Kid 90 and the Aching Sadness of Nostalgia

from SPOILER Magazine Special Holiday Edition 2021

by SPOILER Magazine

Zack Snyder’s Justice League

BY ETHAN BREHM THE WORD “NOSTALGIA” LITERALLY TRANSLATES

to “homesickness” in Greek. As recently as the 19th century (and as early as the 17th), nostalgia was considered a psychological disease, most commonly affecting soldiers at war in another country, with many of them discharged and, in some instances in the Russian army during a 1733 outbreak, buried alive.

These days, nostalgia is more of a blanket term for reminiscing about our past. What was once a niche and uncommon condition can now be seen everywhere we look, sprinkled all throughout our lives and fueling modern pop culture. Nostalgia can be triggered by things as small as an Instagram post about an old TV show or childrens’ toy, as mainstream as a song that employs an obvious ‘90s influence, or as personal as a photo album or home video from our own past. Perhaps it’s not that people today want to relive their past more than previous generations had, but that there are more outlets to alleviate some of these desires, albeit temporarily, and thus more of a culture forming around them. In many cases these longings can still definitely bring about a sort of depression and sadness, even though it seems like most people our age experience these feelings along with us. And so we realize that it’s that sharing of nostalgia that helps us to cope the most.

“Are our memories real or are they the stories we wanna tell ourselves?” This is a main question that actress/ director Soleil Moon Frye poses, and the de facto proposition of her film Kid 90, a documentary that shows footage of her life during her teen years, in the years following the wrapping of her popular sitcom Punky Brewster, in which she starred as the titular character.

In the ‘90s, Frye carried around a video camera everywhere she went, and now, over 20 years later, she’s unboxed the footage and started compiling a sort of time capsule of the era. Becoming famous at a young age, the actress surrounded herself with a small little community of other child actors in Los Angeles. It was that group of kids where, at any time, any one of them would make it big. It consisted of Leonardo DiCaprio (who serves as executive producer on this film), David Arquette, Stephen Dorff, Brian Austin Green, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Jenny Lewis, Mark Wahlberg, Jonathan Brandis, and many, many others. She talks with some of them now in between showing footage from back then, wondering why they value their past so much even though a lot of it was riddled with tragedy. “It feels like we were losing a friend every week,” laments one star, referring to the alarming rate of suicides by young actors during that era—ironically a former side effect of nostalgia back when it was still considered a disorder.

Being a kid is tough, but being a kid actor is like having the burden of expectations of an adult, but without the maturity and confidence to deal with them. There’s pressure to keep a certain youthful image despite wanting and developmentally needing to make the mistakes that every kid makes. Even despite these stresses, it’s still nice when everyone loves you and knows who you are, but then there’s a loneliness that sets in once that’s all over.

Our memories are funny. As we grow into adulthood, we come to an inevitable point where we’re separated enough from our youth and adolescence, and able to think back and wish that we were there again. Life as an adult is tough, and as the deluge of stresses and responsibilities piles up, we have a tendency to wish that things were simpler again. However, time has an interesting way of putting these memories into order; getting rid of the bad and justifying the sad. It may speak more to how, as kids unable to process pain correctly, we found ways back then to wrap our heads around tragedy and make sense of certain realities.

Does this mean that only those who had ideal childhoods are overcome with nostalgia? Not at all. In fact, many of us were faced with some terrible obstacles as kids, whether it be divorce, abuse, depression, bullying, unrealistic expectations—all things out of our control. Yet most of us today long for the mindset we had back then regardless—the same sense of hope, perhaps—rather than the actual time travel. Now, if only we were able to see back then that “this too shall pass”—that life does in fact get better—if only we could have told ourselves that, then maybe those obstacles wouldn’t have felt so despairing. Maybe those among us who thought about ending it all because of them would still be around today.

We’re somehow all convinced that our teen years are our golden years, when in reality it only gets better when we start maturing and seeing other people and their issues. Looking back, it may feel like times were better, but how much can we see only in our memory? It’s just a highlight reel. But what happens when you’re able to take off those rose-colored glasses and actually look back behind you? By unearthing her collection of old videos and recordings, Frye is able to do just that as she digs through her past and experiences, in a way, what things were actually like, undistorted.

Before home videos were ubiquitous like they are today, people weren’t constantly putting on an act whenever the cameras were rolling. Chances are, nobody would ever really watch this footage again, and there would definitely be no chance of the entire world having access to it. Because of this, behavior and dialogue was much more candid and frank. Most of the people in Frye’s videos are very much acting like themselves—for better or worse.

Early on in the film Frye talks about having an amazing childhood and how she wanted to hold onto that youth while everyone around her was forcing her into adulthood—a big reason for her highly-publicized breast reduction—but then later on she says how she so desperately wanted to be mature. This really appears to be a contradiction at first, but the more we think about it, we realize that so is nostalgia.

Is nostalgia more about a longing for the actual past or a desire to obtain the same hopeful outlook and naive mindset that we had back then?

So is nostalgia more about a longing for the actual past or a desire to obtain the same hopeful outlook and naivety that we had back then? It’s not necessarily a desire to change our current reality, but simply a romanticized obsession with life in a simpler form; merely to view the world through the eyes of your younger self. Like we’ve discussed, adolescence is not usually a piece of cake, unless we merely view it as an absence of the pressures of adulthood. Perhaps some of us just need to look to the past as a way to find comfort in where we’ve gotten to today.

Frye’s experiment is a thoughtprovoking one as it stands on its own, but the actress is also able to analyze what she’s learned from the experience and how she can apply it to her life today, even if that’s never really conclusive. The director doesn’t always do a great job comparing her actual memories with what she sees in the footage—a major theoretical topic of discussion. She’s showing these videos to us in full view, yet at times it’s difficult to see them as more than simply presentational. As an audience, it’s interesting listening to her perspective as a teen and now seeing how it’s evolved, but we do wish there were more of a concrete purpose or structure to her themes.

Yet still, Kid 90 operates as a time capsule of sorts, not averse to maintaining a natural narrative, but also never searching for one. It doesn’t really have to. There’s a story at play, but the film isn’t really about that story as much as it is an experience of Frye’s memory compared to the reality that she actually lived through; a glimpse into the past, and one person’s perspective on that look back—her thoughts on how these events have impacted her approach to life now. We don’t necessarily feel changed because of the shared experience, but we do feel like this experience is worth watching. The application for the audience comes naturally, even though it’s a lot of pensiveness and pontificating more than it is a story with a natural trajectory or conclusion.

I suppose this fits into Frye’s commentary about our brain’s tendencies to organize real events into these little narratives so we can better make sense of them. Life isn’t a cinematic story as much as we want it to be, and so the director—

We’re somehow all convinced that our teen years are our golden years, when in reality it only gets better when we start maturing and seeing other people and their issues.

whether intentionally or not—has made it so her film also doesn’t quite follow a standard three-act structure. However, if we’re putting these stories into a documentary presentation and applying form and purpose to them, then our mind’s narrative tendencies do become expectation.

The film is hardly ever able to find anything to ground itself in other than its themes of nostalgia— however huge and relatable those may be. Frye shares with us her actual past, but presents the footage in a way that occasionally feels disjointed and plotless, albeit linear. The filmmaker looks at the past as a roadmap to where she’s gotten to in the present (and this is really her intended theme of the movie), but almost never shows us or talks about that place where she ends up. She reminisces with old friends about the good ol’ days and analyzes the amount of truth in their memories, but nothing ever feels resolved, or even almost so. Yet that may very well be the point. It’s rarely more than an exercise in nostalgia, albeit an interesting one at that.

Kid 90 is definitely cathartic for Frye, but the film only really soars when it’s able to connect to its viewers—many of whom lived through the turbulent and oftconfusing ‘90s—and makes us apply its ideas to our own past. It helps that the audience likely recognizes many familiar faces along the way. If this were the same film but from the tapes of someone we’ve never met, the journey wouldn’t hold as much weight or relevance, or be nearly as enjoyable in its current execution. Frye doesn’t usually name names, so oftentimes we’re piecing things together ourselves, which wouldn’t really work as well if we didn’t have a ‘90s pop culture frame of reference to begin with.

However, Kid 90 is also about the bittersweet transitions in life—the inevitable loss of innocence—and the chapters we go through and don’t even notice until years later looking back. The more thoughtprovoking, and at times fun, aspect of reminiscing is realizing how important certain people or events

watch kid 90, out now on hulu

were back then, and how we never fully appreciated them until later on.

On the other hand, the hard part about revisiting our past is realizing that perhaps life wasn’t as great back then as we remembered it being. But also there are things that were just that great. We look back at our own memories and there’s a beauty there. No matter how bad our lives actually were, our minds always seem to focus on these glimmers of hope, played back in our heads over the oneiric sounds of The Cranberries or Oasis, unfolding with sensibilities of a conventional narrative rather than actual reality. And with conventional narrative usually comes a wrappedup denouement. Frye postulates that if actually going back means that we end up becoming disillusioned by what we perceived as a better time, then is it really worth going back in the first place? Are the lessons we learn in the process worth that disillusionment? Or are we better off with these things serving as mere memories? But one thing is for certain: Reminiscing is much more therapeutic when we have someone who we can talk about it with.