A quarter of a century on, Peter Murphy gives his take on this classic era of film.
1999: the last miraculous year of the cinematic century. A perfect storm of money and talent in the pre-streaming era, when cinema ticket sales and video and DVD residuals enabled studios to take chances with indie generation directors like Jane Campion and Gus Van Sant, when cult movies that flopped in the multiplex could recoup in the rental afterlife. Simultaneously, MTV acted as a finishing school for young directors like David Fincher, Mark Romanek, Jonas Akerlund and Jonathan Glazer.
My favourite five movies of that year are strictly subjective choices, but they all share certain qualities: technical innovation, philosophical weight, a sense of daring. They seemed to have little in common at the time, but rewatching them 25 years later, you can discern a dialogue – or argument – at work between them. Three out of these five films predicted elements of extreme subcultures that would emerge in the next century, and the other two reflect a sense of mourning for the passing of an age and a set of values from a previous time.
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Magnolia
Magnolia, maybe the greatest of all five, seems to encapsulate both: the stridency and the sadness. Paul Thomas Anderson’s third film is a stealth musical, constructed around a set of songs from Aimee Mann’s Bachelor No. 2 album, bought back from her record company in order to save them from music industry purgatory. The Magnolia soundtrack album became a coffee table staple at the time: Mann’s songs don’t just underscore the narrative, they participate in it, most notably in an audacious sequence towards the end of the film in which the film’s narrative threads are drawn together by each of the protagonists, even the dying Jason Robards, lip-syncing lines from ‘Wise Up’. It’s one of the most extraordinary combinations of song and story you’ll see this side of Broadway.
Magnolia utilises the Robert Altman blueprint: a cross-section profile of an expansive cast, all San Fernando Valley dwellers, each of whom is enduring some sort of bottleneck crisis in resulting in a kind of communal nervous breakdown. Jeremy Blackman, Julianne Moore, Jason Robards and Philip Seymour Hoffman all deliver performances of uncanny vulnerability, but perhaps the riskiest of them all was Tom Cruise’s turn as the proto-manosphere guru Frank T.J. Mackey, reportedly based on pick-up artist Ross Jeffries, mentioned in Neil Strauss’s book The Game.
2. Fight Club
Here’s an unlikely overlap with our next choice. Strauss’s pick-up artists styled themselves after Fight Club’s space monkeys, particularly the anti-hero Tyler Durden. This, David Fincher’s fourth film, was the Gen X equivalent Catcher in the Rye, an anti-establishment jeremiad that in retrospect comes off as a little too clever for its own good. The tagline might well have inverted Mike Tyson’s line: ‘nobody has a plan until they get punched in the face.’ Edward Norton plays the unnamed narrator, an insomnia-tortured desk monkey who stupefies himself with consumerist glut, whose life is changed by a charismatic, nihilistic soap salesman named Tyler Durden. Together they start an underground bareknuckle fight club. Norton’s character finds himself delivered from his protracted adolescence through the ritual of the fights, but of course, it all goes horribly wrong when the club metastasises into an anarchist terror group named Project Mayhem.
Some might say Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel is drunk on its own white male tears, a founding document for apprentice incels. Tyler – played by Brad Pitt in thrift shop chic with minus 10% body fat and the racked abs of a cage fighter – is the embodiment of that problematic word ‘problematic’.
In its defence, Fight Club is patently a satire, an anti-buddy movie, a suppressed love story, and a treatise on the dangers of cultic subcultures. Revisiting the film, you can marvel at its technical innovation, the astonishing editing, the grimy, slimy look of the film, the work of cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, as well as judicious use of songs like Tom Waits’s ‘Goin’ Out West’ and The Pixies ‘Where is My Mind’. What hasn’t aged so well is Norton’s whiny voiceover and a mocking undertone during the scenes involving TB and testicular cancer survivors. Or maybe it’s an age thing: what seems ‘transgressive’ when you’re 25 starts to seem plain old mean, when you’re 50.
(Palahniuk’s 1996 novel was, curiously enough, inspired by his reading of Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man, feminist writer Susan Faludi’s non fiction study of how male figures, from industrial workers to war veterans to astronauts to porn stars, got the shaft from the social hierarchies in the postwar years (for context, Faludi’s previous book was Backlash: the Undeclared War Against Women). Palahniuk noticed there was a void of male equivalents to How To Make An American Quilt or The Secrets of the Divine Ya-Ya Sisterhood.)
3. The Matrix
If Fight Club was an unrequited love story between Jekyll and Hyde, or Jesus and Judas, The Matrix gave us Keanu Reeves as a kung-fu Buddha. The Wachowskis’ second film, was, for its time, a prophetic and subversive film constructed from cyberpunk couture, chop-socky Hong Kong movies, and a mish mash of Gnostic/Philip K Dick/postmodernist philosophy (Neo hides his bootleg hacker programmes in a copy of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation). For all its high-tech innovations (bullet-time ballet fight sequences), it was a cautionary tale against AI takeover. For all its stylized sophistication, it laid out a seed bed lexicon (‘red pill/blue pill’, ‘glitch in the matrix’) for Seattle activists, No Logo revolutionaries, survivalist paranoids, Reddit trolls and far-right cranks alike. For all its high conceptualism, it legislated a sci-fi fashion template: Neo’s wraparounds, Trinity’s catsuits, Morpheus’s ankle length leather trench-coat, the assault weapon as prosthetic body extension. The film’s anti-authoritarian, anti-conformist philosophy continued to resonate in Covid era phobias about 5G, insect protein food, microchips in your vaccine, etc. Apt then that the film’s end crawl anthem is not the utopian/dystopian sound of a synthesizer score, but Rage Against the Machine.
We will not, however, speak of the sequels.
The Matrix is far from perfect. There are plenty of hammy B-movie moments, especially from the movie’s supporting cast (the Wachowskis might be cinema visionaries, but they’re dreadful with actors). Some – although not all – of the movies’ effects and ultra 90s electro soundtrack elements have dated badly. But the famous set-pieces – shoot-outs with Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith, the gothic-operatic sight of the machines’ harvesting fields, the fiendish little bugging device worming its way into Neo’s navel – remain as spectacular as they did on release.
4. The Straight Story
Ratchet down the tempo for a moment. The Straight Story seems to seek relief from all this millennial static, the tale of an old, infirm man on a slow odyssey across three states, seeking a rapprochement with family and past. Based on a true-life item that appeared in the New York Times in 1994, the story is as follows: Alvin Straight, a 73-year-old World War 2 veteran, has a long-standing rift with his brother Lyle, who lives two states away. When Lyle has a stroke, Alvin resolves to visit him and patch things up before either of them dies. The only problem is his legs are in bad shape and his eyesight is too poor for him to hold a driver’s licence. Alvin resolves to travel the 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin on his thirty-year-old John Deere lawn tractor, travelling at a maximum of five miles an hour. The journey takes six weeks.
The Straight Story is, true to its title, Lynch’s most conservative film. It’s a quiet, wry piece of work, an elegy to the patience and decency. There is little of Lynch’s trademark symbolism: no flaring of a match as it touches a cigarette, no close ups on red lip-sticked lips, no bulleting of white lines on a night-time highway. The film takes place mostly in daylight and is slow and contemplative and shot through with regret. There are truly lovely turns from Sissy Spacek, and one absolute heartbreaker of a scene with Harry Dean Stanton, and there’s a crucial interlude near the end of the movie (‘the eye of the duck’ scene, in Lynch’s terminology) where Alvin, seeming to need to prolong the odyssey a little longer, or postpone the final act, stops into a bar for a drink, and he and the bartender quietly share war stories. Hushed survivors, silently traumatised representatives of the greatest generation. ‘Those men never talked about it.’ Stoic strength, or the silence of the hurt, or both. Hard not to contrast and compare this with the first world bleatings of the narrator in Fight Club.
5. The Sixth Sense
If these preceding four films were social, political, philosophical and emotional, The Sixth Sense was metaphysical. With his third film, M. Night Shyamalan established himself as suspense technician a la Hitchcock, with a propensity for the kind of ju-jitsu plot twist that compels you to watch the thing all over again. The Indian-American son of a doctor, Shyamalan had been making films since he shot his first 8mm short at the age of 10. His first two feature films were failures, so Shyamalan locked himself in a room, obsessively watched Ordinary People and Carrie, and wrote seven drafts of The Sixth Sense. Within hours of his agent setting the script up for auction, Disney coughed up four million dollars and another million to direct, with complete creative control. When Bruce Willis came on board, the budget went up to 40 million.
Based around the relationship between Willis’ child psychiatrist and Haley Joe Osment as a troubled young boy who claims he can see the ghosts of the departed (‘I see dead people’) the film basks in a low-key, contemplative atmosphere. It’s a surprisingly austere, even gloomy movie, with chilling score, and the city of Philadelphia a character unto itself. There are a handful of skin-scrawling set-pieces: the sudden sight of bodies hanging from the ceiling of a high school, Willis’ discovery of ancient undead voices on a taped interview conducted with a former patient, and a Munchausen’s by Proxy step-mother sub-plot worthy of the Brothers Grimm. If The Sixth Sense wasn’t so eerie, almost Exorcist-like, it could’ve been considered a Zen meditation on the big themes of reincarnation and mortality. Osment is stunning as the terrified boy, refusing to petition the camera’s sympathy, Willis is at his quiet best, and Toni Colette almost steals the film as a working mother harrowed with anxiety and worry for her boy.
Shyamalan went on to make flawed but fascinating movies such as Unbreakable, Signs and The Village, thereafter his name became a byword for turkey: how one of the most interesting filmmakers of his generation managed to disappear down the rabbit hole in such spectacular fashion is a thoroughly depressing question, and almost as big a mystery as any of his own creations.
Still, with The Sixth Sense, he made cinema history. But it was the end of an era. After 9/11, Hollywood ran scared from edgy themes. We witnessed a return to 50s conservatism, rom-coms and teen stars, which eventually devolved into a lowest common denominator pornification of the culture, fascistic superhero fetishism and the disease of the sequel – until a formidable revival of horror and sci-fi in the century’s adolescence made it safe to go back to the multiplex.
Listen back as Peter Murphy discusses his top picks on RTÉ Radio One’s Arena here.
Peter Murphy is a writer from Wexford, Ireland. He is the author of two novels, John the Revelator and Shall We Gather at the River (Faber) and several short stories, including the audio-drama The Hands of Franky Machine. His work has been published and translated worldwide, and his journalism and non-fiction have appeared in Rolling Stone, the Guardian, the Irish Times, Hot Press, Stinging Fly and Winter Papers, among other publications. He performs and records under the name Cursed Murphy, and has released two albums to date, Cursed Murphy Versus the Resistance (2020) and Republic of the Weird (2022). Follow Peter’s work via his Substack, Bandcamp, Instagram, YouTube and Website.
