1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 13: 1979

I lived in Missouri in 1996, and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was the album the kids were listening to: two discs of epic pretentiousness. But the album had plenty of good tracks. Pop radio mostly played “1979.” It was one of the Mellon Collie’s quieter songs – and one of its fastest-paced.

Rock critic Amy Hanson writes:

Light, bright and just slightly off-kilter, “1979” was a somewhat surprising hit for the Smashing Pumpkins in February 1996. With James Iha’s guitars conjuring up just a hint of down-tuned drone à la My Bloody Valentine, and [Billy] Corgan winding a clear vocal through a mid-tempo melody with nary a shout or wrenching outburst in sight, the song was the perfect winter wonder. Disaster was lurking around the edges though, as a key portion of the accompanying video was lost when a production crew associate left the only copy on top of his car like the proverbial cup of coffee, or wallet, or important files, and drove away, effectively driving the images into nowhere. Never recovered, a frustrated band managed to recreate the moment, and duly dispatched it to MTV, where it became a heavy hitter. Although this wobble would become one of the earliest in a string of disasters that would eventually unhinge the band, before hindsight shook out its mane, the beauty and tenderness of “1979,” with the pure poetry in lyrics like “You and I should meet / Junebug skipping like a stone,” did more to erase the angst and anger of a generation of X-ers with its nostalgia tripping than just about anything else.

(I’ve changed some of Hanson’s punctuation and spelling.)

The video nails the jauntier aspects of what it was like to be a white teen in the mid-1990s. (If the 1950s and early 1960s are the “heads” of white teen culture, the 1990s are the “tails,” the muddier side of the coin.) As the video begins, the camera is caught inside a rolling tire. The perspective is intelligible and disorienting and reckless, all at once, and destined to be repeated in endless circularity, like Boethius’s wheel. So is the behavior of the idle teens in the video, who drive donuts and throw toilet paper rolls and wreak havoc in convenience stores. The cops arrive. The video highlights donuts of a different sort: more circularity (truly, nothing is new). The teens go to a party at someone’s house. They make out in the pool. They drive around some more. Billy Corgan, the Smashing Pumpkins’ lead vocalist, sits in the car’s back seat, surveying the chaos, and gently smiles and sings.

Many of these scenes would be repeated in a couple other grungy teen/twentysomething movies of the same year – William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, directed by Baz Luhrmann, and SubUrbia, directed by Richard Linklater – and in other movies of the 1990s and 2000s. The content and style and moral tenor aren’t quite original in the “1979” video, however. One notable predecessor is Larry Clark’s Kids (1995). But in just four minutes, the music video conveys nearly everything the full-length movies do, only much more cheerfully, though not optimistically: “Faster than we thought we’d go / Beneath the sound of hope” (my italics). Yes, that is how those years were: despairing. But that doesn’t mean the kids didn’t have a good time.