Cinema at the End of the World
Before “Y2K” labeled retro enthusiasm for Juicy Couture tracksuits, it designated a period of considerable speculation that when the clock ticked over on New Year’s Eve, 1999, there was a less than zero chance that the software powering Web 1.0 could suffer a glitch, thus triggering a techno-apocalypse that would end civilization as we knew it. Noted by computer scientists as early as the late 1950s but only breaching widespread public awareness as the ’90s were winding down, the “Y2K problem” referred to the convention of coding dates using only the last two digits, thereby rendering computers unable to distinguish the year 2000 from 1900.
New Year’s Day dawned with everyone’s AOL account intact. Meanwhile at the multiplex, the extremely chill Stuart Little (1999) topped the box office. Nevertheless, pre-millennial angst had been coursing through the cinematic landscape for some time. Published by the New York Times in 1996, Susan Sontag’s diagnosis of “The Decay of Cinema” was followed by a chorus of doomsayers lamenting the demise of the seventh art, whose reign as the 20th century’s photomechanical dream machine was being displaced from within by the advent of digitization. The biggest moneymaker of 1999, Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace, was the last of the franchise to be shot on 35mm but featured extensive digital effects and summoned, in the figure of Jar Jar Binks, a spirit animal for everything wrong about the coming digital paradigm.
Strange Days (1995)
However inevitable The Phantom Menace’s box office supremacy, cultural currency in the last year of the 20th century was owned by The Matrix, a film that thematized the universal conflict of analog vs. the digital while reveling in its own exuberant digi-fu dialectic. The Wachowski’s parable of revolutionary demystification waged in the mindscape of computational simulation felt decisively new, even as it spawned a horde of exegetes ready to explain how it illustrated Marxist theories of ideology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Plato’s Cave. What a time to be alive!
Or, perhaps, to be dead. Numerous touchstones of Y2K cinema traffic in visions of collapse, immolation, fragmentation, and the illusion of a stable self. These themes were presaged in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995), a supremely sleazy, suitably paranoid sci-fi riff on fear and loathing in Los Angeles on the eve of the millennium. Largely set in the hours leading up to the new year, the movie envisions a metropolis convulsed by bacchanalia on the knife’s edge of riot, and a pervasive occupation of militarized police with their finger on the trigger. Staged with a fog machine in every alley, a burning car on every block, a lighting scheme dominated by helicopter spotlights, and a thin sheet of sweat coating everyone’s face, the plot centers on a disgraced former cop who traffics in the underground market for “clips,” a form of potent virtual reality allowing the viewer to jack into a realer-than-real immersion inside other people’s recorded experiences. Everyone in the film is either repellent, hapless, pissed off, or deranged; several have their brains liquidized by clip overdose; another is subject to one of the most unsettling rape scenes in cinema. The narrative hinges on the cover-up of a Black hip-hop star murdered by white cops but the movie lets no one off the hook, least of all the viewer. Strange Days remains a hard-edged, exceptionally pessimistic genre film whose depiction of millennial angst, mediated violence, and pervasive psychosis was prophetic of things to come.
Fight Club (1999)
If Strange Days mounted the Y2K opening salvo and The Matrix proffered its quintessential allegory, the finale of Fight Club (1999) served up its signature audio-visual anthem: a megaton eschaton scored to the Pixies’ 1988 single “Where is My Mind?” Where indeed. It’s no surprise that upheavals in the mode of cinematic production would engender narratives about disturbances in the production of subjectivity. 1999 is rife with tales of identity crisis: The Matrix, The Sixth Sense, Eyes Wide Shut, Being John Malkovich, eXistenZ, Beau Travail, The Talented Mr. Ripley, American Psycho. (If we extend, more or less arbitrarily, “Y2K cinema” to bracket the years 1999–2001, the list gathers up even more titles wherein the protagonists grapple with the question of who, what, where, and why they are: Memento, Mulholland Drive, Donnie Darko, O Fantasma, Spirited Away, A.I. Artificial Intelligence.)
Fight Club has been credited with introducing “snowflake” into the own-the-libs lexicon and had the misfortune to be appropriated as an incel urtext. Despite its technical brio, the movie’s fantasia of macho ressentiment is at once too calculated to be provocative and too outlandish to take very seriously. Fincher had played a shrewder mind game in The Game (1997), and would flex his chops more potently in Panic Room (2002), but Fight Club remains a singular index of the transition from the jaded whateverism of Gen X masculinity toward the increasingly malevolent, vengeful cultures incubated in the social media petri dishes of the 21st century.
The Big Dick Energy posturing in Fight Club finds a different kind of outlet in Beau Travail, a movie whose disco inferno denouement is even more startling and cathartic than the Pixies apocalypse. (The two films could, with mischievous irony, exchange titles.) Claire Denis’s hieratic vision of ripped Legionnaires enacting a choreography of repressed eroticism and colonial futility on the shores of Djibouti is a movie out of time: it could have been made in 1909, 1969, 1999, or tomorrow. The nominal themes—memory, masculinity, desire, control—take second place to the ineffable precision and sensuality orchestrated by Denis in collaboration with cinematographer Agnès Godard and editor Nelly Quettier. The good work in Beau Travail is that of a seasoned filmmaker reaching the height of her powers, a triumph shared by several other millennial masterworks: Raúl Ruiz’s Time Regained (1999), Mike Leigh’s Topsy Turvey (1999), Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000), Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001).
Beau Travail (1999)
The most intriguing of all Y2K auteurist feats belongs to David Cronenberg’s millennium-bracketing one-two punch of the virtual reality ouroboros eXistenZ, a witty summation of his long-standing body horror concerns, followed three years later by the magisterial Spider (2002). Underrated to this day, Spider is a film of Bressonian purity and perhaps the greatest movie ever made about the effort to sustain consciousness. It has long been viewed as inaugurating a break with the overtly speculative tropes associated with “the Cronenbergian” and a turn to more “classical” narrative forms, yet the film’s staging of a shambolic schizophrenic (Ralph Fiennes) as he projects himself into his memories is no less of a virtual reality trip than eXistenZ. The difference is tonal rather than conceptual: Spider is the saddest movie in the Cronenberg oeuvre; eXistenZ the funniest.
The movie opens as legendary game designer Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) unveils to a focus group her latest title, eXistenZ, only to be attacked by a faction of the “Realist” underground in the name of existence. Shuffled away by “P.R. nerd” Ted Pikul (Jude Law), Allegra attempts to salvage the damage done to her biomorphic game pod, a squishy console that plugs directly into the player’s spine. Various complications ensue, above all the creeping realization—for both the characters and the spectator—that every event transpiring in the diegesis is another level of gameplay. Topical as its riff on technology may have felt in 1999, eXistenZ hasn’t aged a day, in large part because Cronenberg treats the material with the same placeless mise en scène he had long practiced and brought to apotheosis in Crash (1996). Moreover, the ultimate gag in a movie rife with clever dialogue, droll bit players, and gross-out jokes is that the virtual reality game being played is cinema itself. Transition between levels is signaled by little more than a change in coiffure, costume, and body language; the throbbing, lubed-up game pods may be advancing up the narrative, but the real game engine driving things forward is a supreme command of montage.
eXistenZ perfects a strategy rehearsed in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991): mounting an entirely credible and compelling thriller that is sheer phantasmagoria from start to finish. The movie concludes on a delicious variation of the Y2K mantra “Where is my mind?” as Pikul wonders, “Are we still in the game?” The abrupt cut to black that follows could well emblematize the end of 20th-century cinema itself.
Nathan Lee is an Assistant Professor of Film at Hollins University and has written film criticism for The New York Times, The Village Voice, and Film Comment.
eXistenZ (1999)
