Recurring Motifs of the '00 Decade

[colinr0380]

I suppose we could argue that there was a large number of films where reality proves itself to be quite different from the way we initially perceived it to be in films this decade, though along with The Sixth Sense and The Others you could also trace this back to The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor "it was a virtual world all along!" type sci-fi films. Also films which flatter their audience that you actually are special and stand out from the crowd as you go on a journey with a nobody becoming somebody (either you are a messiah figure or you become the leader of a terrorist organisation, or you're a superhero!)

Then combine that with the resurgence of straight forward fantasy films and you get the sense that Hollywood cinema in this decade has gone from a gnawing feeling in the late 90s that you are being lied to or manipulated to outright escape into manufactured worlds and a feel that ignorance could actually be bliss - an escape from a reality where you cannot, or are actively discouraged from, effecting any change.

By the way I really like Memento (for me Nolan's remake of Insomnia is his more disappointing film so far), but even this could be seen as a continuance of ideas from Christopher Nolan's first film Following, which is perhaps even more radical in the way it jumbles up its entire timeline, though it could be seen as tricksier in doing it without a memory loss 'excuse'. It shows an early version of ideas explored again in Memento of having the audience orient themselves in time and piece together the narrative by watching the surroundings and seeing whether the main character is clean shaven or not, wearing a suit or not, and beaten or not with his wounds in various stages of healing. A number of scenes resonate extremely well used in this manner (for example scenes from much later in the film initially seem to be following on naturally from early scenes until a crucial difference in dress or the characters manner is noticed that gives the timeframe away) There is also a nice linkage between the confession to the police officer (which acts as the general voiceover device for the whole film) and the way our hero talks with the well dressed man who starts off as a friend but soon proves to be the antagonist, which anticipates the way Leonard in Memento is constantly retelling his story to people without an idea of whether they are a friend or a foe.

[Sanjuro]

The 00s was the decade I finally got sick of watching 'half-movies'. It's not unique to the decade of course, but it seems every other movie coming out has been cut in half or thirds, and some of the poorer efforts (Pirates of the Carribean 2 for example) leave me feeling like I've paid to watch a 3 hour trailer. I'm sure Che is a great movie but it happened to be the final straw for me and I didn't bother with part 2 when it finally turned up.

Yes cliffhanger endings have been around since the dawn of film but sometimes you just want to go to the cinema, pay once and watch a story with a beginning, middle and an end. And that seems in danger of becoming a rare thing recently. At least at the local multiplex.

Anyway, sorry about that, I know it's not a motif as such but it feels like a 00s trend.

[Mr Sausage]

you could also trace this back to The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor "it was a virtual world all along!" type sci-fi films.

Or Cronenberg's eXistenZ, which came out around the same time (although he'd been playing with altered or deceptive realities for most of his career, usually involving the body altering the mind's perceptions of reality).

[milk114]

I would like to add Primer and The Butterfly Effect (not really) to the mix. I like the point that Fight Club et al focus on violence/action while Eternal Sunshine focuses on drama.

I think there's a thread between a lot of these movies that hasn't necessarily been discussed. Movies like Primer and Eternal Sunshine utilize technology/science to "make things better." eXistenz, Matrix, Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, etc are about the fear of taking technology to the extreme such that they take over reality. I think Nolan comments on this scientific fear/fascination in The Prestige by having Tesla seen as dangerous.

I think in the late 90s into the 00s there was a movement away from subjective narratives being of the mind by drugs (Altered States, Naked Lunch, etc) towards a conservative viewpoint. Look at Trainspotting or Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas versus Requiem for a Dream, Blow or even Pineapple Express. I think this reaction against drug use extends to the few comedies that parody the earlier subjective viewpoints, making fun of hallucinations/dream sequences in films, such as Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and the dancing with a big bag of bud, Tenacious D's animated section, and I can't think of other right now.

Just a few random thoughts.

[AWA]

I think it would be a good idea to post a link to this thread ( "Self Conscious 'quirkiness'") in this thread to cross-reference some points that are showing up in this thread as well as numerous interesting observations, point / counter-points are brought up in that thread which are useful insights into this thread.

So I guess now this is some kind of meta-discussion of recurring motifs of this decade and of this message board itself.

[Sloper]

It’s a while since I’ve seen it, but Mike Figgis’ Timecode (2000, appropriately enough) is not only a gimmicky film (which works very well, I think) but also a genuine symptom of the ‘digital age’. It really couldn’t have been made any earlier, and whether you like it or not it’s a fascinating glimpse of the possibilities opened up to the cinema by new technology. From the first film to use split-screen (possibly Suspense, 1913) to Timecode, a film constructed entirely around the effect; there’s something inspiring about that progression.

Edit: I'm sure split screen was used earlier than 1913, actually. But you get the idea.

[Len]

I always thought Timecode would've made an wonderful installation. A large room with four speakers, each one playing one the sound from one of the pictures, so by moving around the room, the audience could choose which screen to follow.

As it was, I found myself frustrated by the film essentially reducing the wonderful idea to a more traditional narrative. Obviously it's the only way the film could be shown in normal cinemas, but I still think the basic concept of the film would've been better served by an installation.

[Sloper]

The installation idea sounds nice, but what I really liked about the film (especially as I was about 16 when I saw it) was that it wasn't about the gimmick; it was a conventional narrative film, just using the digital technology to serve the story. Admittedly, it wasn't a wholly satisfying narrative, but it was quite an achievement to weave a reasonably compelling plot using such a complicated method of filming. I heard that Figgis wrote the shooting script like a musical score, for four different parts, and then they did the whole thing in three or four takes. Also, the decisions made about which soundtrack you hear, at which point, was part of the film's artistry; sometimes you'd want to hear what was going on on a different screen, but it was important that you weren't allowed to.

I remember getting quite excited when 24 was first announced; it sounded like it could be a really innovative TV show, using similar methods to Timecode. Then I saw the first episode, and realised this was going to go on for another ten or eleven series. The film was inventive; the TV series was a gimmick.

[colinr0380]

I remember getting quite excited when 24 was first announced; it sounded like it could be a really innovative TV show, using similar methods to Timecode. Then I saw the first episode, and realised this was going to go on for another ten or eleven series. The film was inventive; the TV series was a gimmick.

I agree on Timecode. Wasn't the big innovation that there was finally the technology available to film a whole unbroken take for 100 minutes, compared to something like Rope having to hide the cuts to change reels with a wipe to black every ten minutes?

While the actual story (stories) that are told are rather broad and likely wouldn't hold up individually I think that works to provide an easily graspable narrative for an audience. Then the real fun comes about through seeing the juxtapositions of the cameras (such as in the scene where the couple are making love behind the cinema screen while another camera is focused on the executives watching the rushes of girls testing in a sex scene, the third is on the girl's lover listening in on the sex in the limo parked outside and trying to tell if the moaning is coming from the film or not, and the fourth is following the other lovemaker's completely oblivious partner further down the street, who is troubled by the breakdown of the relationship in a more abstract way) or the soundtrack from one segment informing another in an interesting way. It also provides opportunities for different acting styles from cameo performances casually caught by the camera (such as those by Mia Maestro, Kyle McLachlan, Holly Hunter, Julian Sands and so on) but at the same time sustained pieces of acting such as that by Jeanne Tripplehorn where all she can do is listen in and react for the whole middle section of the film, or Saffron Burrows who seems in a world (or a film) of her own, wandering and detatched from the rest of the characters.

I also liked the way that physical distances between the characters become much more important, as the camera following Saffron Burrows starts moving further and further down the street away from the other cameras clustered around the studio offices. I thought it was beautifully done that Tripplehorn at the end of the film walks in completely the opposite direction and we have her and Burrows as literally and metaphorically going in opposite directions at the edge of the film's geography. Yet they remain strangely linked together through the situation that occured at the offices in between them.

I also agree on 24 - I've always thought that a brilliant use of the real time convention would be to have a constant splitscreen with someone doing absolutely mundane tasks for at least a couple of episodes. You could then either introduce them into the main narrative with a 'shock' realisation that they are the main bad guy of the series or, more interestingly, have the character accidentally run into the path of the main story at some point and become a casualty of the terrorists, or even Jack. It would add an extra weight to the usually faceless characters shoehorned into the series, and maybe even work for publicity reasons as audience interest increases in wondering exactly how so and so is going to work into the main action (of course the really radical move would be that they don't, but that might cause riots!) Sometimes 24 tries this but only in a limited manner and usually pulls back as if afraid of pursuing their techniques further or as anything more than a catchy gimmick to hang tired material on.

[Sloper]

Thanks Colin - you bring back some nice memories of a film I don't remember too well. It depends a lot on the skill of its actors - in a sense, the continuous shooting makes it a lot like a theatre piece - and there's some really impressive 'silent' close-up acting. Some of the cast do a wonderful job of doing nothing - listening in on someone else, or just being alone, moments which you would normally only see in pieces, in cutaways, but in this format can be lingered over.

[zedz]

It’s a while since I’ve seen it, but Mike Figgis’ Timecode (2000, appropriately enough) is not only a gimmicky film (which works very well, I think) but also a genuine symptom of the ‘digital age’. It really couldn’t have been made any earlier.

Really? Not in 1976, say?

It is an impressive filmmaking feat, nevertheless, but I think it's far more in the avant-garde tradition than the 'gimmicky Hollywood' one.

[nsps]

It’s a while since I’ve seen it, but Mike Figgis’ Timecode (2000, appropriately enough) is not only a gimmicky film (which works very well, I think) but also a genuine symptom of the ‘digital age’. It really couldn’t have been made any earlier.

Really? Not in 1976, say?

It is an impressive filmmaking feat, nevertheless, but I think it's far more in the avant-garde tradition than the 'gimmicky Hollywood' one.

Well, the actual feature-length unbroken shot component does relate specifically to the modern medium, as you'd need to make a custom mag to do it on film. I don't think that the digital age has democratized filmmaking as much as some were speculating it would at the beginning of the decade. It's certainly easier for a kid to shoot a movie in his apartment and cal it mumblecore, but the number of filmmakers actually making use of the medium is quite small.

I'm surprised no one mentioned the super hero movie, which pretty much became the decade's escapist blockbuster of choice from "Spider-Man" to "The Dark Knight" and "Iron Man" (and now "Watchmen," of course). Sure, the genre existed before, but it reached its prominence in the oughts.

[brendanjc]

I'm surprised no one mentioned the super hero movie, which pretty much became the decade's escapist blockbuster of choice from "Spider-Man" to "The Dark Knight" and "Iron Man" (and now "Watchmen," of course). Sure, the genre existed before, but it reached its prominence in the oughts.

I seem to remember a few Batman and Superman films that made a bit of money a few years earlier, at least enough to reach some sort of prominence. There were quite a few other superhero films released in the 90's as well, just to less acclaim and box office success (off the top of my head: The Crow, Spawn, Steel, Blade, The Phantom, Punisher, Nick Fury, Captain America, Meteor Man, Darkman). I think this is the problem with this sort of thread, especially on a forum filled with such knowledgeable folks (far more than myself at least) - the parameters for this discussion are still unclear.

Just going back to the 90's again, the real-time "gimmick" that 24 uses was used in 1995's Nick Of Time if I remember correctly. The Game has a huge, arguably movie-invalidating twist; it's also from the 90's, like the aforementioned The Usual Suspects.

Some more common things that many movies seem to have these days that were probably done first in an earlier decade:
- The oft-imitated car-crash shot from inside the car looking out the side window. The last ones I remember were in No Country For Old Men and a Volkswagen commercial on TV.
- Having multiple story threads that are only united by a single moment or tangential relationship in the plot, but which work together thematically. I'm thinking about things like Crash or Innaritu and Arriaga's collaborations like Amores Perros. I suppose you could argue that something like the earlier Chungking Express works in a similar way.

Maybe a better place to start a discussion like this would be: how was cinema different in the 00's than the decade preceding it? I thought about CGI supplanting traditional animation, but I suppose that really started with Toy Story, again in the 90's. Maybe there's something interesting in the proportion of films being released that are remakes - it certainly seems high in recent years.

[nsps]

I seem to remember a few Batman and Superman films that made a bit of money a few years earlier, at least enough to reach some sort of prominence. There were quite a few other superhero films released in the 90's as well, just to less acclaim and box office success (off the top of my head: The Crow, Spawn, Steel, Blade, The Phantom, Punisher, Nick Fury, Captain America, Meteor Man, Darkman). I think this is the problem with this sort of thread, especially on a forum filled with such knowledgeable folks (far more than myself at least) - the parameters for this discussion are still unclear.

I'm aware of all these films, but I'm talking about density and popularity. It's not that the genre didn't exist before, but that it's a bigger deal this time around. (And I guess I don't really count films like The Crow as super hero movies—not saying it isn't, I just always saw it as a revenge movie with a ghost story.) I could name a bunch of westerns from the '90s, but no one would argue that the decade was the peak of the genre.

The Superman franchise and the Batman franchise started a decade apart and didn't exist simultaneously. The genre's bankability significantly increased this decade, with the revived Batman franchise and Spider-Man gaining the most notoriety, but we also had a new Superman, two Hellboys, three X-Men plus Wolverine, The Incredibles, two attempts to adapt the Hulk, and B stuff like Daredevil, Constantine and several more in the coming years (admittedly carrying into the next decade). You mention Punisher and Captain American—the former was remade this decade (with a sequel!) and the latter is being remade. Maybe Marvel's attempt to adapt its many franchises inflated the numbers, but there's no denying the genres rise in prominence.

If we're looking for specific never-happened-before innovations, you won't find many. It's hard to make that sort of claim with films from the 1910s. So I guess the real point of interest is what themes and techniques kept cropping up, the themes that appealed to filmmakers and/or audiences. I agree that CG has certainly grown this decade, along with both good and bad uses of motion capture.

[JonathanM]

I think the 00s have been the decade of the super hero. Which is not really surprising given that the US government spent most of the decade driving home the ides that democracy is an unfortunate hindrance to forceful balls-out executive action. I'm surprised that the Washington sniper and the people who went on killing sprees in universities and high-schools weren't wearing capes and masks.

I think the Soze effect isn;t so much about reality as about identity. Both Memento and The Usual Suspects (not to mention Fight Club, The Departed, The Matrix and The Sixth Sense) are about people not being who they appear to be and this dove-tails nicely with the decade long bout of introverted navel gazing that has gripped US indie film.

[filmnoir1]

In addition to the play with time, the fascination with super heroes, and critique of neo-liberal policies that ushered in this dark period of adjustment there has also been the constant need to discuss or show elements of torture in American popular culture of this decade. Whether in shows like 24, Heroes, Lost, BSG, Prison Break, or films like 3:10 to Yuma, Syriana, Redacted, Road to Guantanomo, The Kingdom, Rendition, etc. there is the constant presence of a need to understand and perhaps justify what America became after the events of 9/11. In my opinion this is the most dominant motif in American culture and I would argue speaks to the deeply disturbed psyche of our nation as we struggle to reconcile the ideals and political philosophies that we hold dear versus an inordinate need to maintain the illusion that we are secure and just in all of our actions. If anything these films speak to the fragility of our safety and our ideals at a time when the might of the US is in decline because of our arrogant imperialist agenda and a naive belief that we are "the shining city on the hill" simply because a cowboy from Missouri said so and another pseudo cowboy from Texas echoed that sentiment.
It is not only that torture became a plot device, a method of displaying the US's political and military might to the world, it also has become the accepted metaphor to show the very self-destruction of the country. From our classical film forms (Westerns, gangster films) to the new crop of A class sci-fi and comic book movies this technique has seeped into our consciousness to the point that we are no longer shocked or disgusted to see these events depicted. A quality that Hollywood has openly embraced by mass producing "torture-porn" films and creating new methods to frame and compose torture scenes within films.

[Magic Hate Ball]

What about the liberal application of filters? It seems that no film is of natural color these days.

[JonathanM]

In addition to the play with time, the fascination with super heroes, and critique of neo-liberal policies that ushered in this dark period of adjustment there has also been the constant need to discuss or show elements of torture in American popular culture of this decade.

Torture is also the ultimate expression of political expediency over moral principle and that reflects the change in political culture towards one of open hostility towards all safe-guards against executive power. At some point over the last 20 years, America (and Britain in her wake) stopped being a society of laws. Processes grown up over centuries to prevent mistakes and abuses of power were cast aside as old and fusty. This goes from the criminal undermining of the nascent framework of international law (even Nixon made it illegal for America to produce biological weapons) to the destruction of the careful process of intelligence filtering that made sure that the executive based its decisions on only the best and most certain information (hence an independent intelligence agency). Now America has just freed itself from a government of war criminals and none of them will ever face trial for what they did. They'll become even richer on the lecture circuit. But if you get caught downloading a film illegally? off to prison for you!

[AWA]

What about the liberal application of filters? It seems that no film is of natural color these days.

While I get your point, I think suggesting that there was ever a time when "natural colour" existed in films is erroneous. There really is no such thing.

[colinr0380]

It is not only that torture became a plot device, a method of displaying the US's political and military might to the world, it also has become the accepted metaphor to show the very self-destruction of the country. From our classical film forms (Westerns, gangster films) to the new crop of A class sci-fi and comic book movies this technique has seeped into our consciousness to the point that we are no longer shocked or disgusted to see these events depicted. A quality that Hollywood has openly embraced by mass producing "torture-porn" films and creating new methods to frame and compose torture scenes within films.

Certainly the Saw and Hostel films seem to bear more relationship to the current culture, unlike the conveyor belt-produced horror remakes and sequels whose only purpose seems to be to make money without comment or commitment to their material, simply going through the motions to re-market previously successful works (though that could be a motif of the decade itself!)

I do find the Saw films fascinating for their approach to their material and they would certainly sit with the trend of trying to deal with the idea of whether torture is justified or inflicting pain is necessary to achieve a greater goal (this is just the more visceral and horrific take on the subject that can encompass a spectrum of films from superhero vigilantism/unilateralism to more overtly political approaches like Rendition, Lions For Lambs or Redacted).

The Saw films also take on the strange idea that torture is being done for the good of the person being tortured themselves, as a kind of self improvement programme (though for the ultimate and blackly funny example of this kind of thinking you have to go to the episode of Cat's Eye featuring James Woods adapted from the Stephen King short story Quitters, Inc.! Disturbingly for me, while my mother often talks about that section of the film having a big impact on her, it didn't seem to affect her strongly enough to get her to quit smoking!)

I found the attitude of the Saw series to its main Jigsaw character quite amusing, since he is initially presented as a madman, albeit one with a penchant for overly elaborate schemes relying heavily on coincidence, a lot of spare time on his hands to construct all his torture devices and who must have bought up every abandoned warehouse in the industrial district of his unidentified city!

As the films themselves go on and become ever more convoluted in both chronology and plotting terms (and more fascinating to see how the filmmakers are going to get themselves of the corner they painted themselves into this time!), Jigsaw becomes some kind of God-like figure with acolytes and teachings. He has had two, so far as we know at the time of the fifth film (but given the nature of the Saw series where you can have flashbacks to events that were occuring at the same time as the events of previous films, there could be lots more! Jigsaw's wife was willed a mysterious box during the fifth film in a throwaway scene that looks likely to be followed up in later films) independent agents doing his bidding at certain points, both unaware of each other and who could even be seen as terrorist style individual 'cells' that continue to operate once the leader has been removed, or even as a kind of a Departed-style comment on moles within and without an organisation given that one of Jigsaw's acolytes was a junkie and the other is a police officer moving through the ranks, both of whom find their calling.

But the wonderful irony is that the various people he gets to carry on his Seven-style work (of punishing people for their crimes but also giving the possibility of escape from death with only hideous wounds to remember their ordeal if they 'play his game') after his death don't seem to have the same reverent attitude towards his ideas and instead start building devices that do not allow people to escape from them even if they do play along! I suppose this could be seen as an interesting comment on the concept of fairness in modern society and that even if a person sets out an, albeit insane, philosophy or plan of action to redress the balance even that becomes corrupted when others take it on to start settling scores or for personal advancement!

I would personally put forward Saw III as the best in the series - Saw was a serial killer thriller with a number of logic defying twists and a jumbled up chronology. Saw II was a rather poor entry in that it seems to be a retread of the first film with less likable characters, though as with the first film (and a trait that would come to define the series) a brilliant final twist that restructured the film into something different. Saw III tied together the previous two films while the new characters encountering the torture devices which had been the main focus of the second film was pared down to a minimum as the focus moved on to the more interesting relationship between Jigsaw and his newly revealed acolyte (I may be slightly biased since the acolyte Samantha was played by Shawnee Smith, who I fondly remembered from her role as the heroine in the 1988 remake of The Blob! The first three Saw films, and especially Saw III where her role is more fully explored, are greatly helped by her performance, and I felt she stole the each of the films with her performances in the jaw trap scene from the first, the needle pit scene from the second and the final confontation in the third)

I would certainly recommend any fan of horror to struggle through the first two films to get to the far better third, which does not stand on its own without knowledge of the previous films. The next two are more focused on the police officers in the case and, while I still think the second film was the least interesting of the series so far, I have not been gripped to the same extent by them.

I do feel that the Saw series has been unfairly maligned somewhat - while they aren't the most intellectual of films, more modern grand guignol relying on the rather sick fascination of the audience in what particular ironically used torture device will turn up next and how the characters will escape from it (or more usually how we will see the character fail to escape from the device in gruesome detail!), it certainly seems to hit a nerve with references to corruption, torture as an almost religious act with the cathartic punishment of the guilty or alternatively a purging of your sins in surviving or choosing who to save or not, anger at a perceived lack of fairness or responsibility in society leading to vigilantism, and as talked about in earlier posts it ties into ideas of fluid and changing personalities and hidden secret identities that could be another defining characteristic of the decade. Certainly the Saw films look likely to define the 00s decade in US horror (also in its irritating form of headache inducing flash cuts and loud bangs at regular intervals), if only because of the sheer number of them produced to a Halloween release schedule as regular as the timetable of an abbatoir, and the way the films insistently push the implications of the gore (backed up with brief flashes of the carnage) into the viewers face in a disturbingly passive aggressive manner!

[Magic Hate Ball]

What about the liberal application of filters? It seems that no film is of natural color these days.

While I get your point, I think suggesting that there was ever a time when "natural colour" existed in films is erroneous. There really is no such thing.

Would "less extreme filtering/color timing" would be more precise? It's like every other film that comes out these days was run through the CSI machine.

[AWA]

What about the liberal application of filters? It seems that no film is of natural color these days.

While I get your point, I think suggesting that there was ever a time when "natural colour" existed in films is erroneous. There really is no such thing.

Would "less extreme filtering/color timing" would be more precise? It's like every other film that comes out these days was run through the CSI machine.

Yes. There far more excessive colour stylizations today thanks to the application of numerous computer filters which don't adhere to any kind of aesthetic sensibility other than fetishizing an indulgence for overboard chromatic filtering.

For instance, the washed out blue-gray of any given bleak horror or future-is-ugly type of action film makes me want to vomit through my eyes.