Because it’s impossible to think of precocious (read: drug prone) teens in L.A. in the 90s without also thinking of Bret Easton Ellis’ writing style, there is something beyond just “nostalgia” to Soleil Moon Frye’s bittersweet documentary, Kid 90. What’s more, like the theory presented in Rashomon, no single person will ever remember an account of events the same way (in part why Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction is told from different vantage points). Unless, that is, it’s shown right in front of their face with VHS archives (to that end, it should be noted this method was trailblazed via Jonathan Caouette’s 2003 documentary, Tarnation). Even then, of course, if the narrative is shaped into a documentary style, it’s hard not to see it colored in a certain light. Granted, Moon Frye–the girl everyone still knows most commonly as Punky Brewster–does her best to be as objective as possible with the unearthed material from her salad days.
After going through the rigmarole of being a child star in the 80s (and what was it with childhood stardom being so much more of a thing during that era?), Moon Frye came out the other side with her mental health still intact and, well, a huge set of tits that was suddenly making her fodder for the media’s joke mill. This, too, would become one of her great traumas overpowered by the strength to speak candidly about it, as well as her breast reduction while still in her teen years.
Clocking in at a brief one hour and eleven minutes, Kid 90 nonetheless covers an extensive amount of ground, particularly when taking into account that it’s primarily reliant on all the footage Moon Frye gathered as a youth. As she states at the beginning, “I think it’s fascinating to be able to go back, and have a true, chronological blueprint of what it was to grow up as a teenager in the 90s.”
Her teenage self constantly with a video camera in hand at a time when it was extremely cumbersome to hold, and also utterly indiscreet, speaks to the idea that people were not afraid of their actions being filmed back then. They didn’t see it as having potential to be used against them later. For this was long before the days of even TMZ. That Moon Frye did have this compulsive need to document also speaks to how she would note, “Part of me believes that somewhere inside, that teenage girl knew she was gonna have a story to tell.”
And she does. For the 90s as a cultural zeitgeist were most applicable of all to teens, particularly those growing up in the “life moves pretty fast” milieu of Los Angeles. More than anything, however, Moon Frye seeks to find out the following: “The big question for me was: did things really happen the way I remembered them?” While, to a certain extent, the answer is yes, it is also no. For it’s easy to see, reflecting on it with more objectivity, that so many of her friends were crying out for help, including Jonathan Brandis and Sean Caracena. Looking back on these two in particular leads Moon Frye to lament, “I think we all must have felt lonely in some ways, or at least some of us more than others. I know that in retrospect, and watching these videos. …friends were so obviously reaching out… some of my friends really needed to be heard.”
Alas, Moon Frye had her own demons to tango with, becoming romantically linked to House of Pain’s Danny Boy O’Connor. As another older man she has a dalliance with, a pattern emerges in Moon Frye’s life that highlights her self-admitted daddy issues. In her defense, however, Moon Frye’s “just one of the boys” persona seemed to make her run with a primarily male crowd–plus, most of the child-turned-teen actors in the industry were male. And, as Brian Austin Green points out, “Literally there were like twelve kids in the business, so we all knew everyone.” This includes Joey Lawrence, who calls Soleil to ask if he should visit her in the hospital or at home after her breast reduction surgery. A choice she had no regrets about as “Punky Boobster” became a nickname, in conjunction with the other unwanted attention that arose from having huge breasts all at once after being associated with puerile innocence. In short, it was too much too soon. As were the drugs that started orbiting in her circle.
Thus appears the imagery of Moon Frye and her friends getting fucked up as she delivers the PSA monologue (while in her Punky Brewster phase), “You don’t have to take drugs to be cool if you’re cool with yourselves. Believe in yourself, believe in what you can do, and you can make anything happen, anywhere. Just say no if somebody offers you something, wants to sell you drugs–say no, say hell no!” This cuts to her teen years where she’s making fun of herself for ever touting such a message as she screams, “I used to say ‘just say no’ to drugs, but now I’m just too busy saying yeah!”
“We got away with everything. It got pretty crazy. It was like our 60s, right?” Stephen Dorff admits. And yes, part of “getting away with everything” stemmed from those beautiful final moments before the internet emerged to change the way everyone acts, how they now feel they must always be “on” (hence, Easton Ellis pointing out in his book, White, that everyone has become an “actor” in the wake of social media).
The recklessness portrayed now comes across, surprisingly, as having a decided air of purity. Because it was a time when things were not calculated. Putting on a pose wasn’t as pervasive. Though one could say The Real World did fuel a new awareness of the “documentary style” and its propensity to spotlight the “common man.” Smoking a cig and chewing gum in her pool as she waxes on being miserable, this scene of Soleil is one that can be called peak 90s in L.A., intermixing elements of Reality Bites, My So-Called Life, any Nirvana song and, of course, the prose of BEE. Moon Frye’s angst-ridden narration, “This is what life is like. I picked the wrong time to be alive,” only adds to it. But oooh girl, in hindsight, it was clearly one of the better times to be alive, despite the tumult in L.A. year after year in the 90s, ranging from the Rodney King riots to the Northridge earthquake. There’s even footage of Moon Frye watching the O.J. Simpson police chase that remade what television and news were to people, suddenly feeding into their need for twenty-four hour crisis porn that played on a “reality TV” notion.
Amidst it all, Moon Frye keeps growing up in an increasingly fractured world. Which is one thing that will never change about being a teenager, no matter the decade. “I drank whatever they gave me,” she admits as more scenes of her partying are shown. It was only inevitable that with a “lifestyle” such as hers and being one of the few girls among the group, a violation was going to occur. Here, we also have the conjuring of Alyssa Milano’s (hmm, why isn’t she in Kid 90?) character in Fear being sexually assaulted by Mark Wahlberg (who is one of the many actors constantly leaving messages on Moon Frye’s voicemail). In the end, it would be a then twenty-nine-year-old Charlie Sheen who Soleil would deem her “first,” at least of a consensual nature. For when she was seventeen, she was raped by a man she does not name, subsequently deciding to lock that experience away in a box and never look closely at it again until now–a fact that once again plays into this idea throughout the documentary about whether or not we truly remember things as they are. And yet, even if we do, can we really trust it when all looking back is colored by our current worldview and collection of experiences in the present?
What some might find most shocking of all is that Moon Frye, perhaps because she is of a different generation, does not make “a thing” of having sex with an older man like Sheen. She doesn’t ever paint it as him being in a position of power that he took advantage of, instead describing him as her “Mr. Big” (possibly also a sign of Moon Frye’s vast generational divide from Z)–and yes, there are some New York moments in the documentary, but none so interesting as the L.A. years. In today’s climate, this is an extremely avant-garde move, and one that begs the question of how influenced we are by the media in the present feeding us the vast majority of our perceptions when memory (a.k.a. one’s sureness of self) fails to allow us to form our own opinions. To recall that, yes, there was once a time when it was okay for a girl to want to fuck that hot older guy without it being a concern for the politically correct police. And naturally, because of the time Moon Frye came of age, there are cringe-y moments of “unwitting” misogyny, to be sure, like when Jonathan Silverman and Dana Ashbrook are featured asking Soleil who she lost her “virginity” to in an ultra skeevy manner.
By the final frames, Moon Frye and the others she interviews do seem to be more at peace–or at least more “as one”–with the past. Whether it truly held up to how they remembered it versus reality is, as usual, entirely subjective. But one thing that is for sure is Moon Frye’s lifelong commitment to being true to herself. Regardless of how many selves have come and gone in that body. To accent the point, at the conclusion, she reads a letter she wrote in 1992 to the Soleil of the future. With these final words, it’s clear her former incarnation could be proud of this current one.
