Walkmans, dial up internet, scrunchies, payphones, VCRs, looking up movies in the newspaper; and watching Beverly Hills: 90210 starring Luke Perry. These were the rites of passage for any child of the 90’s.
90210’s Dylan McKay was the epitome of smouldering cool. For me 90210 was a show about glamourous, grown-up white kids, doing what glamourous grown-up white kids did: have lots of sex, wear skimpy outfits and go flouncing out the door, being rebellious, cool and rich.
Dylan, Brandon, Brenda, Kelly and the 90210 gang were as relatable to me as a young brown Muslim kid in the western suburbs as aliens in outer space, but at that time I had no capacity to separate fiction and fantasy, and no critical faculties to engage with anything I watched.
The world of Californian teens was the exotic white world – and it was as riveting to watch, laced with taboo and the fear of getting caught for watching the salacious content. I remember sneaking into the bedroom with the tiny second TV with my siblings, our hearts beating frantically as we rushed to change the channel if our parents walked past and breathing a sigh of relief at commercial breaks.
The show was what every desi parent feared – full of out of control hormonal teenagers and lots of parental disobedience - and Luke Perry embodied all of it. He didn’t have any pressure to get married or have a job or even work. Dylan was the ultimate bad boy who existed outside of time and space. He was a projection of all our fantasies of who we could be if we existed outside the social structures that bound us.
HSC? University? Parents on your back? Dylan didn’t have to deal with any of that. He just rode his motorcycle and responded in mono-syllables.
His brooding visage was the lift out poster in TV Hits magazine we shared in the school walkways, along with dousing ourselves with clouds of Impulse deodorant we borrowed and passed along the corridors.
For millennials – Luke Perry and 90210 is a reminder of a simpler age of childhood – before internet overload and job insecurity, before we were isolated autonomous pods floating in a world of endless choice.
A world before Netflix when there were three channels on TV, and you needed to be home at the scheduled hour to communally watch your show so you could talk about it at school the next day (or arrange for it to be timed and recorded on the VCR by a friend). When you had to run for the toilet during the commercial break, and have someone shout at you to quickly return because the song was playing and the show was on again.
Now 90210 fans are mourning the loss of Luke Perry, and the less complicated fictional world he represented - the escapism of the Peach Pit and love triangles, where the most stressful thing was wondering if Brenda and Dylan would stay together. (Brenda and Dylan forever).
