The Decade the Outsiders Got In

It started at the margins and the video store. Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape won Cannes in 1989, made a fortune against its tiny budget, and proved there was a real audience for small, talky, personal American films. Then came the gold rush. Sundance turned from a sleepy festival into a marketplace; Miramax turned distribution into a blood sport; and a generation of directors with no film-school pedigree and total cinema literacy poured through the door. Quentin Tarantino, who had genuinely worked in a video store, arrived with Reservoir Dogs and then Pulp Fiction, films assembled out of other films and delivered with a swagger that made cinephilia itself feel dangerous.

The decade had a tone before it had a movement: ironic, verbal, in love with structure and pop debris and the texture of ordinary aimlessness. Richard Linklater drifted through a day of talk in Slacker and a night of it in Dazed and Confused. The Coen brothers perfected their deadpan in Fargo and The Big Lebowski. Paul Thomas Anderson conducted ensembles in Boogie Nights and Magnolia; Wes Anderson built his first doll's houses with Rushmore; Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman bent reality in Being John Malkovich; Alexander Payne sharpened his knives on Election. At the rawer edge, Larry Clark's Kids and Harmony Korine's Gummo and Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66 pushed transgression as a value in itself, while Todd Solondz's Happiness dared you to keep watching.

And then the thing the decade was named for quietly stopped being true. "Independent" had meant outside the studio system — but success is a solvent. Miramax was bought by Disney; the studios opened "indie" boutique divisions; the Sundance hit became a genre with its own conventions, its own stars, its own predictable arc from festival buzz to specialty release. By the end of the decade an "independent film" was a marketing category, a look and a tone you could manufacture, not a relationship to capital. The outsiders had been so thoroughly let in that the inside reorganized itself around them.

This is the recurring fate of a winning insurgency, and the '90s indie wave is its cleanest American case. The movement's gift was real and permanent — it widened forever what an American film could sound like, who could direct one, and how strange it was allowed to be; Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation and a thousand films since are unimaginable without it. But the word curdled in the winning. The decade that began with a kid from a video store sneaking into the temple ended with the temple selling tickets to the sneaking. That is not a betrayal of the independent film. It is just what happens, every time, when the outsiders finally get in.

---

The line: Sex, Lies, and Videotape → Slacker → Reservoir Dogs → Pulp Fiction → Fargo → Boogie Nights → Being John Malkovich → Magnolia

This line crosses:

• The Ten Years the Directors Won — the second American director-boom, and its rhyme: New Hollywood was killed by the blockbuster, the '90s indie absorbed by the studios' boutique arms; both freedoms ended when the system found how to monetize them.
• The Myth Made in Italy — Tarantino is the shared node: the video-store cinephilia that powered the indie decade is Leone's "love a genre by amplifying it," now native to Hollywood.

Read through: Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film.

A note on the argument: the history and the films are documented record. The framing of the decade as an insurgency that dissolved its own meaning in winning — "independent" curdling from a relationship to capital into a marketable tone — is this essay's reading.