I recently watched Gregg Araki's 1997 film Nowhere and was shocked by the ease with which it fit into my much loved tradition of Barth's Research and Development and Wallace's Hysterical Realism. Perhaps it is something to do with my relative youth, but until recently I have been able to conceptualize the nineties within an ideological whole, this is to say the zeitgeist had not yet crystallized in my understanding. However, upon viewing Nowhere, I began to feel as if I could identify a common thread in the media of the era. This spirit of course runs from the late eighties into the early naughts, and yet an undeniable connection does seem to exist. Take for example Pee-Wee's Playhouse, David Burn's True Stories, and of course Wallace's Infinite Jest. In all Woods' identifying traits are present. Characters are underdeveloped, dialogue is wooden, affects are simultaneous melodramatic, mysterious, and flattened. Still, all this takes place against a background of extreme, fantastic, over stimulation. In Infinite Jest this background is an allegorical, future American Federation, dubbed, in a Pynchonian homage, O.N.A.N. The environments are complex, sensual, and theatrical, inhuman characters play out their deadened existences against a backdrop of impossible spaces, spaces more complex than the characters themselves. Clearly the characters exist within a world deadened by irony and cynicism, humanity has been robbed of its humanity, or rather our humanity has, in an osmotic fashion, drained from us into our surroundings, our media. As Wallace pointed out in his 1993 essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, media has become so self aware it has made us into into passive, alienated consumers of the very forces that pacify and alienate us. Anyway, that's the diatribe, now watch the movie.
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