Love, Safety, and the 1990s: On Annie Baker’s Janet Planet
Annie Baker | Janet Planet | A24 | June 2024 | 1h 53m
Eleven-year-old Lacy isn’t sure if she should take the antibiotics. She sounds out the word—AN-TI-BI-OTICS. She knows her mother, an acupuncturist, thinks they’re bad. But her mother is letting her choose for herself whether or not to use modern medicine to cure her stomach virus—or perhaps just anxiety—that is keeping her from the first day of sixth grade. The paper pharmacy bag sits on the counter until Lacy climbs out from under the dining table to swallow exactly one pill. This scene in Janet Planet, the debut film from playwright Annie Baker, is one of many moments where a splinter between the maturity of a mother and a daughter doubles as a generational rupture, where a woman born in 1945 reaches out to a girl born in 1981 and tries to relate. A story at once so small and so, so large, Janet Planet is also a period piece about America’s awkward neoliberal turn in the 1990s and the vestiges of counterculture still hanging on.
I, like Lacy, was recently deliberating taking a course of antibiotics, which a virtual doctor prescribed me after I filled out a questionnaire at 3 a.m. on my phone. I considered my mother, who like Lacy’s, instilled in me the belief that antibiotics mess with the body’s natural equilibrium. It’s a knowledge tucked in the same space in my mind where I keep the rules of thumb that berries should be bought organic but bananas and oranges don’t need to be, that yoga is basically just as good as talk therapy, and that the rich should be heavily taxed to improve the quality of life for everyone else. These are some of the things my mother, born in 1967 to divorced hippies in Massachusetts, taught me. Baker, raised by her divorced mother in Amherst in the 80s and 90s, is informed by a similar attitude of living in casual defiance of the unappealing norm.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer likes to draw up a hyper-specific time and place. Janet Planet is set in western Massachusetts and structured in three parts by the people who enter into relationships with Janet from July to September. First, a crusty and temperamental boyfriend, Wayne; a whimsical yet flighty friend, Regina; and finally Avi, a Rilke-quoting puppeteer who runs a nearby commune. Lacy, quiet but hyper-aware of the world around her, finds the flaws in each.
It's the summer of 1991: the year of the recession that George H. W. Bush couldn’t quite dig the nation out of. The troops are returning, sluggishly, from Iraq and Rush Limbaugh is decrying “feminazis” on syndicated FM. When the Clock Broke, John Ganz’s new account of “how America cracked up in the early 1990s,” makes a case that this time period engendered the rise of a whole new politics. With no Cold War to rally around, it was open season for the age-old conflict of the Left versus the Right. But for a number of reasons, progressivism is also fatally weakened.
Janet Planet exposes the New Ager’s spiritualism of this period wearing thin. Wayne’s body hurts. He has a migraine and he lies in the dark while the new generation’s child watches from the hallway with the light on. Wayne lashes out at Lacy and her persistent questions, slamming the door in her face. Janet’s face reveals this is a step too far. The scene feels like a metaphor for the way the culture in the ‘90s turned toward individualism and away from the collective. Collectivist action—utopian socialism, community organizing, civil rights and anti-war action—threatened the anxious desire to privatize. The door was slammed, so to speak, on dissident Americans’ persistent questioning, its skepticism of the tight authoritative system and idealization of an alternative. At this juncture, Wayne settles into his destiny as a disillusioned Baby Boomer. Regina’s free spirit is crushed by a dead-end ice cream stand job. Avi is a joke because a beatnik sensibility, the film suggests, is at least somewhat performative in 1991.
Baker’s naturalistic dialogue—a dedication to the present that eschews flashbacks or overstuffed backstory—helps convince us that we’re in this particular fulcrum moment. So do the woodpeckers outside the cozy, angular house they filmed in, built in 1979 and once home to a Waldorf operation. For her role, the actress who plays Janet, an effortlessly maternal, though not exactly authoritative Julianne Nicholson, tapped into her own rearing by an herbalist mother in a Massachusetts cabin without running water, according to Baker’s interview with the New Yorker. A prop car’s bumper sticker proclaims “Free Tibet” in a sun-dappled driveway. Sitting in a Northampton parking lot, Lacy tells Regina that a man lit himself on fire there, in protest of the war. “The Gulf War” isn’t named but, armed with all the cues, we know.
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The ’90s may not have looked like the Summer of Love photos printed in Life, but it certainly had a counterculture despite, or perhaps in response to, the wave of possessive, buttoned-collar individualism. I was born in ’97: too young to have firsthand knowledge, but old enough to reflect on the stories my mother tells me. In the ’90s, she carried me on her hip to a solstice parade where bicyclists rode nude with painted daisies for nipples, and we did not pay for cable. As a child in Boston, she spent days at a time in the care of Maria Montessori’s direct disciple. When it came time for me to go to preschool, she found a place that used the same method of collaborative play.
After the mythic hedonism of the ’60s and ’70s, with a rapid jerk back to conservatism in the Reagan ’80s, the ’90s saw a consolidation of corporate power that made any anti-establishment, anti-consumerist activity clinging to the margins—such as a communal puppet troupe—extra precious to some and super suspect to those on the other side. “From 1965 to 1994, we did strange and weird things as a country,” journalist Fred Barnes wrote of Newt Gingrich’s theory of American history. “Now we're done with that and we have to recover. The counterculture is a momentary aberration in American history that will be looked back upon as a quaint period of Bohemianism brought to the national elite.”
While the world changes on a macro level, so do the insides of the American family. It makes sense that Lacy, Annie Baker, and my mother are all children of divorce—widespread adoption of no-fault separation in the 1970s led to the “divorce revolution.” By the ’90s, the right decided it’d gone too far. In When the Clock Broke, Ganz notes that daytime talk shows became preoccupied with wives working through infidelity and describes the general panic around a loneliness epidemic. Kids from fractured homes were portrayed as fragile, damaged.
Janet’s single-mother status, unexplained to the viewer, is loaded with anxiety. She pursues her romantic desires wherever they take her; she allows herself to get swept off her feet; she takes ecstasy with Lacy around in order to unlock her unconscious, explaining it as “a pill for sleep.” From the vantage of 2024, do we reproach Janet? Do we chuckle at her laxness that’s so unusual today, what with our location tracking software, “gentle parenting” influencers, and online message board peer pressure?
We could delineate every era by its parenting norms, and find the generational flip-flop within every family unit. My mother’s parents treated children like fully-developed people arguably too early; I felt like I wasn’t allowed to become an adult until too late. Janet and Lacy dance around their own negotiation of what’s appropriate and who they want to be to one another. In the beginning of Janet Planet, Janet comments that Wayne thinks it’s odd they still sleep in the same bed, which Lacy counts as another mark on the score against him. Janet seems to not know whether she agrees, relying on the instinct of her young daughter to clarify her own.
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My mother is writing a memoir. It’s about her unconventional upbringing, a trial by fire in Boston’s Jamaica Plain, where she found structure in unexpected places as refuge from her young parents’ open-door approach to various characters and substances. She’s on Chapter 10 and I haven’t read any of it yet. I am fearful of it being good and thus public, and the potential for it to be bad and thus never realized. On a recent visit home, I asked her: “What is the thing about the book that will make it interesting to someone who doesn’t know you?”
She thought about my question as we walked under the Ballard Bridge in Seattle. “The idea that you can feel loved without feeling safe,” she said.
The hippies are easily romanticized. Nostalgics who don't know dating without apps or San Francisco without Google lap up a salacious version of them sold by the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson. But we weren’t there, then. In the 1999 anthology Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture, Frank Zappa’s daughter Moon Unit admits she hated the absence of rules, supervision, and underwear in her household. “It always left me with an awful floating feeling…of too much space, of too many choices,” she wrote. “Hippies explore sexually taboo terrain but their children, too young to choose the lifestyle for themselves, suffer the consequences of being exposed to too much stimulus too early on, more than most of us experience in a lifetime.”
Lacy is a strange, precocious kid. Not alarmingly so or much more than I must have been, talking under my breath to Calico Critters. But she says herself that she has no friends—and it’s “a complete mystery” as to why—instructing Janet to pick her up from camp because she thinks no one likes her, which turns out not to be true. She’s sensitive and observant, and through her eyes, the too much-ness of Janet and her milieu is laid bare. She scrutinizes her mother’s every move, as we watch her notice her mother’s failings for the first time.
When my mother asks her mother on the phone why she let certain things happen, why she lived with the man she chose to live with, how she could allow her daughters to feel unsafe, my Mimi says, “That was the way it was, then. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” The phrase is funny, a distillation of what I imagine was actual, no more representative of a moment or milieu than a Guns ‘n Roses logo t-shirt sold at Hot Topic in the suburban mall of the new millennium.
All we have of the past are interpretations and reproductions. Janet Planet commits to one without judgment. What would it mean to not romanticize, but to take a person, a place, or an era as it was? At the screening for the film that I attended, the audience scoffed at Avi, and it makes sense as to why: the flowing linens and the thick beard; the way he points at Lacy and tells her, “You are God.” I don’t see him as a villain, though cliche cult leader he may be. He is one more point in Lacy’s constellation of adults who form her idea of their mysterious operation. Avi is both Lacy’s source of despair and the creator of a magical twilight theater show that mesmerizes her, which is a complication she’ll find in people for the rest of her life. It is not always safe to let the strange man in. But it can be an act of love to let the child meet him.
Filmmaker Jane Schoenbraun, whose 2024 feature I Saw The TV Glow is also set in the ‘90s, described Janet Planet as “a film about something there isn’t a word for but there should be: the experience of being young and trying to glean the extent to which you feel safe being a part of the world.” For all of Baker’s specificity, the story’s perspective belongs to the curious pre-teen girl. In every iteration of society this girl will exist, roaming the borderland between childhood and growing up. Somewhere in the field she’ll have a realization about the positions held by men and women, the cosmic rhythms that comprise sex and partnership and that explain why your mother’s friend gets back in the bad man’s car. It’s not a “coming of age” film exactly, but it is a portrait of an age where one grows.
Before the summer, Lacy lived full-time on Janet Planet. Over the course of two months, she turns more often to herself and allows there to be a separation from Janet. This is the beginning of childhood’s end. It’s an inevitable tragedy set to Beverly Glenn Copeland’s unpretentiously holy Keyboard Fantasies. History has to die the same way: go out with no bells or resurrection promise. Gone forever are the ’70s, the ’90s, the early 2000s, and recreations made today are just that. Janet Planet is not a neatly packaged period piece, the way an 11-year-old is not a full-blown person.
In his satire novel Generation X, Douglas Coupland coins something called “legislated nostalgia”: the culture’s oppressive expectation that we feel something for a time we may not have even lived. It’s a feeling many of us have when we claim that we were born in the wrong decade. Narratives about the past that don’t settle for simple nostalgia but rather tease out its jagged intricacies, writing characters who try to make sense of a fundamental change in politics and values, are the ones we are most able to relate to. Baker’s art does this well. I think my mother’s will, too.