We Love Wednesday Addams on TV But Never in Real Life
Let’s be honest about how we treat people who are different
Perhaps I’ve watched Wednesday over a dozen times since it premiered on Netflix. What’s not to love about murder, mayhem, monsters, and existential teenage angst? It reminded me of growing up as a teenager in the 90s minus the intrusion of digital technology and the performance it demanded of children.
While there’s much to reviled about the 80s-90s (i.e., rampant misogyny, racism, sexism, homophobia, and the rise of the Christian right), there was a simplicity that now feels archaic, quaint, and downright unfathomable.
In 1993, I was a seventeen-year-old freshman in college navigating freedom, adulthood, sex, drinking, and voicemails. Wait — we no longer needed a tape recorder to capture messages? I was feeling very Judy Jetson. So, who could possibly have time for the internet back then? Our technology consisted of J. Crew catalogs and compact discs, which slowly overshadowed the mixtape because we could skip! rewind! advance the lyrical plot! with the press of a button.
We’ll never return to that from which we’ve come. And only Gen-X, the forgotten generation, will truly understand this. Perhaps this is the only artifact we can clutch to our chests — a march into adulthood…
