CO-VIDs: the 90's neoliberal fantasia as experienced by daria morgendorffer, millennial

[Music] the nostalgia cycle dictates that we as a culture start reminiscing things about 30 years after they happen we got started early on the 90s 90s nostalgia began not later than 2008's the wackness a movie set a mere 14 years before it was made but which can only be described as a period piece by 2018 still not 20 years from the decade in question we were saturated with bruno mars dropping the video for finesse jonah hill writing and directing the straightforwardly titled mid 90s and old ibm and ps1 aesthetics flooding the indie game market it's also the year mtv announced it was rebooting daria fans were of mixed opinion about this so where you girls been all our lives waiting here for you we were born in this room we grew up in this room and we thought we would die here alone but now you've arrived and our lives can truly begin for many people who were teenagers in the 1990s people like me that is daario was something special and it is beyond the scope of this video for me to gush about all the reasons why about how genuinely smart genuinely witty and just genuine the show was about how much it respected your intelligence about how yeah okay after about season three it kind of stops being funny but is never less than honest so even if it no longer makes you laugh much it can still make you cry how it tapped into the feeling that all of the indignities of high school of being ignored humiliated or treated like crap could be withstood if you just find that one person who gets you but the thing i feel gets overlooked is that daria herself as an affect-free fount of cynical wit wasn't just a pure distillation of 90s teenager dumb though you can't deny she is but was written as a kind of defense of it being in daria's target demographic at the time it felt like the show was sticking up for us like 90s teens got a lot of [ __ ] from adults conventional wisdom was that they were a second lost generation sarcastic bitter and perpetually unimpressed all they did was make fun of everyone and complain about everything listening to sad angry music made by sad angry people only a few years older than them no direction and no motivation unfeeling caring about nothing and believing in nothing boomers turned on mtv and that's all they saw and at first glance that's all they could make out of daria either but the thing is the essence of daria the key to unlocking her character is that she cares she cares so much about so many things she cares about knowledge in a school where teachers don't know how to impart it and students are mocked for acquiring it she cares about depth when everyone around her is rewarded for superficiality she cares about integrity in an age of crass commercialism she cares about human connection even though her parents don't understand her and her sister pretends they aren't related daria didn't believe in nothing she was so principled her closest friends sometimes found it insufferable the sarcasm was a defense mechanism she wound people up as a way of exerting just the tiniest amount of power over the world around her it's how she kept it from getting to her and it was always carefully deployed biting remarks were either asides to friends in on the joke or directed at people who didn't care about her opinion gee i hope this won't lower your opinion of me come on how much lower going to get they weren't designed to hurt anyone and in the rare event they did daria carefully clumsily turned sincere and she was the first to cop to the fact that yeah this may not be the healthiest way to deal but it was all she had i'm too smart and too sensitive to live in a world like ours at a time like this with a sister like mine maybe i do miss out on stuff but this attitude is what works for me now the show's argument was that 90s teenage cynicism makes sense as a response to a flawed and corrupt world that does not appreciate you at an age where you have little means of changing it however much we idolize them the 90s were the decade of nafta the rodney king trials the first gulf war and the gulf war oil spill the hole in the ozone layer the rise of conspiracist white extremism that in a mere 10 years produced the una bomber the oklahoma city bombing and the waco standoff the o.j simpson trial which turned a misogynist getting away with murdering his wife or alternately a racist police conspiracy or both into empty pop spectacle and the unsanctioned bombing of kosovo how could you care about anything believe in anything be surrounded by adults telling you that this is the best things have been in years on top of having to be a high school student and not be cynical and being openly cynical when the whole world was telling you to shut up and smile was if not actually constructive at least maybe a little brave while mtv was doing its damnedest to monetize cynical teens dario was the rare property that seemed to understand them an interesting hitch in the deep mythology of daria is that the jaded apathetic teenager is a gen x archetype daria's age is a little squidgy being that the show ran for five years and she appears to be an upperclassman the whole time but she's in the same graduating class as me which means she was born somewhere in the early to mid 80s which would make her not gen x daria is an elder millennial i'm not i'm not going to use that word and so was the target audience for a high school comedy that premiered in 1997. we reminisce about the 90s like they were a monolith but really any discussion of 90s nostalgia should pause to ask wait whose nostalgia are we talking about and which 90s because this was the 90s and this was the 90s and this was the 90s and this was the 90s dary is about the mtv generation but specifically the mtv of smells like teen spirit and jeremy but it premiered on the mtv of backstreet's back and tub thumping but she doesn't fit the millennial stereotype of being over emotional and craving validation for every minor accomplishment daria morgendorffer does not care about participation trophies and for me as an elder millennial it's hard to say whether daria's disaffection stemming from strong moral principles is an accurate stand-in for gen x because they're not me i don't know what was actually going on with them i have only the culture produced at the time and most of it was culture produced for them not by them i don't know maybe they were just petulant layabouts the relationship between millennials and generation x is fraught and not just because there are older siblings classically the dividing line between the generations is framed by their relationship to the internet if you're gen x the internet is something that came home one day where if you're a millennial you grew up with it tech literacy and interconnectedness are our defining traits generation x was the last generation to be alone in the global sense and yes this is extremely classist in many communities the internet still hasn't come home but most cultural narratives are written by those with money but speaking of people with money at least as significant a dividing line is one's relationship to the recession a major factor of gen x disaffection was the career teens in the 90s had this map laid out for them you were going to finish high school get into a good college leverage your degree into a boring job with a good paycheck climb the corporate ladder for 45 years buy a house in the suburbs retire and die and somewhere along the way you got married and raised kids to do the same thing and the 90s teenager was smack in the first step of this process asking but what if i don't want all that what if i care about something else it wasn't even necessary to know what the something else would be just like are you even allowed to want it my goal is not to wake up at 40 with the bitter realization that i've wasted my life in a job i hate because i was forced to decide on a career in my teens and i sympathize i do because i had the same enui i didn't know what i wanted to do either but i knew i didn't want it chosen for me and that was the path i was expected to walk as well but even if they struggled with it by 2008 most of gen x had a degree and at least the beginnings of a career and guess what the rest of us didn't get millennials were given the same map as exers and then watched it catch fire in our hands by the time we were out of college if we even got to finish the jobs were gone and they never came back we didn't get careers we got the gig economy we had nowhere to peddle our degrees or to pay off the debts we ran up getting them owning property was a fantasy we daydreamed about rents that took less than half our income living with fewer than three housemates or bedrooms that were separate from the living room generation x was the last generation to accumulate any meaningful wealth not as much as those that came before but millennials and zoomers are getting nothing and we get dumped on by everyone else if daria is correct that the 90s attitude came from a moral place then gen x sold out their 90 cynicism just like boomers sold out their 60s idealism and both turned to the younger generation and said [ __ ] you got mine so yeah it's hard not to wish we could go back in part to grab the gen x teen by the shoulders and shake them yelling just like their parents what right do you have to be disaffected you don't know how good you've got it but where their parents would say it was so much worse in my day we'd tell them it will never be this good again it's not hard to see why the 90s would hold so much power over us the cold war ended in 1989 and the war on terror didn't begin until 2001 so the 90s were quite literally the only sustained period in 75 years where the u.s wasn't in a forever war with an infinite and loosely defined enemy the world superpowers began disarming their nukes the crime rate was dropping the economy was strong we had a liberal in the white house who'd won by courting the youth and minority votes cashing in on his rep as a former hippie to position himself as the fusion of 60s optimism and 90s pragmatism the relaunched vw beetle in politician form republicans were having a fit about him but couldn't get anything to stick to the guy and not for nothing the music kicked ass i mean i mean okay a lot of it was actually kind of bad but 25 years later even the bad stuff has some charm it was the neo-liberal dream come true the 90s were the best argument that the system works so long as the right people are in charge this is everything the democrats have been promising to get us back to almost everyone they've run for president has promised either a continuation of or a return to clinton-era liberalism but they even ran another clinton of course for 20 straight years the only one to actually win was the guy who said maybe let's do something different and then he didn't this is biden's entire appeal just put the dems in charge and things will incrementally go back to the way they were and to millennials that is very enticing because it's what we saw growing up it's what we were promised we weren't sure if we wanted it but it was at least a fallback if our dreams of being in a ska band or making adventure games at lucas arts didn't pan out and it never came and what we've had instead has been just so so much worse for two straight generations the 90s were the least things have sucked in living memory but i think it's worth remembering that what the democrats promise the neo-liberal dream did come true once and we weren't happy we were famously disenchanted with it neo-liberalism is the romantic relationship that's always in crisis if not a financial crisis a health crisis if not a health crisis a family crisis and you're just holding tight to each other because you're each the only solid thing in the other person's life you are trauma bonded and then all of a sudden things finally finally calm down for just a minute just long enough for you to take a breath step back and get a look at yourselves and for the first time you have room to think oh no this doesn't work this hasn't worked for many years things stayed terrible so long he almost missed when they were merely bad and if it's a choice between the two i'll take a return to the 90s over whatever this is in a survival pending revolution kind of way i've never been of the mind that the way to refuse bad is to stick with terrible or to tell myself bad and terrible are basically the same to abdicate my responsibility for them but it's not a solution 90s america was still sexist racist corporatist and bombing whomever it felt like and none of the things that were ostensibly right about the 90s stopped us from getting where we are now neoliberalism is a politics of saving the relationship that only works in crisis by allowing more crises to happen if anything it shows that politicians run on the same 30-year nostalgia cycle as pop culture in the 80s reagan cashed in on being a 50s tv star and in the 90s clinton cashed in on being a 60s activist and right at the changeover of 30 years since the 80s to 30 years since the 90s we had another reactionary iconoclastic tv star running against another white-haired folksy liberal who's not as progressive as he sells himself and oh my god in 2024 the republicans are gonna run the next w aren't they oh word is if it's even still happening that mtv decided the daria reboot would instead be a new show about jody spinning off from daria the same way she spun off from beavis and butthead it's a bit of a funny idea actually since it's supposedly about jody getting her first job after college so instead of being ambiguously gen x i guess she's now ambiguously gen z and we've skipped millennials entirely because nobody likes millennials but i i do think it's the right call jody is the better protagonist for today daria made sense in an idiom that no longer exists jaded sarcasm isn't brave in 2020 it's the path of least resistance for edgy chan lords it does not imply a deep and abiding morality this is the new sincerity generation nowadays bravery is being a gender non-conforming socialist queerto who refuses to let the ugliness of the world close them off from human connection and young people don't feel trapped by the future because nobody believes in the future anymore but to wrap this up with a bow we're not getting anywhere by looking back progress is gonna come from trying things we've never tried before so i wish them well and i thank them for the culture that defined my childhood but it's time to do like mtv and say goodbye to the 90s and this is the part where we play real hard it's much louder than at the beginning and we go back to the quiet part again

Channel: Innuendo Studios

Views: 194,127

Rating: 4.9088464 out of 5

Keywords: daria, mtv, morgendorffer, 90s, nineties, neoliberalism, democrats, nostalgia, biden, trump, clinton, reagan

Id: shSLPcp4C18

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Brutusness]

Very cathartic video.

"Young people don't feel trapped by the future, because nobody believes in the future anymore" definitely verbalized a feeling that's permeated my generation of younger millennials, in my experience.

[u/Frozen_Fractals]

Wow, there are some parts that hit heavy in this video.

"Things will never be this good again."

"The 90s was the only period of time in the last 75 years that the US hasn't been in a forever war."

I know the Co-vids are supposed to be less polished, and Ian has discussed the broad subject of this video before. But I feel like this is one of his best works.

[u/flugelhornjesus]

I’m reminded a little of that quote from Fight Club that I’m too lazy to look up right now, about how gen x were pissed that they weren’t all going to be movie stars when they grew up or whatever, and how weird it is to me, as a younger millennial, that someone could get so worked up about being lucky enough to live a relatively comfortable life.

Or like that movie Office Space. Like shit, yeah, okay, your job is soul-sucking and that’s lame, but Christ at least that guy could afford an apartment by himself, probably had benefits too.

And I don’t want to come off as overly unsympathetic to gen x disaffection, if only because- as Ian alludes to in this video- becoming enamored with the idea of things being less bad than they are now can prevent you from imagining a way in which things might be actually good.

It’s just sobering to think that gen x’s worst nightmare has become the younger generations’ best-case scenario, is I guess what I’m trying to say.

Anyway, great vid. I’ve always thought Ian’s at his best when he lets a little genuine anger seep through.

[u/SilentDis]

I was born in 1979. I'm at the end of the Gen-X age-range.

While he doesn't, and can't, know it, Ian spoke to a lot of my expiriences as well. Just as 2008 came along, I lost everything in a combination of my father leaving my mom, my job in tech blowing up, and numerous other catastrophes. Found myself working for peanuts in restaurants.

I've been back out of restaurants for 6 years now, doing work-from-home tech support. I'd slowly climbed up from that work to doing research, documentation writing, and web coding. Even managed a very, very small collective bargaining action for the small team I was on, and managed to get everyone on the team a raise.

New CEO, and... the job poofed. I'm back on phones, taking 30/day, with my skills entirely under-utilized, while I walk your grandpa through finding the address bar in his browser. It's become outright hostile toward the employees.

This whole thing sucks, and I do relate to Daria; maybe not as much as Ian does. Thing was, even as an edge-of-Gen-X, I still fall into the Millennial bucket according to most boomers. Either way, I 'did as I was told' for years, knowing it wouldn't do any good but after being yelled at so much, you kinda just 'go with the flow'. I was beat down, and just had no fight in me. I was steamrolled.

It took the later-Millennials, Gen-Z, etc. to light a fire under my ass. They were better at speaking up, better at screaming that it wasn't right. They saw exactly what I saw, but they didn't have the baggage of being screamed at and beaten that 'this is how it will always be'. They got me active, and I'm so glad for it.

I make no excuses for my shit performance on the political stage. I was dead asleep, and simply cried to myself over it. The Millennials and Gen-Z lead this charge, but I see where they're going, and I'm 100% in support, and have done everything I can to actively bolster their efforts and join when I can.

While I can't speak for all, I think you'll find this mentality with a lot of folks like me; edge-of-age, should be 1-step-back but find themselves siding with the progressives because of a simple failure of fortune. Something that should not be able to destroy lives as horrifically as it does.

[u/worthysimba]

Didn't realize how much I missed innuendo studios. Great vid.

[u/PokemonTom09]

Don't really have anything specific to say here beyond simply that this was a great video, as usual from Ian.

I don't have much first-hand experience with the 90's - on account of being a baby during them - but I totally agree with his extrapolation of how the attitudes pervasive among youth in the 90's shifted over the decades.

A stand out observation I completely agree with:

"Jaded sarcasm isn't brave in 2020, it's the path of least resistance"

[u/cedarsauce]

I felt so much of this video in my soul

[u/D_Caribou]

This video is completely on point on how and why I identified myself with Daria when I was in high school. And he's right, Daria was a sum-up of the early millenials/late X'rs frustration at society imho.

But, I am intrigued on how would a Daria for late Zoomers would look like, because there's lots to be cynical about today's world, in conjunction with the more honest approach the younger generations have.

[u/Supple_Meme]

The dream was always a lie, and because the people in charge have been asleep at the wheel, we're heading straight into climate catastrophe, environmental collapse, and a geopolitical meltdown. Years wasted asleep.