Sometimes it's hard to tell if something is a feature of the world or just a feature of your own mind.
About this time last year, I wrote a post about the different aesthetic associations that, in my mind, come along with different "currents" of Catholicism.
But there are "aesthetics"-- in my own mind-- associated with so many things. Sometimes they're so specific, I wonder if they can be real.
I was sitting in a café in the Ilac Centre the other week, talking to a fellow poet. I was specifically talking about my frustrated efforts to write a poem about the Ilac Centre. Specifically, the poem was about the Ilac Centre in the nineteen-eighties. I said: "Well, it had a very specific atmosphere back then. There was a fountain in the middle, and a big balloon rising up and down above the fountain, and there were windowed lifts that went up to the top of the centre, and there was a mezzanine café, and there was a mosaic of street traders there, and..." All of this came together in a definite aesthetic for me, but as I tried to describe it, it seemed evanescent to say the least.
Anyway, recently I've been thinking of a very specific aesthetic which I called the "twinkly nineties aesthetic". I think it can best be exemplified by this scene from Groundhog Day. (The bit where the music begins.)
This aesthetic had a few elements which I'll try to identify:
1) It was unabashedly sentimental and upbeat.
2) It tended to use nature imagery, either literally or metaphorically.
3) This is harder to articulate, but it seemed to assume an equilibrium of social forces. For instance, liberalism and conservatism, religion and science, masculinity and femininity, tradition and progress-- there was a certain sense of stability.
4) I somehow associate it with blue jeans, hazy blue mountains in the distance, running brooks, stepping stones, and...that kind of thing.
3) Twinkly keyboard music.
4) A spring atmosphere-- sunshine, green fields, light sparkling on rippling water, etc.
I particularly associate this atmosphere with religion class in my school in the nineties. The religious education was terrible and was mostly watching "inspirational" films, or films about moral issues. They weren't all from the nineties, but the ones that were (or close to it) tended to have this atmosphere, at least in parts. For instance: Regarding Henry (1991), Shadowlands (1993), Scrooged (1988), Alive (1993) On Golden Pond (1981). In fact, although it's the earliest (and a long way from the nineties), On Golden Pond might be the prime example.
We'd also have retreats which involved a lot of lying around (literally lying around) listening to twinkly keyboard music like the music in the Groundhog Day video. At least, that's how I remember it.
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| A still from The Stand (1994) |
I also associate this aesthetic with The Stand (1994), which I watched on my thirtieth birthday. Despite its post-apocalyptic theme, it still had this sort of atmosphere-- partly because the survivors of the devastating virus are returning to nature, out of necessity. Cocoon (1985) also has this sort of atmosphere. So does The Bucket List (2007) and The Twilight Saga: New Man (2009) which shows that it's not necessarily confined to the nineties.
If anyone reading this video thinks I'm just talking about "hippie-ness", I'll have failed to express what I mean. It's something much more specific. Yes, it is hippie-ish, sort of. But a specific kind of hippie-ish, a long long way from gentle people wearing flowers in their hair in San Francisco.
Whether it exists outside my mind is quite another matter. I'd be interested to know if anybody else know what I'm talking about.
