A Life in Film is a project where I’m writing about a movie from every year I’ve been alive.

1992: Let’s not even talk about the weird Xavier McDaniel joke

SINGLES (dir. Cameron Crowe)

I don’t know what it’s like to grow up as part of any generation other than X. Maybe the oldest Millennials, since I often find my cultural sympathies lining up with those a little bit younger than me. But that’s it. Like all of us, I’m a product of my time.

Which, in my case, means that I was starting to assemble the first draft of my adult self during the stretch when Singles had its weird little supernova interlude. I don’t know that it was a movie that meant much to, say, 40-year-old lawyers or even 17-year-olds who were thinking of joining the Air Force after they graduated; but among the nerdy, music-centered college-bound youth cohort that I was part of, this thing blew up like a firecracker. Out of nowhere, and for a little while, this movie exerted a bizarre cultural gravity. Not nearly as widespread as Batman, but very intense in its niche. The only album I’ve ever experienced peer pressure around “when are you gonna get it, you lameass?” was the Singles soundtrack, which went on to spend a few years as a member of the 90s De Rigeur Dorm CDs Starter Pack.

And that soundtrack album is tightly tied into the whole thing. The interplay between music and movie was a knot you couldn’t cut. They were conjoined*. The movie was noteworthy because of the soundtrack, which was noteworthy because it was so Seattle-heavy, which of course it was because this was a movie about music-loving folks in Seattle, which hey did you hear that Seattle is where things are happening right now? Anyway, Pearl Jam and Chris Cornell figure somewhat prominently in both movie and album.

*Consider the fact that the title of the movie itself is a triple entendre: singles as in single people, singles as in one-bedroom apartments, and—of course—singles as in music.

A Life in Film is a project where I’m writing about a movie from every year I’ve been alive.

1991: I’ve an arse here you can kiss.

THE COMMITMENTS (dir. Alan Parker)

To repeat a sentiment I’ve used a lot in this space: The Commitments is not a capital-letter Great Movie, but in its low-key way it is a great little movie about music. It’s about the joy inherent to making music with other people, one of the great collaborative pleasures of life. And, equally, about the bullshit that can come along with it. Maybe bullshit’s too strong a word; friction’s better. Interpersonal disputes, technical problems, trouble booking shows, miscommunications, you name it—all the stuff that I spent years talking about (at roughly Commitments-level stakes) in Nowhere Band.

And the level of the stakes is important there. This Is Spinal Tap covered a lot of the same ground, but at a different level. For all that Spinal Tap’s career problems are central to whatever plot that movie has, they’re still big enough to play arenas (when they’re not opening for puppet shows) and release albums on major labels. The Commitments, on the other hand, are at ground level and they’re going to stay there. The Commitments’ world isn’t that different from the one the Awesome Boys navigate in Nowhere Band, or—not coincidentally—the real one my bands the Creekside Ruffians and Derailleur have moved through. It’s the world of bands that are never going to make anything more than beer money. And if that’s less glamorous than the world of pro musicians, it’s accessible and relatable, since it’s where most of us who own instruments are going to spend all of our time. It’s the reality of what making music is like for the vast majority of people making music. And it’s even still pretty aspirational, because, as the movie illustrates, it’s just a shitload of fun to play instruments and yell with other people.

A Life in Film is a project where I’m writing about a movie from every year I’ve been alive.

1990: Dudes Rock Under the Sea

THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (dir. John McTiernan)

To lean again on the autobio part of this project: The Hunt for Red October is another one that I’m not about to claim is great cinema (although as a really well-executed-more-or-less-based-in-something-resembling-the-real-world thriller, it’s maybe a great example of a type of cinema that I’d love to see more of in the modern era). But it’s a movie that appealed to a bunch of my interests when it came out, and maybe helped cement them as things that would stay on my mind for the long haul. And it’s also a ton of fun, which is nothing to sneeze at.

But those interests. This was, of course, the first film adaptation of a Tom Clancy book (FWIW, I feel like it’s by far the best Clancy movie, adapting his best book). I was at the time going through the kind of Tom Clancy megafan phase that only makes sense when you remember that it was before the internet and I was living in deeply conservative rural Nebraska and the pipeline for new-author discovery was, uh, limited. I’ve written at length about my difficult mental relationship with the works of Thomas Clancy, but at the time I thought he was better than Hormel chili and any movie adaptation was something I had to see.

Clancy’s books, including Red October, often center on the CIA, which was another major interest at the time. Of course, nerdy adolescent boys often get interested in spying; that’s nothing unusual. What made me different was that I damn well did something about it, going through a process that came pretty close to getting me a job at the CIA *and* getting me a very unfortunate hat from Structure (and yeah, this is a thing I mention at the end of the linked comic, but it’s worth mentioning here: given where my mind and politics went as the 90s progressed, I think it was best for both me and the CIA that the thing didn’t work out).

A Life in Film is a project where I’m writing about a movie from every year I’ve been alive.

1989: Look. I’m sorry.

BATMAN (dir. Tim Burton)

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of superheroes on film.

But the thing is (*looks around*), this is all my fault. Well, mine and the fault of thousands of other people who had opinions about who the best writer for Superman was or what we’re supposed to take from the ending of Watchmen. We all thought “god, superhero comics can be cheesy, but they can also be so much fun, so resonant, and such fertile ground for metaphors that can really take you to interesting places looking at the real world! Wouldn’t it be great if everyone would wake up to this and get on board?” And then a monkey’s paw twitched, and a long fuse started burning, eventually leading to a world where everything at the multiplex was competing examples of CGI punchfest dogshit where all the life and humanity had been purged by a corporate assembly line filmmaking process.

This isn’t true, of course; or at least it’s not true in the sense that there weren’t actually any cursed monkey’s paws involved. But I do think that there’s probably some truth to the idea that the critical mass of comicsheads in the early 00s who all went and bought tickets to the first Nolan Batman movie, and to the Raimi Spider-Man movies, and the Singer X-Men movies, we were the accelerant that gave Hollywood in general and Disney in particular the idea that there was endless money to be made by quadrupling down on this superhero thing. It’s not just a thing that we let happen; it’s a thing that we cheered on at the time. And I don’t feel great about that.

Tracing definitive cause and effect in stuff like this is rarely possible, of course. But I feel like it’s reasonable to say that a lot of my cohort of 2000s-era young nerds with disposable income were all put onto this track just by living through the hype cycle for Burton’s Batman.*

*Purists will no doubt argue that the Donner-Reeves Superman movie was there laying groundwork a decade earlier, and that Superman and Batman had been showing up in movies since the 40s. And this is all true, of course! But subjectively, at the time, the Batman ’89 hype cycle felt different and more lasting, even if I’m just saying that from the center of the marketing-push blast zone.