With the 21^st-cen­tu­ry peri­od piece, cin­e­ma writes the his­to­ry books

The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Philip L. Gra­ham has been wide­ly cred­it­ed with declar­ing jour­nal­ism ​“the first rough draft of his­to­ry,” though as first drafts go, it’s espe­cial­ly rough. If for no oth­er rea­son than posterity’s sake, the human species com­pul­sive­ly doc­u­ments each day from the blink­ered van­tage of real time, col­lec­tions of events and data syn­the­sized into instant reac­tions on the inter­net and pages of op-ed sec­tions. The goal is to make sense of a hec­tic present, but that ini­tial wave of chron­i­clers is hand­i­capped by imme­di­a­cy, the facts yet to cool into a nar­ra­tive vis­i­ble in full.

As a form of col­lec­tive pub­lic mem­o­ry, his­to­ry begins in earnest with the movies, which chan­nel polit­i­cal and social real­i­ties with the ben­e­fit of per­spec­tive into what crit­ic J. Hober­man termed the ​“dream-life.” Now near­ly a quar­ter of the way into our young cen­tu­ry, a suf­fi­cient amount of time has passed for a lucid notion of this moment to take shape through the cin­e­ma, in par­tic­u­lar those films that empha­size their own dis­tance from the most recent chap­ter of the past. While every work of art is a rel­ic of the cul­tur­al con­di­tions under which it was made, some attempt to dra­ma­tize and ana­lyze the steps we’ve tak­en to get here.

Along these lines, I’ve been think­ing about the 21^st-cen­tu­ry peri­od piece, for our pur­pos­es any movie pro­duced after the year 2000 and set in an ear­li­er part of the post-Y2K era. (Those with exten­sive flash­backs tak­ing place in 1999 or ear­li­er are dis­qual­i­fied, as are those with­out dis­cernible mark­ers or men­tions of set­ting.) Con­sid­ered as a canon, they illus­trate both the sig­nif­i­cance of chronol­o­gy-defin­ing events and the indi­vid­ual ram­i­fi­ca­tions they hold for the peo­ple involved — those fig­ures stand­ing astride major devel­op­ments and those just try­ing not to get crushed under­foot by the onward march of progress all around them.

Film­mak­ers have tak­en an inter­est in the ​“Great Man” the­o­ry of his­to­ry ever since Charles Fos­ter Kane dropped his snow­globe, though as in that sear­ing por­trait of a thin­ly veiled William Ran­dolph Hearst, the con­cept is reversed as the flaws in our most influ­en­tial titans of indus­try and gov­ern­ment expand to nation­al and even glob­al pro­por­tions. The Social Net­work​‘s take on Face­book co-founder Mark Zucker­berg (how­ev­er inac­cu­rate, cast­ing the man we all now know as a par­tic­u­lar­ly advanced automa­ton in a light of emo­tion­al pro­fun­di­ty) diag­noses the whole of Sil­i­con Val­ley as the bit­ter revenge of the nerds, the advent of Big Tech reori­ent­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty at the cost of real-world iso­la­tion. In Maya, the fic­tion­al­ized intel­li­gence spe­cial­ist track­ing down Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thir­ty, the Unit­ed States’ war on ter­ror takes human form as she cross­es some cru­cial eth­i­cal lines in pur­suit of clo­sure, vengeance, or just a pos­i­tive report she can take back to her supe­ri­or. (The Hurt Lock­er, the oth­er half of Kathryn Bigelow​‘s GWOT Dip­tych, cat­a­logues the trau­mas that the Amer­i­can occu­pa­tion of the Mid­dle East inflicts on the sol­diers in the action.)

The coor­di­nat­ed attacks of 11 Sep­tem­ber loomed large over Hol­ly­wood in the fol­low­ing years, and not just when Amer­i­can Air­lines Flight 11 plowed into Robert Pat­tin­son to bring 2010’s romance Remem­ber Me to a stun­ning­ly mis­cal­cu­lat­ed twist end­ing. For teen girls Lady Bird of Lady Bird and Lisa of Ken­neth Lon­er­gan​‘s Mar­garet, the geopo­lit­i­cal hav­oc rag­ing in the back­ground of their lives throws their ado­les­cent solip­sism into sharp­er relief, the for­mer tun­ing it out where­as the lat­ter goes knee-jerk jin­go, both reac­tions more in response to the per­son­al quag­mires in their own lives.

More com­mon­ly, the fiery death scream­ing through the sky served as a reminder of life’s pre­cious­ness, John Cameron Mitchell​‘s pan­sex­u­al fan­ta­sia Short­bus thumb­ing its nose (and oth­er parts) at the fleet­ing nature of our mor­tal­i­ty with an orgy-jam­boree cel­e­brat­ing vital­i­ty. Brady Cor­bet​‘s ambi­tious Vox Lux con­spic­u­ous­ly announces its his­tor­i­cal bent ear­ly on with men­tions of Reaganomics and the pop-musi­cian dias­po­ra out of Swe­den, with its pri­ma­ry focus placed on the spec­ta­cles of vio­lence set­ting the terms of a chaot­ic new world; a Columbine-like inci­dent and the destruc­tion of the World Trade Cen­ter brack­et the first half in 2001, then a mass shoot­ing on a Euro­pean beach casts a pall over the ​’10s in the second.

As the rushed-to-mar­ket del­uge of COVID-relat­ed con­tent can attest, film­mak­ers are attract­ed to big hap­pen­ings, and the only oth­er cat­a­clysm that’s com­mand­ed as much ret­ro­spec­tive atten­tion as ⁹⁄₁₁ is the finan­cial crash of 2008. Explained from a smug bird’s‑eye view in The Big Short and with boots-on-the-ground empa­thy in 99 Homes, the hous­ing cri­sis upend­ed the classed peck­ing order with the cru­el poet­ry of a Greek tragedy. See­ing rich peo­ple in pan­ic mode makes for sat­is­fy­ing dra­ma, the dri­ving engine of the scam­mer epic Hus­tlers, in which a squad of crafty strip­pers fleece the Wall Streeters com­ing in from a long day of fleec­ing hard­work­ing reg­u­lar folks. Their white-col­lar marks might as well make up the ensem­ble of Mar­gin Call, as a group of invest­ment bankers scram­ble to screw their clients out of their mon­ey before the firm goes bel­ly up.

“Amer­i­ca is one big strip club,” says J. Lo in Hus­tlers, echo­ing Killing Them Softly’s part­ing sen­ti­ments of refu­ta­tion to the hol­low hope offered by Barack Obama’s elec­tion to the White House. The cyn­i­cism ram­pant in this time trans­lat­ed to shrewd self-inter­est where per­son­al account­ing was con­cerned, and no one kept a clos­er eye on her mon­ey than Chelsea, the high-end escort prowl­ing through down­town Manhattan’s finan­cial sec­tor in The Girl­friend Expe­ri­ence. As she pumps her var­i­ous johns for stock tips and oth­er advice that might give her a leg up as the econ­o­my goes into a tail­spin, direc­tor Steven Soder­bergh sug­gests that lean times have made us all just as ruth­less­ly bot­tom-line-mind­ed as she is. (2012’s Mag­ic Mike, anoth­er Soder­bergh film about the inter­sec­tion between sex work and cap­i­tal in the post-melt­down par­a­digm, shares in a cash-strapped dread trad­ed for a rise-and-grind can-do atti­tude in the sequel.)

In the numer­ous ripped-from-the-head­lines pic­tures rehash­ing the play­back of note­wor­thy true crimes — whether in inves­tiga­tive pieces like Spot­light and She Said, or buzzy report­ed-arti­cle adap­ta­tions in line with The Bling Ring and Bad Edu­ca­tion — sup­ple­men­tary details hint at the pieces of zeit­geist that might endure as part of the last­ing pop-cul­tur­al pic­ture. A pass­ing men­tion of nude-post­ing Red­dit boards in Red Rock­et sit­u­ates the film on the eve of Don­ald Trump’s 2016 elec­tion to the pres­i­den­cy, just after DIY porn had begun its great democ­ra­ti­za­tion but before the advent of Only­Fans. Uncut Gems plays out in 2012 because that’s when a suf­fi­cient­ly dra­mat­ic NBA play­off game hap­pened to take place, but direc­tors Ben­ny and Josh Safdie cap­i­tal­ize on the lack of smart­phones or legal­ized sports bet­ting in New York that would have rad­i­cal­ly altered Howard Ratner’s life.

Still being in the thick of the pan­dem­ic, it’s dif­fi­cult to see the lock­downs and para­noia of the last three year with any sort of dis­tanced clar­i­ty, though COVID has giv­en a few sol­id punch lines to the time­ly Glass Onion. But most of the slapped-togeth­er quar­an­tine arti­facts (once upon a time, Anne Hath­away was in a film called Locked Down) prove the dan­gers of mak­ing haste, draw­ing rash con­clu­sions that already look out-of-date by the time the final cut make it to viewers.

The ear­li­est sto­ries on record were cre­ation myths, devised to explain nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na too mas­sive to be con­trolled; today, we engage in a sec­u­lar equiv­a­lent of this rit­u­al, orga­niz­ing the messi­ness of exis­tence into sto­ries ren­der­ing it com­pre­hen­si­ble. This con­stant recon­tex­tu­al­iz­ing can be a source of com­fort, if one wants it to be. Fads fade and dis­as­ters beget new dis­as­ters, but the ten­den­cy toward self-scruti­ny has been the one con­stant through all of mod­ern life, each gen­er­a­tion equal­ly assured that it’s liv­ing through the end times. Sur­veyed as a whole, this body of work posits the heart­en­ing the­o­ry that as years tick by, the only guar­an­tee is that there will always be more of them.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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