pressure-bloated visage of Arnold Schwarzenegger as he slowly suffocates on the red sands of the surface of Mars). This is Fukuyama’s prophecy concerning the state of mankind resulting from the end of global societal struggle. We will explode.
The 1990s started with such an extraordinary set of positive, and mostly peaceful, historical events, it is hard for me to remember the failures. No doubt this is the fuzziness of my middle-aged memory but there was true joy and triumph in the years 1989-1992. In the light of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening of Eastern Europe, the break-up of the Soviet Union, the democratization of the Eastern Bloc, and reunification of the German people, one can almost pretend that Parachute Pants and Color Me Badd never happened. The United States topped off that period with a walk-over campaign against the once feared million-man Iraqi Military in the Gulf War, an almost cleansing war for us that seemed to take a decade’s worth of American cultural self-criticism and self-reflection on the failures of the Vietnam War, and wash them away.
And yet. . .
As I wrote in the last essay, there were heroes in our media. In answer to some criticism I received, I might point out that Captain Benjamin Sisko, of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Buffy Summers, of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, were also brilliantly written, unique and heroic characters, each pursuing virtue while struggling against their human weaknesses, all while failing to be alternatively white or male. They both were people of principle who often had to struggle against the realities of the moment to stick with what they knew was right.
Beyond the popular culture, where heroism was still allowed, there were other signs for optimism. The crime rate began to drop significantly; poverty, both global “real” poverty and the American version, also continued its more or less steady decline.
And yet. . .
The EU was born. This is a fact that should still fill us with awe. In Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature, he cites political scientist Peter Brecke’s “Conflict Catalog” of European history. Pinker writes: “The sheer number of European wars is mind-boggling. Brecke . . . Lists 1,148 conflicts from 900 CE to 1400 CE, and . . . 1,166 from 1400 CE to the present–about two new conflicts a year for eleven hundred years.” If one gets elevation like that for perspective on European History, is there anything more powerful than the European continent ending its long sordid history of hyper competition and associated wars?
And yet. As the decade wore on there were ominous signs of something brewing. Fukuyama claimed that we were suddenly aware of history as it closed, which left us untethered to “tradition and authority.” The horizon of history ceases to be a destination, but becomes “merely a horizon. . . a mirage that disappears as one draws closer.” What did this to us was our education. In preparation for the ideological struggle of the Cold War, our civilization required a broadening of education for the workforce to function in an increasingly complex system of division of labor. Once the end of history arrived, once external pressures on our culture were lifted, and the focus on the ideological struggle disappeared, that system of requiring mastery of multiple perspectives brought with it an overarching relativism. One can see the descent into relativism going back to the sixties and the types of philosophy held as relevant amongst the intelligentsia. While a Boomer might have a copy of Camus or Sartre on the shelf (relativists to be sure, but much heavier on the dread–Sartre’s preoccupation with anti-colonialism notwithstanding, they were both clearly philosophers of the inner life of the individual, not political philosophers), it would be the Millennials who were handed Foucault as almost a right of passage; holy texts for a generation that inherited a world without history. The great and horrible liberation philosophy of critical theory intent only on destruction was not fully embraced by academia till the late 1990s. Critical theory’s narrative is that it’s on a mission of justice and freedom, but what it chafes against is reality itself and the natural limits it places on the individual or the favored group. No more ideologies, no more institutions, no more causes are the logical extensions of that ideologies’ arguments. A purely relativistic framing of reality (aside from being laughably illogical) cannot thrive with an objective adversary. When the Soviet Union became 12 countries, and China started making our plastic crap, all the adversaries at disappeared.
I would contend that we sensed this turn long before the culture wars brought it to our collective social media feeds, and that there were several artistic expressions that explained the moment, but more importantly, warned us against the condition we currently struggle against. Five films that were released in 1998 and 1999 (films and music albums were still “released” back then, they were not yet “dropped”), showed us both the world that had arrived and the one that was coming. These five films, wildly different in tone, all challenging, with varying levels of darkness and optimism, all shared in a single slim hope that now, at the end of history, we might find our way in the new world, or break it all to pieces.
Pleasantville, written, produced, and directed by Gary Ross, writer of such films as Big and The Hunger Games, placed two ‘90s teens inside the black and white television world of a 1950s era family sitcom. Visually stunning, and emotionally somewhat sentimental (a good thing, from my perspective), this film explored what that sitcom world, designed at the height of the Cold War and the apex of America’s economic and cultural power, would feel like without those ballast tanks keeping it afloat. It asks many important questions that reflect late ‘90s anxieties: Is there a place for the nuclear family any more? Are post-sexual revolution attitudes truly liberating? What does one live for when the world has lost its purpose and focus? In the titular town of Pleasantville, there is no history at all, the roads are either dead-ends or loop back to the center of town, the home team always wins, and every dad returns home to work in perfect order, each, we are led to believe, declaring “Honey, I’m home!” when they walk through the door. The black-and-white aesthetic is relatively blunt in its symbolism–this is a world without troubles or cares, but it is also a world without color.
As David and Jennifer (Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon), our present day ‘90s teens, interact with this sterile world, color appears. In an inversion of the story of the Garden of Eden, Jennifer introduces Pleasantville to the joys of sex. Soon there is new music, new books, new art, and various objects and sundry people begin popping into color. Chaos ensues, and its up to our two teen heroes to help shepherd this sterile world through the joys and griefs of a fully colorful reality.
There is something quite balanced and fair in the perspective of the film as the world of Pleasantville falls apart and is reborn. Though the film keeps things relatively light-hearted, it does seem to say that If you want sex, there will be attachment and feelings and aggression; if you want knowledge, there will be conflicting ideas and possibly violence; if you want a rainbow-like world of color, there has to be rain.
However, in recent years, I’ve noticed the frame of the story more and more. At the opening and closing of the film, David interacts with the reality of the ‘90s. In a single minute opening scene, David sits through a montage of three dreary classes with monotone teachers. Each teacher is worse than the last, as the camera pans in from the back of the classrooms, uniting both teachers and rooms into a single depressing reality. Teacher one describes how little economic hope the students have in the future, teacher two enumerates how STDs are running rampant, and teacher three hits the kids with how climate change is going to bring ruin and catastrophe on the world “by the time you are fifty.”
This is the real black-and-white reality that David escapes from into the world of Pleasantville–the close of the millennium is framed as vaguely threatening, but really just bleak and empty. David and Jennifer’s father is absent and isn’t interested in taking advantage of “his weekend.” They have a mother who is leaving for a weekend romantic getaway with her younger boyfriend. When David returns from Pleasantville to the real world, he sees his present reality differently. In a closing scene, he finds his mother crying because her weekend didn’t work out. She weeps and says, “I’m 44; it's not supposed to be like this,” and he replies, comfortingly, “It’s not supposed to be anything.” Here is the sentiment of the film that runs far deeper than maybe even Gary Ross knew when he wrote it. The very idea of a prescription for life, the cultural necessity for such prescriptions, was over. The house, car, 2.2 kids, etc., the path of the American bourgeois since the end of the Second World War, of the Cold War, of Reagan’s “morning in America”—the reason for it was all over, and we were then, and are now, adrift and facing myriad choices without letting down anyone but ourselves. We weren’t putting the nation at risk, or disappointing our fathers, or letting down our immigrant grandparents’ expectations anymore by not choosing that middle class existence. We were free.
There is a real optimism in this film, one that challenges us to look beyond hedonism and conformity and, rather, to craft lives that are uniquely our own. It is frightening to be as free as the movie contends we are. If life “isn’t supposed to be anything,” then the instructions of our communities, the dictates of our culture, are all called into question. Pleasantville does not shy away from this. In fact, its most powerful bit of optimism is how it encourages us to be brave in the face of this new freedom. It is not an optimism that would last.
Fukuyama observed the revolutionaries of the historical moment at the end of history–Chinese, Romanian, Lithuanians, etc., who fought for and to build their own liberal democracies–that “when they finally succeed. . .they will create for themselves a stable democratic society in which struggle and work in the old sense are made unnecessary. . . they imagine that they would be happy when they get to this promised land, for many needs and desires would be fulfilled. One day they too will all have dishwashers and VCRs and private automobiles.” In other words, these revolutionaries imagine a future society like ours. A society that creates the Levis, not one wherein you can trade a pair for a car (those of you in your 40s may remember this iconic advertisement). Fukuyama concludes with the rhetorical question: “But would they be satisfied with themselves?”
Sam Mendes and Alan Ball’s American Beauty, and David Fincher’s Fight Club answered that question with a resounding “maybe?”
Fight Club and American Beauty both have rat race half-men protagonist/narrators, struggling against the new world without history. Dissatisfied with what was left of the bourgeois lifestyle they inherited, both men rebel, and find satisfaction in the re-creation of their lives into something other than soulless buttoned-up cubicle-inhabiting wage-slaves making a buck to buy designer furniture. The differences of the films are somewhat stark after that: Fight Club’s narrator is young, childless, unmarried. American Beauty’s is middle-aged, has a wife and daughter, a suburban Pleasantville-like existence. Fight Club’s narrator is triggered into transformation by an aching conscience and deep consciousness; American Beauty’s narrator is triggered by meeting a sexy teen girl. However, as the films were released only a month apart in the autumn of 1999, their similarities at least in how they diagnose the issues of that time (and those times to come), remain remarkable in that both were essentially in production at the same time at different studios with entirely different source material and creative teams.
Of the two, I find Fight Club far more compelling, not the twists and turns and reveals, those are merely gimmicks, and certainly the toughness of the film is more to my tastes. Fight Club takes square aim at the end of history and the lies it purports, spreads, endorses. In the most famous speech in the film, leader of the Fight Club, Tyler Durden, declares: “We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war…our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact.” Fukuyama didn’t nail his own point rationally in any chapter of his book better than that one brilliant line of dialogue taken directly from the novel the film was based on.
This diagnosis is clear and far reaching, and still relevant today compared to American Beauty. The prescription for the ailing, pampered, self-satisfied, materialistic culture it criticizes also seems to me to be the better of the two films. The protagonist/narrator creates a counterculture that better serves the needs of the men who have fallen behind in this new world. However, he then has to confront the unavoidable issues that arise with all countercultures, that they begin to create a conformity all their own. He learns truths along the way, however, and finds love (of sorts) and finds that he must face the new world as himself, holding to these few truths that his rebellion has revealed. The movie seems to embrace the challenge of Pleasantville, saying to the attentive viewer: “you are only as much a part of the empty, drab, gray nothing culture of this new world as you let yourself be; go forth and find a new way!”
American Beauty finds a different, and disturbingly worse, prescription for the troubles of our times–one that has been repeated, sadly, and almost stupidly at this point, over and over since then. This prescription/solution makes American Beauty relevant in a different way, though Fight Club is often watched by young people still, and American Beauty has faded in the popular memory. There is something so moving about American Beauty at times that comes from the superb performances, fine direction, and a few lines of dialogue that it's hard to see the borderline-nihilistic subtext of the film. In the famous bag-dancing scene, when the teen boy love interest of the protagonist’s daughter describes the “most beautiful thing I’ve ever filmed” to the girl (15 minutes of a plastic shopping bag dancing on the wind in a corner by a brick building), the boy is given some lovely lines, and the music and acting fill the scene with meaning. The world is beautiful, life is beautiful, and it's hard to take sometimes, the scene says. To that point, the film was going somewhere. But through a convoluted series of ridiculous events replete with a stereotypical closeted gay murderer and red-herring attempted murder, the protagonist dies, and the film makes a valiant stab at meaning, failing somewhat spectacularly, while giving every lost screen-writer with half-an-imagination since then a framework for coping with the lack of meaning in their own lives.
The protagonist, an every-dad character, never completes his rebellion against the norms he bumbled into in his mid-life crisis. Instead, in the end, and now dead, during a touching montage of flashbacks, narrates a sad excuse for bourgeois apologetics in the new age of no history. No tragedy, no realization, he found nothing, learned nothing, he just feels grateful for his “small life.” I get it. We should feel grateful for our lives big or small, everyday, and we should see the beauty of the world, also every day. We don’t, and that message isn’t so bad. However, the movie does an extraordinary job of distracting the audience from the reality that his only child found him with his brains splattered all over the kitchen table, that his wife will still wake up the next day a vapid shallow materialistic bitch, and that his murderer was a cultural stereotype MacGuffin, thinly drawn by the screenwriter as a plot device, because without that non-character the protagonist can never be murdered and think deep thoughts aloud for a bourgeois audience incapable of finding meaning in their lives. The protagonist woke up and realized he had become one of the “men without chests” of the post-history world; however, he never got to finish exploring outside the cave of his middle-class existence. That is a tragedy worthy of mourning. But the writer lets us off the hook. Instead of triggering a state of mourning over the lost potential of the hero at the beginning of his journey, he pandered to the low expectations and middling values that the bourgeois have been righteously attacked for for over a century. It talks a big game about beauty, but the concluding assertion that this every-dad and his family and their small life is enough is belied by the fact that the causes of the quiet desperation with which he started the film do not go away simply by gently contemplating the good times in one’s life. There are other ways of being, other paths, and gratitude is not a coping mechanism.
This is the world without history, without ambition, aspiration, greatness, or God.
Departing from Fukuyama, two more films from 1999 warned us of our present dilemma. It’s a little on the nose, but The Matrix is the first. An interestingly optimistic film given its priors, and the subsequent sequels attempted to address some of the first film's internal contradictions, though I’ve not yet met a defender of the results. The internet, in its dial-up infancy still in 1999, was growing in its sophistication as a user-friendly technology, and the concept of virtual reality and AI were already stable digestible nuggets of our pop-culture. In a broad sense, the film challenges us to turn away from inauthentic distractions and towards reality. It is reality that may appear gray and tasteless, like the food the characters must eat once they leave The Matrix, but it is reality, and that, all by itself, is worth fighting for.
Ultimately, and simply, and without beating the dead horse of my series on technology use, what the film got wrong is how easy it was to turn us into servants of the The Machine, and how willingly we would bend our necks to the glowing rectangle in our hands, becoming metaphorical batteries powering The Machine with the data it needs to grow and thrive. What a sad irony that so many of us choose to become what that film once made us dread.
Not to give The Matrix light attention, as more and more people move to living more of their lives online than in real life–in an age where IRL can be abbreviated–I think it’s relatively obvious to anyone with the fortitude to have made it this far in this essay to see the connections.
The draw of online life, however, the allure of the embrace of the fake, constructed, digital world was roundly criticized by a film released the year before: The Truman Show. Directed by Peter Weir, and written by Andrew Niccol, The Truman Show depicts the ultimate reality TV show, a constructed reality, a completely inauthentic town on a massive sound stage too big to see the construction, and all build around one man who doesn’t know he is the star of the show. Every minute of Truman’s life has been filmed, every person in his life is an actor, every moment a construction of a writing team, a presentation, a fully curated life for the entertainment of all. The only authentic human being in the show is Truman, which makes it that much more disturbing, and Truman himself that much more endearing.
With the creation of the title/job description Influencer, our era embraced the new aspirational existence of The Truman Show. What in that film is depicted as an almost horrific way to live life, is now one of the most sought after professions by young people. Depending on the studies and polling and the frame of the question, anywhere between 55% and 86% of adolescents want to be influencers for a living. And according to one poll, 88% thought that being “authentic” was important in an influencer. They are seemingly unaware of the paradox.
Without the pressure of enemies from without, we have created Influencers of all stripes–even one President–who curate their lives as much as live them, who construct their realities more than they face reality; artificiality has won out.
The challenge to us presented by Pleasantville and Fight Club, even the middle-class dodge of American Beauty, have been abandoned in favor of a chasing-it lifestyle obsession, more materialistic than ever, more commercial, more gray despite the flashing colors.
I am put in mind of the moment when Truman finally capitulates to the manipulations of the show’s creator, and apparently ends his obsession with trying to find the truth which is the main point of tension in the film. He can’t help but sense the fraudulent world that surrounds him. In that scene, after all the corners have been closed, all the roads turned back towards his town, he awakes in the morning and looks into the mirror of his bathroom as we all do every day. There is a marvelous moment where we, the viewers, aren’t sure if he really has capitulated or not. He looks into the mirror and seems for a moment to be performing. Suddenly, the only authentic character in the television show of his life has gained a self-awareness (maybe) and we’re not sure what he will do with it. He could stay, and be adored and pampered, cared for without much struggle unto death. He could choose to be what they have created him to be. That was the moment, the allure; one that we face today. That temptation is our every moment–do we begin to perform for snippets of recognition in a life without challenge curating our existence into a performative lie, or do we escape and seek the real world. I love that moment, Jim Carrey really nailing it, because I still am not sure–will he escape?
As more and more of our children continue to get eaten by the culture, I wonder if we will. Can a new path be found? Will we choose to escape? Politics has become a recreational sport for our online play; art is stagnant and dull and controlled by liberal arts graduates with no new ideas; despite brain chips and AI, we’re still living with the technologies that haven’t been new in two decades; despite global events, not much has really changed since the 1999–even 9/11 almost seems like an interim fever dream at this point. History may return, but it's not here yet, and we have failed to answer the call of the Last Man. In the ‘90s we had hope, we were warned, and we still can make a choice.