In the shadow of 9/11... Cloverfield
At the beginning of the year, G2 mused on what the noughties meant for the fields of fashion, music and sundry other cultural catchment areas; I thought it was a shame that cinema didn't manage to get in on the act, because it's been the scene of a sea-change as chilly as any you'll find.
So, it's once more unto the towers. I do think 9/11 has particular relevance to cinema, serving notice on the previous decade's film-making in the apocalyptic, burning visual language that we were previously on cheering terms with from countless trips to the multiplex. This was searingly real, of course, yet most of us witnessed it through a screen, the same way we'd absorb a blockbuster. To me, this cognitive dissonance has been what noughties cinema has been all about. As The Matrix elegantly augured, our sense of truth was up for grabs. A war was at hand: reality vs unreality.
On one hand, the seismic shock of 9/11 reawakened us to the complexities of the wider world, to film-makers an inexhaustible river of insistent images and inarguable stories. The documentary underwent the kind of renaissance that could hardly have been predicted, not just snagging the arthouse crowd, but pulling in huge audiences. Top of the bill has been Michael Moore and his personified polemics. Werner Herzog has re-emerged like some old Jedi master, his credos on film-making made urgent again, and his Grizzly Man the shining beacon of the new documentary movement. And outlandish tales have wriggled from boreholes around the world, from family secrets in Capturing the Friedmans to the Californian leisure expeditionaries of Dogtown & Z-Boys. Often small-scale and always vital, these films felt like the latter-day oral tradition coming alive once more.
On the side of the unreal, it's not like the CGI arms race ever really paused for breath. It just Ctrl X-ed the twin towers out of the skyline, as with Spider-Man, and got on with business. Special effects and marketing costs have done for blockbuster budgets what nuclear weapons did for defence expenditure: $200m, so hubristic when James Cameron sank the Titanic in 1997, has become the norm. Our hunger for fresh images, to visualize the inconceivable, has been fuelled by the superhero boom and the sprawling fantasy franchises. The Lord of the Rings triumphantly marched on the box office in three waves, and a splendid logistical achievement they were, but there were only a few glimmers of true magic for me.
Some people thought the Rings films' trudge to blackened Mordor had a contemporary ring (though talk of evil empires is supremely ambiguous, and Saddam could probably have wrung as much enjoyment from his LOTR boxset). And the best of the superhero films were certainly infused with post 9/11 urgency, Spider-Man full of Manhattan solidarity and Christian Bale's Batman knowingly close to being a neocon, interventionist, super-soldier pin-up. For all the echoes, though, the primary need the tent-pole films serve is escapism; a reason for heading to the cinema in any decade, of course, but ever increasing in intensity in the noughties, when CGI output hit mass-industrial volumes, the hyper-real superseding the dowdy real. The special effects in last year's Transformers seemed so intricate and vivid, and the film so empty, it almost felt like it was the precursor of some new military-spec new wave cinema.
But for all the studios' might, it seemed to be the rebel alliance promoting old-time reality whose influence was in the ascendant. Even outside of the documentary brigade, there was signs that the real world was encroaching irrefutably on Hollywood's bubble: for one, the nervy, multi-perspective, present-tense narratives of Alejandro González Iñarritu found their way into Oscar runaway Crash. This innovation was the best of many good things to come out of the Latin American buena onda - one of the hotspots of world cinema during the last eight years. Meanwhile, journalistic operators like Michael Winterbottom were roving sensitively in the dust elsewhere, while enclaves of Hollywood began to make sustained, direct sorties outside the gates in search of proper material. Whatever you think of George Clooney, I think he deserves huge credit for transferring into his star capital into making serious, 70s-style films - a transaction with a punitive exchange rate. Not many of the new school of heavyweights, many talking - however obliquely - about Iraq and American foreign policy, have made much money, but at least the world is on the agenda again.
The end of the noughties is in sight. Who won the reality wars? Both sides seem exhausted: interest in the documentary push has slowed down, and people appear equally fatigued by CGI. The documentary revival has undoubtedly sharpened up mainstream film-making, and the ultimate, most cosmetic rapprochement of all came a few weeks ago: Cloverfield, playing for full membership of the hungover-tourist-with-a-camcorder school of aesthetics. The only surprise is how long it took for the mainstream to fully embrace it, the Dogme brethren having first suggested this nausea-inducing emetic for bloated cinema a full 13 years back.
Ten defining films of the noughties so far, in date order (NB These aren't my personal favourites, just what I think might end up as the decade's consensual remains):
1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) 2. City of God (2002) 3. Lost in Translation (2003) 4. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) 5. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) 6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) 7. Brokeback Mountain (2005) 8. Caché (2005) 9. Borat (2006) 10. There Will Be Blood (2008)
Which would be your choices?
