American Cinema of the 2000s: Themes and Variations

Introduction

I N T R O D U C T I O N Movies and the 2000s TIMOTHY CORRIGAN In 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey eerily envisioned a new millennium obsessively driven by technology and violence . Before the arrival of that millennium, Kubrick’s film described an epic space journey that begins with the prehistoric discovery of crude weapons that would develop and drive human history through many centuries of exploration and conquest. Linking the past and future with a famous match-on-action edit that transforms a prehistoric club into a sleek twenty-first-century space ship, the film tells the tale of an intergalactic quest for a mysterious monolith, a quest that concludes when the ship and its astronauts become waylaid by an animated computer gone bad and bent on destroying the human crew. 2001 concludes with the image of an embryo floating in space, announcing an ambiguous new age about to be born out of cycles of intellectual discovery and human brutality. When that year 2001 actually arrived, a different apocalyptic violence stunned the world as al-Qaeda terrorists crashed two hijacked jet airliners into the Twin Towers in New York City. As a darkly ironic reminder of Kubrick’s film, witnesses of those shocking images, either on the streets of Lower Manhattan or as television viewers around the world, stated that the crash of the airliners and the crumbling of the towers was “like a movie.” Reflecting this uneasy and uncanny merging of film history and historical catastrophe, the first decade of the 2000s became defined by revolutions of seen and unseen violence, of astonishing and threatening technologies, of cultural and political conquests and reversals, and of a wavering humanity within inhumane worlds. In this decade, new communicative technologies, from Internet news to cell phone tweets, moved more rapidly than ever, almost with a life of their own. In this decade, new speeds drove a cultural and political impatience that continually demands cycles of change that hardly progress. In this decade, American films and film genres, like 2001 as 2001, cyclically and centrifugally intersected with social and political worlds, giving birth to new visions, invariably stretching the terms and borders of reality, realism, and the definition of the human. 1 2 TIMOTHY CORRIGAN In virtually every cultural and social arena, the decade appeared as a turbulent series of rapid movements and turnabouts. The population of the United States reached 300 million, taking only forty-two years to gain 100 million people since reaching a population of 200 million in 1964. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States quickly became embroiled in two wars that spanned the remainder of the decade—one in Iraq and another in Afghanistan. Even the natural world erupted on 29 August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast and exposed the failures of the U.S. government to protect its own natural borders with the speed with which it cavalierly entered those two wars. As a result, over 1,300 people perished from Alabama to Louisiana, sparking heated debates about the shadow of racism in that slow federal response. Meanwhile, an escalating and often bitter debate about another kind of putative racism swept across the nation as it confronted a tide of illegal immigration and a troubled immigration policy. In 2008–2009 a massive global recession, generated by unregulated banking practices, brought the U.S. economy to its knees, while a “Green Revolution,” promoting conservation practices in daily life and public policies to wean America from the soaring costs of oil extracted from the war-torn Middle East, gained momentum. Responding to the ubiquity of the Internet and the apparent triumph of the digital revolution, media culture embraced a widespread fascination with YouTube, 3D movies, Blu-ray discs, and video-on-demand via the Internet. In the midst of fast-paced turbulence and change, the election of the first African American president in November 2008 stood out for many as the most remarkable and dramatic event of a new millennium, inspiring many with an exuberant energy that a year later would stagnate in old political cycles. If the first decade of the twenty-first century seemed continually and quickly to expand through the promise of the virtual, those virtualities again and again ran hard up against the resistant realities they often seemed to control and reshape. Indeed, a tragic emblem of the decade might be the shocking disaster of the space...