With the death of Luke Perry we bid farewell to the 90s
Post-adolescent reflections on Dylan McKay
Pills
March 5th, 2019
March 5th, 2019
It seems like yesterday. A beat of eyelashes. In reality, twenty years have passed. Just one day to bring you back there, in the middle of the '90s. Just a March 4th any, the news of the deaths of Kith Flinth of The Prodigy and Luke Perry and you find yourself a teenager with the elastic of Calvin Klein sticking out of jeans, Kurt Cobain's torn tee and Greek homework to do. It happens to everyone sooner or later. The real and fictitious people who accompanied you as a young man fall one after the other like flies on a sultry evening. And, suddenly, you understand that you are an adult, but you find it hard to come to terms with the present. Because you are still that little girl who spent the afternoon watching Beverly Hills 902010 and hoped that Dylan would drop Kelly for Brenda.
Difficult to explain to those who grew up in the age of Netflix, with hundreds of cool TV series available, how important and pervasive it was in our daily life, the figure of a twenty-five-year-old busy to play the unlikely role of a high school student. To say that Dylan McKay, the character who made popular Luke Perry, who died after a stroke yesterday, was the James Dean of Generation X is exaggerated, even if the ingredients for the perfect rebel without causes were all: perfect hair, the high forehead, the sad look, a messed up, introverted family, the silver spider, a villa on the beach where he lived alone spending his days surfing or reading Byron and even a father involved with the mafia and a wife killed in bomb attack. The actor's career is no longer able to achieve the same success, chased without too much emphasis between appearances in Vacanze di Natale '95 starring Massimo Boldi or in the film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (film that opened the way to the iconic TV series with Michelle Gellar) and only in recent years approached with Riverdale. Dylan has engulfed Luke, keeping the man trapped in the character, in a continuous nineties loop done afternoons at the Peach Pit to chat with Brandon and Kelly. Seen in this light it makes little sense who, learning the news of Perry, cries at the end of an era because without Luke-Dylan, Kith who with the dazed look sings Firestarter, without Dolores O'Riordan or Chris Cornell do not leave the 90s, those remain immutable, ready to come back into vogue cyclically according to the will of designers and creatives, what if it goes is just the time that flows. Adolescence that gives way to adulthood.
