Page 43 - Esquire - USA (Winter 2020)

the Big Bite

A Cultural Guide to Just Enough of Everything

We stand at the dawn of a new decade, and I can
think of no better example of our cultural evo-
lution than this: 2010’s top-grossing comedy was
Grown Ups, a film about Adam Sandler taking his
E N T E R T A I N M E N T boys on vacation and making a movie studio pick up
the bill. Nearly ten years later, we were all talking
TEENAGE about Todd Phillips’s Joker, a movie about a party
clown who kills because he doesn’t get the laughs he
RIOT feels he deserves. The culture at the end of the teens
does not exclusively serve the bros in the same way
it did at the beginning, and some of them are taking
From Atlanta to Moonlight the news better than others.

to Endgame, a celebration of the When we look back years from now, we’ll see that
this cultural decade didn’t start neatly on January
best (and a little of the worst) 1, 2010, just as the ’90s didn’t really get going until

that was the decade in pop culture Nevermind hit number one in 1992. We can argue
that the teens began in 2013, when Netflix debuted
By Dave Holmes House of Cards and made streaming a prestige prop-

illustration: Adam C. Moore Winter 2020_Esquire 37