The Age of Vibes

On the Cringiness of Barbie, 90s pop-rock, Colleen Hoover, and nostalgia

Photo by Sandra Gabriel on Unsplash

Back in 2011, the show Portlandia declared that “the dream of the 90’s is alive” in Portland, Oregon. Over a decade later, it’s safe to say that the dream of the 90’s is alive everywhere. On college campuses like mine, students cross the quad in wide-leg jeans and Air Jordan sneakers and hair scrunchies and Doc Martins. They come to class unironically wearing Nirvana and Notorious B.I.G. t-shirts—though they sometimes admit they don’t listen to their music. But the music is back too. One can hear traces of grunge, 90s hip-hop and R&B, and folk-rock in many of today’s most popular artists. A few months ago, a friend sent me a video he shot at a P!nk concert in Los Angeles showing Alanis Morrisette joining the pop singer on stage to duet on Morrisette’s 1995 hit, “You Oughtta Know.”

And, of course, the most popular movie of 2023, Barbie, is all but built around two throwback hits from the 1990s, Matchbox Twenty’s “Push” and the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine.” I get the appeal of 90s nostalgia, definitely; but I was taken aback to read in a New York Times opinion piece by Lydia Polgreen and published shortly after Barbie was released, that the Indigo Girls are, “as the kids would say, cringe.”

Cringe? To my middle-aged brain, cringe is that thing you do with your face when someone scrapes nails across a chalkboard. It’s how you turn away from the sicko clipping their toenails on the subway (or perhaps, even read about someone doing it). But this was not cringe as a verb, but a noun. The Indigo Girls are cringe.

Polgreen goes on to explain that cringe is “the ultimate insult of our era. It implies a kind of pathetic attachment to hope, to sincerity, to possibility.” There is cringe comedy, think The Office or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend; cringe drama, like the mega-popular This Is Us; and on and on.

So, cringe is the ultimate insult, and yet, the examples I just cited are wildly popular. We seem to love cringe, can’t get enough of it. Even nostalgia can be cringe; Urban Dictionary offers the portmanteau, cringestalgia. This is more evidence that the dream of the 90’s is alive, except this time, cringe has me thinking of the 1890’s. Even in its viral, made-for-social-media way, cringe is just the latest iteration of another, much older style we love to hate and hate to love: sentimentalism.

As a literary mode, sentimentalism is most commonly associated with nineteenth-century domestic novels—think Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, both published in the 1850s and both best sellers in their day. These novels, and many more like them, used evocative language and imagery to appeal to readers’ emotions, often with the intention of affecting some kind of social change. In an essay titled “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature,” literary scholar Joanne Dobson defines sentimentalism as “that body of mid-nineteenth-century American literature, usually but not always written by women, that takes as its highest values sympathy, affection, and relation (and indeed builds these values into its very language and literary form).”

While sentimental novels were popular in the United States throughout the 1800s, the tide began to turn toward the end of that century. As early as 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in what now looks clearly like a misogynistic fit of jealously, complained to his publisher, “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.” By the early decades of the twentieth century, as realism came to be the dominant literary mode and sentimentalism was swept out of fashion, it would be Hawthorne who was canonized at the expense of many of the so-called scribbling women.

Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, “sentimental” came to be a disparaging term. “Sentimentalism,” writes Leslie Jamison in her 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams, “is an accusation leveled against unearned emotion.” She goes on to quote Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism, “A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it,” by way of exploring the reasons sentimentalism in literature is so much maligned. Jamison goes on to explain that there are both moral and aesthetic criticisms of sentimentalism—a “derogatory shortcut,” she calls it. The moral critics disparage sentimentalism because it gives too much credence to emotions in moral decision making, while aesthetic critics claim sentimentalism oversimplifies our emotions.

And yet. Even as the critical tide turned on sentimentalism, it never really disappeared. In fact, toward the end of the twentieth century, literary scholars like Dobson, June Howard, and others led a revival of scholarly attention to nineteenth-century sentimentalism. But especially outside the academy, sentimentalism, or, today, cringe, has remained popular—what has changed is the willingness of its fans to own up to liking it.

For example, while romance novels have always sold well, they have often been disparaged in the mainstream. But, in recent years, spurred on in part by social media trends like #BookTok, the corner of TikTok dedicated to discussing books, it’s cool to admit to loving romance. At the start of each semester, I get to know my students by asking them to share their favorite movies, music, television shows, and books. For years, getting students to answer the book question was like pulling teeth, and I often heard that they either didn’t have a favorite, hardly ever read, or as a last resort, they’d namedrop a novel they were required to read for a high school English class. That all changed a couple of years ago, however, when increasingly I heard the name Colleen Hoover. I didn’t know Hoover, it turns out, because I’m not on TikTok.

Us old people eventually caught on, however, and in 2022, six of the top ten best sellers were by Colleen Hoover. Perhaps not surprisingly, in the same year, romance was the top-selling fiction category overall, jumping 52% from 2021. While people who love Hoover do so unabashedly, her critics describe her work as, you guessed it, cringe. In fact, Emily Martin, in a “Book Riot” essay describing the “backlash against TikTok darling Colleen Hoover,” writes that Hoover’s cringe-worthy writing is “part of the appeal for Colleen Hoover fans.”

At the heart of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates over the value of sentimentalism versus realism, was a disagreement about how best to represent reality. Should we experience the world primarily as rational beings, aspiring to be objective in our decision-making, or by giving ourselves over to our emotional tendencies are we better equipped to handle real life? Journalism professor Karen Roggenkamp explains, “Somewhat paradoxically, medievalism, with its ‘romantic’ literary sheen, served as part of the broader push toward ‘the real thing’ in American culture.” Sentimental writing, a hallmark of romanticism, called on readers to look beyond the triviality of everyday life for the deeper truths embedded therein.

Which brings us back to Barbie and the Indigo Girls. In the film, the song “Closer to Fine” plays an integral part in Barbie’s passage from Barbie Land into the real world. There is resonance in the lyrics, of course, as the Indigo Girls sing about their search for meaning, “There's more than one answer to these questions / Pointing me in a crooked line / And the less I seek my source for some definitive / Closer I am to fine.” But in the film, the lyrics seem beside the point. Rather it’s the emotion—what my students call the “vibe”—that makes this 1990s throwback work as the soundtrack to a portal from a pink-hued utopia to the decidedly less glamorous and, critically, much more patriarchal real world. It is as if “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig took literally Roggenkamp’s assessment of the function of sentimentalism as “part of the broader push toward ‘the real thing.’”

The tide has turned again from the middle of the twentieth century when, at the peak of modernism, we believed that we could rely on rationality and objectivity to guide us toward a better world. There was a sense, then, that if we could apply the rigor of the scientific method to politics, journalism, religion, and even art, we could free ourselves of our messy emotional nature. Today, however, we find ourselves more aligned with our eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forebearers who recognized, to paraphrase David Hume, that reason is and should be subject to our emotion.

In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, finds evidence to support David Hume’s famous claim. Haidt challenges rationalist approaches to moral psychology by showing that “moral reasoning was often a servant of moral emotions.” That is, in determining the morality or immorality of a situation, people most often make quick, intuitive decisions, and only afterward do they employ reason to explain our intuitions.

While it’s easy to dismiss sentimentalism as frivolous—as Nathaniel Hawthorne once did—to do so would miss the ways in which appealing to people’s emotions is most effective at instigating positive social change. Empathy is a hallmark of sentimental writing and while there are risks in empathizing, both for the subject and object of empathy, feeling with another person is the first step toward understanding them. Often, this is how art affects change.

No doubt, we have traded the Age of Reason for the Age of Vibes. Emotions dominate our discourse whether we’re talking about the importance of empathy, the heartstring tug of nostalgia, or, indeed, cringe culture. These things tend to be cyclical, and I have no doubt that when eventually we experience a kind of cultural emotional burnout, the tide will turn back to an emphasis on rationality. In the meantime, it’s best to embrace the vibes—cringe or otherwise.