Is It a Question Year or an Answer Year?
Plus: a 34-year old movie that's of the moment + what you want to see here in 2025
Welcome to Mess & Noise. Last time, I rounded up my most profound 2025 predictions, which included vanishing diners and a Luigi backlash. If you’re new here, I also write about being a working parent, business and culture weirdness, and sandwiches. Paid subscriptions are paused for January while I get my act together.
Around the time I turned 30, someone told me there are Question Years and Answer Years. On your birthday, you can look back and decide which it was. As someone who overthinks, procrasti-plans, and considers deep research relaxing, I like this framework. Getting permission to ask questions for an entire year? That’s a treat.
2024 started as an Answer Year (they all do!), but by November there were too many Questions. Mainly, “Wtf is HAPPENING???” and “I thought Gen Z was gonna save us?”
I’m reading When The Clock Broke, a political/cultural history/critique of the 90s, positioned as a prequel to Trumpism. In that decade there were loud and loathsome racists and reactionaries like David Duke and Pat Buchanan. There was “wokeness” to rail against, but it was called “political correctness.”
Instead of Twitter/X, we had the National Enquirer and World Weekly News. I remember my leftist stepmom freaking out about the Ozone Hole in ‘88, (which we kinda fixed!) the same way we freak out about climate change today. It’s oddly comforting to read because I keep thinking, “Oh right, we’ve been here before.”
If it’s just-a-little-bit-of-history-repeating, are there also parallels between today’s youth culture and the 90s? I watched the seminal Gen-X movie Slacker to find out.
Slacker is very much a film, filmed on film, that follows over 100 different characters around Austin while they have random conversations and encounters with friends and strangers.
There’s no plot, nothing happens except chatter that doesn’t resolve before it jumps to the next conversation — exactly like scrolling social media. The dialogue spans the multiverse, “opportunistic celibacy,” random gun violence, targeted political violence, awkward displays of masculinity, tons of conspiracy theories (one suggests the ‘88 election of George Bush was rigged), some art, and light misogyny.
The only difference in discourse then and now is where and how it happens.
Before the internet, you had to go to a coffee shop and strike up conversation with strangers in order to share your theories about “the secret groups who run our government” that have “already colonized Mars so they can leave this planet when it melts.” (No shit that is an actual line of dialogue from a 34 year old movie, not a late-night Elon Musk tweet.)
As a kid in L.A., my favorite part of Venice beach was reading manic essays that paranoid people scrawled on posters to display on the boardwalk, warning passersby of the government trying to control their brains and whatnot. Now you can open Instagram from your bed to hear MAHA moms freak out about seed oil conspiracies, only without the accompanying sunshine and sea breeze you’d get on the Venice boardwalk.
There is one guy in Slacker, “TV Guy,” who is addicted to screens and ostensibly doesn’t leave his house. The analog/VHS version of a boy with hikikomori syndrome, he prefers screens to real life because you can pause, rewind, and see all the little details. Today he might opt for a PS5 or scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
Same shit, definitely an Answer Year. We can fix any mess like it’s an Ozone hole.
Speaking of answers, I need yours!
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Links & Recs
More 90s stuff, no apologies: I’m finally listening to Kim Deal’s solo record and it’s wonderful (thank you, Katie H.!) There are sweet, classic, Deal-ian love songs (Are You Mine?, Wish I Was, No One Loves You More Than Me) twisty surprises (Crystal Breath) and one song (Disobedience) that hit the melodic swells/builds that Deal perfected way back on her 1995 Amps album, along with big echoey Steve Albini vibes (some of his last, sniff).
I listened to Disobedience in the car after dropping my son at school and multiversed with my 16-year old self, driving around the San Fernando Valley, waiting for my life to begin. I was a middle-aged mom in cold-ass Brooklyn, an alienated teen in a southern California suburb, a twenty-something yell-singing lyrics at a Breeders show in Webster Hall, an old woman on her deathbed somewhere in the world, who can’t remember anything but the particular pitch of Kim Deal’s guitar and voice combining. I cried in the parking garage before getting out of the car. Music can be life-affirming that way!
Also:
An intricate study of ultra-processed foods. This reel on hypernormalization. Karen Bass’s big oops. The NY Times interview with Ben Stiller got me very pumped for Severance coming back this week. Next week’s interview is with Curtis Yarvin, yikes. People are getting reverse nose jobs. I’m kind of down! Do I miss my old nose or do I just miss being 16? (See weepy section above).
That’s it for this one! Love and miss you, Los Angeles.