One of the intriguing lessons gleaned from studying Gen-X filmmakers is which topics they explore comfortably and which ones they explore haltingly. In general, the most powerful statements offered by these directors relate to issues that affect the here and now of their young lives: education, family, work, love, sexuality, drugs. Yet when challenged to look ahead, they seem to falter. Perhaps reflecting the collective youth of their makers, films helmed by Gen Xers mostly shun issues of old age and the future. Given the generational predilection toward exploring issues of life’s meaning—as seen, particularly, in the philosophy-drenched personas of slacker characters—the reluctance these filmmakers have about imagining what comes next in their chronology is telling.
In the most cynical interpretation, Gen Xers don’t discuss old age and the future because they have no optimism for what looms ahead. But perhaps the real reason behind their reticence in these areas is that Gen Xers’ ambivalence about the present makes them dubious about prognostication: As they have such a tentative grasp on the forces that define the present, guessing which forces might define the future is daunting.
When the concept of aging arises in Gen-X movies, it’s usually portrayed tragically, as in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (which depicts how families are affected by the impending deaths of old men) and Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil (which shows an aging Nazi corrupting a willful youth). To a certain degree, the fear of aging that this portrayal implies is par for the course—by definition, the young haven’t the maturity required to understand the old, no matter how genuinely they may respect previous generations. Yet Generation X’s relationship to their immediate predecessors provides two more possible explanations for Generation X’s hesitance about the future.
First and most obviously, a boomer’s vision of the future played a key role in Generation X’s past. Star Wars became a blockbuster in 1977, and Gen Xers comprise a huge segment of the youth audience that supported George Lucas’s space opera. Young viewers’ infatuation with futuristic stories continued through the late 1970s and early 1980s, yet the generation weaned on Star Wars has been slow to imitate the popcorn fare it consumed when young: The Matrix, The Crow, Dark City, Gattaca, and X-Men are among the few major futuristic statements made by Gen-X filmmakers, and two of them (The Crow and Dark City) were made by the same man, Alex Proyas. While the paucity of Gen-X sci-fi flicks might suggest that Generation X doesn’t share the wonderment and hopefulness (or, some might say, naiveté) that distinguished its chronological predecessor before cynicism set in, it’s also possible that the lack of futuristic visions can be attributed to cultural cycles.
The popularity of science fiction tends to ebb and flow, and the box-office success of The Matrix and Lucas’s fourth Star Wars movie, Episode One—The Phantom Menace (both of which were released in 1999) laid the groundwork for a new run of sci-fi flicks. Such pictures are notoriously slow to emerge, because of the complexity involved in making them, so the repercussions of 1999’s hits may be felt later in Generation X’s run. Certainly the fact that Steven Soderbergh, forever the Gen-X pioneer, said in 2001 that he planned to remake an obscure Russian sci-fi movie called Solaris proves that this group of filmmakers may yet speak to a genre that had such a profound impact during their formative years.
Setting aside the reasons why they are so few, the major sci-movies directed by Gen Xers share an important aspect: All predict a bleak future in which the virtuous are a violently oppressed minority. The Matrix features an all-out war against the status quo, and The Crow and X-Men feature superpowered vigilantes as their protagonists. The heroes of Dark City and Gattaca face omniscient authority figures in the mode of Big Brother, the antagonist of George Orwell’s endlessly imitated novel 1984. And while it’s true that these futuristic visions subscribe to a popular portrayal of the future—The Crow, for instance, has production design straight out of 1982’s Blade Runner, the seminal science-fiction thriller directed by Ridley Scott—the similarities between Generation X’s futuristic movies may indicate something more than just a generational affection for the same influences.
At the very least, the abject terror associated with institutionalized authority in these movies echoes the misgivings about institutions that permeate so many Gen-X movies. Members of this generation seem deeply fearful of dehumanized governments and corporations, whether personified by the humiliating workplace supervisors of Office Space or the unforgiving overlords of Gattaca.
Because they have so many precedents in other people’s films, Alex Proyas’s pictures are among the least unsettling of Generation X’s cautionary sci-fi tales. The Crow, adapted from a comic book created by James O’Barr, is essentially an extra-violent, extra-fantastic retread of Tim Burton’s Batman, only without the colorful villain and high-tech gadgets. It’s a vigilante story with a strong heart and a haunting backstory, both of which involve star Brandon Lee. The son of legendary martial artist Bruce Lee, Brandon Lee gives a sexy and soulful performance as a musician raised from the dead to avenge an assault on his family. The poignancy of his performance is accentuated by viewers’ knowledge that Lee was killed in an accident during filming; this actor playing an undead avenger actually is a voice from beyond the grave. Yet the trappings with which Proyas surrounds Lee lack the actor’s humanity.
The ornate Gothic spires and cloud-choked skies that Proyas employs to personify the city in which the Crow lives are familiar to anyone who has seen Batman, Blade Runner, or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. All of these films imagine urban sprawl taken to its logical extreme, so the cities in these movies are nightmares of soulless towers, rampant grime, oppressive darkness, and pervasive smoke. They essentially are tweaked visions of modern-day Los Angeles or New York or Hong Kong or Chicago. And while his predecessors filled their dystopian milieus with ironic details, Proyas fills his with obvious signifiers.
The director’s style matured somewhat in Dark City, which combined sci-fi elements with photography and clothes straight out of a 1940s film noir—again, à la Blade Runner. The picture, based on an original story by Proyas and his collaborators, imagines a weird future in which extraterrestrials control the life of the protagonist (Rufus Sewell) and other characters, taking the paranoia of 1984 to an extreme by saying that the all-powerful force pulling the puppet strings is genuinely otherworldly. While Dark City has several arresting visuals, it ultimately gets bogged down in borrowed ideas and comic-book-style action. It’s interesting in the context of a discussion of Gen-X movies for its inescapable similarities to The Matrix, which also puts a fanciful spin on Orwell’s familiar Big Brother imagery. The Matrix, however, succeeds where Dark City fails because The Matrix is structured as a classic quest story, and because the payoff at the end of the quest actually raises the stakes of the story, instead of merely tossing viewers an ironic, Twilight Zone-style twist.
Like The Crow, X-Men was adapted from a comic book. An exuberant adventure that replaces Proyas’s bloodshed with tricked-up fisticuffs, the movie is set in the realm of countless other cautionary tales: the not-too-distant future. And like any cautionary tale worth its salt, X-Men has an issue: intolerance. The story portrays a secret war between good and evil “mutants,” humans born with paranormal abilities. The other participant in this three-way aggression is ignorant humanity, as represented by McCarthy-esque Senator Robert Kelly (Bruce Davison). He wants mutants documented, detained, and maybe even exterminated. The intolerance that Kelly represents causes the movie’s villain, Magneto (Ian McKellen), to lash out against normal humans, and causes its hero, Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), to organize opposition against Magneto. Proyas’s futuristic heroes resort to anarchistic violence to right the wrongs of their worlds, but the X-Men—as Xavier’s costumed apprentices are called—practice a kind of civil disobedience, and curb bloodshed whenever possible.
If the future is incidental to Proyas’s movies and to X-Men, however, it’s integral to Gattaca, screenwriter Andrew Niccol’s directorial debut—and probably the most emotionally resounding Gen-X sci-fi flick. Subtle and sad where The Matrix is flamboyant and angry, Gattaca uses a wrenching human drama to illustrate the unimaginable realities of an Orwellian future.
Niccol’s hauntingly paranoid movie posits a future in which a genetically engineered master race occupies the top strata of society, while naturally born—and therefore imperfect—people are ostracized bottom- feeders. Given the staggering advances in medical science at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, from successful cloning experiments to the emergence of genetically engineered food, the science underpinning Niccol’s fiction is utterly contemporary, so the ethical issues he explores are uniquely relevant. It’s therefore disappointing that Gattaca isn’t wholly effective as a drama. The minimalistic style of the movie is intoxicating and the story line raises issues that provoke intriguing conversations, but Niccol’s screenplay eventually drowns in pedestrian narrative elements.
Before that happens, however, Niccol sets up a fascinating premise. In the future world dominated by lab-perfected paragons, one of the genetically engineered aristocrats (Jude Law) loses the use of his legs, so he sells his identity to a man of low—read: natural—birth (Ethan Hawke). To put across the illusion of being perfect, Hawke’s character must ensure that he leaves no traces of his imperfect physicality anywhere, so he scrubs his skin raw in the shower to dislodge every tiny fragment of dead skin, and panics when he misplaces the corrective lenses that adjust his poor vision to ideal standards. Niccol’s movie contains allusions to Nazism, of course, but also represents an educated, cynical guess about where man’s tinkering in his own physiology could lead: If we can get to the point of building perfect people in a laboratory, wouldn’t our traditional disdain for the imperfect—as seen in centuries of racial, ethnic, and religious intolerance—lead us to create a new hierarchy meant to shun the weak, the stupid, the ugly? As he did in his remarkable script for The Truman Show, Niccol poignantly dramatizes the human capacity for inhumanity—a theme that not only dovetails but in some ways encapsulates the feelings that feed into Generation X’s collective sense of alienation.
Despite the presence of such timely subject matter, it’s impossible to discuss Gen-X movies without considering the movies that influenced them, from Star Wars to Blade Runner to Brazil and beyond. Great sci-fi films are few, but each casts such a long shadow that countless subsequent pictures are dismissed as weak imitations. Movies in other genres get put through the contrast-and-compare wringer—Traffic gets measured against The French Connection, the similarities between Erin Brockovich and Norma Rae are talking points—but sci-fi movies fare particularly poorly during the comparative process. So for some filmmakers, the better part of valor when it comes to science fiction is avoiding the genre entirely.
It’s not so much that the genre’s possibilities have been exhausted, but that the genre’s possibilities have been so expertly explored that it’s difficult to imagine concepts that won’t be defined by their relationship to other ideas in other movies. In a way, perhaps this generation’s youthful romance with science fiction has put them too far inside the genre to get an outside view of what colors haven’t yet been added to the painting. Having said that, one particular science-fiction film, The Matrix, plays a crucial role in the cinema of Generation X. For that reason, a discussion of The Matrix occurs not here but at the end of this chapter, because the philosophical issues raised by Larry and Andy Wachowski’s picture are so provocative that grouping it with other science-fiction films is too limiting.
While Gen Xers have been slow to attack the science-fiction genre, they have shown no such reluctance when embracing the related genre of fantasy—or the even more dynamic ilk of films that play with the line separating fantasy from reality. The savviness with which the makers of The Sixth Sense, Being John Malkovich, The Blair Witch Project, and other films question perceptions of actual and physical life probably has everything to do with this generation’s relationship with cinema itself.
Generation X grew up knowing more about movies than any previous generation, and even the voluminous amounts of filmmaking information to which they had access as youths has been dwarfed by the avalanche of behind-the-scenes data that’s available now, at the time when the oldest Gen Xers have reached maturity. (One can only imagine what the next generation of filmmakers will have to offer, given that the curtain hiding the secrets of movie magic seems to have been completely removed.) In a very important sense, movies such as Being John Malkovich and The Blair Witch Project are about the role that illusion plays in filmmaking—and about the fact that projected film images are in fact an illusion, thanks to the phenomenon called persistence of vision.
Probably the least original Gen-X movie about illusion and reality is The Cell, Tarsem Singh’s ultra-stylized picture about a psychiatrist who enters the mind of a serial killer to learn the location of his victims. The picture got some attention upon release because of its disturbing visuals, such as a shot of a man voluntarily suspended by hooks attached to rings sewn into his skin, or a shot of a horse cleaved into pristine sections by sheets of glass. Critics rightly noted that the most sensationalistic visions in the picture were borrowed from hip New York artists—continuing a tradition begun with Alfred Hitchcock’s employment of Salvador Dalí as the designer of Spellbound’s dream sequences—but less was made of how derivative the movie’s central device was.
At least as far back as 1984, when a sci-fi thriller called Dreamscape was released, filmmakers have toyed with the idea of a characters projecting themselves into the slumbering minds of other characters. Singh tried to make the familiar seem fresh by utilizing ornate, frightening production design and by incorporating a pop-psychology backstory—the killer was abused as a child, so the shrink becomes an avenging angel who destroys the killer’s rage, thus freeing the wronged babe inside the monster—but the movie was strangely flat and unmoving.
The first two films directed by Kasi Lemmons, Eve’s Bayou and The Caveman’s Valentine, deal with buried emotions more interestingly. Lemmons’s debut, Eve’s Bayou, is a strange and somewhat opaque combination of mystery and family drama in which the death of a philandering father may or may not have been caused by one of his daughters, who may or may not have used a combination of psychic ability and voodoo to avenge the sexual abuse of her sister. The qualifiers in this description are necessary because Lemmons’s evasive narrative makes the “truth” of her fictional events hard to grasp; as have countless movies since Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Eve’s Bayou plays with the idea that when numerous people view a given event subjectively, adhering to any one objective description of the event is itself a subjective choice. The film won many partisans, and did surprisingly strong business given the usually chilly reception afforded serious films by and about black people, but just as its story points out how biases and emotions color recollections of fact, the story confounded as many viewers as it entranced. At the very least, the film is an effective mood piece with moments of otherworldly power—an effective conversation piece with an abundance of provocative narrative elements.
Seductive savagery: Dream sequences in Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, which illustrate how a killer (Vincent D’Onofrio) romanticizes himself, play a characteristic Gen-X game of blending reality and illusion (New Line Cinema).
The surreal imagery in Lemmons’s second film, The Caveman’s Valentine, is less about a tumultuous past than a tumultuous present—specifically, the troubled existence of a schizophrenic named Romulus Ledbetter (Samuel L. Jackson). A former concert pianist living in a cave in New York City, he springs into action when a young murder victim is found outside his cave. Romulus becomes an ersatz private detective, but his investigation is hampered by the same force that provokes it: His delusional belief that an all-powerful figure called “Stuyvesant” is broadcasting “Z-rays” from the top of the Chrysler Building to control Romulus’s life. The caveman is motivated in part by his desire to mete out justice, and in part by his desire to rebel against his imagined Orwellian oppressor. The Orwellian allusion, of course, connects The Caveman’s Valentine to the myriad other Gen-X movies that suggest omniscient overlords.
Whereas the serial killer in The Cell has dreams in which he is personified as a glamorous demon, the hero of The Caveman’s Valentine is haunted by demons. As we see in vivid flash cuts, he literally has bats in his belfry: Winged creatures fly around in his mind, perhaps to symbolize the dark and random thoughts that frequently overpower Romulus’s consciousness. The character’s inability to restrain his id is tragic and also strangely alluring. The obvious problem is that Romulus often erupts into seemingly unmotivated fits of rage, so his demons make it near-impossible to fit into “normal” society: At one point, Romulus talks his way into an elite party, then slides into the partygoers’ confidence by playing the piano until an unprovoked outburst reveals his emotional imbalance.
But Romulus’s fantasy life also is a benefit, because he’s haunted by a facsimile of his estranged wife, Shiela (Tamara Tunie). She functions like a willful sidekick, taunting Romulus when he’s about to do something stupid, but also inspiring him to greatness. The positivity of this imagery leavens the darkness of Romulus’s other visions, creating an intriguingly balanced portrayal of insanity. On one level, the character’s fantasy life is totally separate from reality, but on another level, his fantasies keep him grounded.
Fantasy and reality intertwine in a more traditional way throughout The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan’s acclaimed and monstrously successful breakthrough film. The moody, measured thriller depicts the extraordinary relationship between psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) and an eight-year-old patient named Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Cole is troubled by bloody visions because, as he says in the movie’s endlessly quoted tag line, “I see dead people.” As Malcolm soon learns, the ghosts gravitate to Cole because he’s able to communicate with those on “the other side.” The ghosts want the youngster’s assistance in resolving issues that were left hanging when they died. Malcolm aids Cole in revealing the identity of a murderer and other tasks before Shyamalan reveals his narrative trump card: Malcolm is himself dead, and is lingering in limbo because of unresolved issues related to his marriage.
On a narrative level, this twist of cinematic reality turns watching The Sixth Sense into a game, because Shyamalan put clues about Malcolm’s secret into various parts of the movie. Except in a prologue, we see none but Cole acknowledge the psychiatrist’s presence; Malcolm wears the same clothes throughout the movie, although the director hides this fact by having the character wear different versions of the same outfit; and so on.
But on an emotional level, Malcolm’s secret adheres to a reality-defying idea that gained tremendous currency at the end of the twentieth century, the idea that souls linger on earth until they achieve “closure.” Throughout the late 1990s, psychics were ubiquitous on television, books about the afterlife became best-sellers, and songs and movies and books featuring angel characters were embraced by the public. It was in this context that The Sixth Sense achieved massive success by tapping into the zeitgeist. Many pundits attributed the sudden interest in spirituality to the arrival of the millennium, and to the widespread superstition that the year 2000 might coincide with the Christian vision of Armageddon, at which point all living persons would be made to account for the virtue, or lack thereof, in their lives.
Whatever the reasons behind it, however, the mainstream acceptance of The Sixth Sense was interesting. Many bought tickets for the movie because word got out that it had a great twist ending, but there also must have been some appeal to the idea that Malcolm could use his afterlife to fix what was wrong with his actual life. As do Lemmons’s films, Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable convey the comforting idea that if people identify and fulfill their destinies, their souls will find peace. Significantly, these films address spiritual issues even though Gen-X filmmakers mostly avoid depicting the formal mechanism through which most people explore their spirituality, religion. This is yet another example of Gen Xers circumventing an institution in their quest for meaning.
Conventional ideas about reality also get a skewering in Being John Malkovich, which is largely informed by contemporary celebrity culture, but which also delves into issues of spirituality. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman anticipated the kinds of discussions his movie would provoke, as seen in a self-reflexive monologue spoken relatively early in the movie. The speaker is a frustrated puppeteer named Craig (John Cusack), who has just discovered a portal into the mind of real-life actor John Malkovich—played in the movie, of course, by John Malkovich.
CRAIG: The point is that this is a very odd thing—supernatural, for lack of a better word. It raises all sorts of philosophical questions about the nature of self, about the existence of the soul. Am I me? Is Malkovich Malkovich? Was the Buddha right, is duality an illusion? … Do you see what a metaphysical can of worms this portal is? I don’t think I can go on living my life as I have lived it.
The joke behind this monologue is that it’s almost word-for-word the kind of vague blather that a pretentious critic might write after seeing Being John Malkovich, so it’s a discussion about a discussion about the movie. That cheeky proposition is typical of Gen-X cinema, in part because of the generation’s savviness about what movies are, and in part because of how deeply postmodern conceptualizing has penetrated modern critical thinking. Pulp Fiction, for instance, is at times a movie about watching a movie, and The Blair Witch Project is from beginning to end a movie about watching a movie.
No Gen-X picture has gotten more mileage from exploiting the divide between reality and fantasy than Blair Witch, which became symbolic of the modern independent-movie boom because it was such an inherently low-tech proposition. Conceived as a compilation of footage recovered from a trio of twentysomethings who disappeared in a Maryland forest while searching for an mythical figure called the Blair Witch, the movie was shot on grainy 16-millimeter film and equally grainy amateur-grade video.
Ironically, however, the pitching of the movie was as high-tech as its making was low-tech. Using a heavily trafficked Web site, the filmmakers created a complex “mythology” around their movie, and even convinced many moviegoers that the characters and images in The Blair Witch Project were real. So on a certain level, this black-and-white, unprofessional-looking movie is the best example yet of how Generation X’s relationship with technology affects their perceptions of reality: By making their film look amateurish, and then using technological means to spread a lie about it, the makers of The Blair Witch Project pulled the wool over the eyes of a vast segment of a technology-savvy generation. The illusion was made even more complete by a widely seen companion documentary, The Curse of the Blair Witch, which was in many ways more polished and persuasive than the actual film.
Even among those who were in on the joke, however, the interplay between reality and fantasy in The Blair Witch Project was delicious. In the movie, three would-be documentarians venture into a forest that, according to legend, has for centuries been haunted by the Blair Witch, the bloodthirsty and vengeful spirit of a woman who was shunned by ignorant locals. As the three go deeper into the forest, they are spooked by unexplained noises and by peculiar artifacts that appear around their campsites as if by magic. Once they decide to flee, they realize they have lost any sense of direction—so the movie becomes a ticking clock counting down the minutes until the Blair Witch claims three more victims.
The slyest gimmick in the film is that the witch, presuming she “exists,” is never shown: The biggest hint that the myth is reality is the movie’s famous final shot, in which protagonist Heather (Heather Donahue), enters what appears to be the witch’s lair, points her camera at the seemingly paralyzed body of her friend, and is struck by a powerful offscreen force. After more than eighty teasing minutes, this climax is a shattering payoff for those who succumbed to the movie’s unusual spell.
Be afraid … be very afraid: A deft exercise in postmodern horror, the Daniel Myrick–Eduardo Sánchez film The Blair Witch Project features Heather Donahue as a willful college student due for a deadly comeuppance (Artisan Entertainment).
For all of their fanciful imagining, fantasy films—whether horror shows such as The Cell or satirical romps such as Being John Malkovich—ultimately deal with the gap between reality and fiction in a conventional fashion, grounding viewers in an idea of objective reality. Romulus’s visions in The Caveman’s Valentine are obviously not real (we know they exist only in his head); the trips into the mind of Being John Malkovich are obviously not real (the whole context of the movie is self-consciously contrived); and The Sixth Sense is predicated on the familiar concept of the dead being able to communicate with the living.
Conversely, Eve’s Bayou and The Blair Witch Project leave unanswered questions in their wake, for they portray supernatural forces that defy simple explanations. Did the little girl in Eve’s Bayou kill her father by normal means or by utilizing voodoo? Is the witch in The Blair Witch Project real, or did some maniac exploit superstition? These adventurous films zero in on an idea that’s close to the heart of Gen-X cinema’s modus operandi: Given how familiar audiences are with the means by which filmmakers create illusions, the illusions that have the greatest impact are the ones left unexplained. These films, then, are as enigmatic and overwhelming as modern life itself.
The three doomed souls wandering through Blair Witch can even be interpreted as poignant metaphors for Generation X itself. Lost in the wilds of contemporary existence, and with no map to guide them to safety, the characters are beset by unseen forces over which they have no control and about which they have terrifyingly limited knowledge. They are disconnected from the institutions that could protect them—family, community, authority—so is it any wonder that they are consumed by the void?
The fear that Gen Xers are working without a net, that they are so disconnected from other segments of society that they are at risk of being destroyed by the unknown like the characters in The Blair Witch Project, pervades some of Generation X’s darkest films. In David Fincher’s The Game, a businessman is shunted into a dangerous adventure, with mysterious assailants pursuing him for no apparent reason. The businessman learns that his reckless brother hired a firm to chase him as part of a life-or-death game that the brother hoped would shake the businessman free from his soulless lifestyle. Fincher backs off from the potentialities of this story with a cheap trick ending, but the paranoia implied by the story line—“Everyone’s out to get me, but I don’t know why”—is telling.
Similarly, Max (Sean Gullette), the protagonist of Darren Aronofsky’s debut film, Pi, finds himself the target of unwanted attention when he becomes embroiled in a weird plot involving computers, arcane elements of Judaica, and other disparate factors. Max’s brain contains esoteric knowledge that both maddens him and sparks the interest of extremist groups, making him a victim of his own intelligence. Aronofsky’s thriller is loaded with wild intellectual concepts and presented as sensory bombardment, so the madness eating at Max’s brain, for instance, is represented by a piercing noise that Aronofsky plays at such an intense, unrelenting volume that viewers experience almost the same discomfort as the beleaguered hero.
Max is a surpassingly brilliant mathematician who has shut out the rest of the world to crunch numbers in his claustrophobic Manhattan apartment. He stumbles across a 216-digit figure that crashes his supercomputer, and after he discards his only printout of the number, extremists hunt him down because they view the number as a key to power. Meanwhile, the mathematician suffers from crippling migraines that occur whenever he nears the rediscovery of the magic number. In methodical narration, Max draws a parallel between his life-threatening quest for the number and a childhood folly in which he defied his parents by staring into the sun, nearly destroying his eyes in the process. At its core, Aronofsky’s story is about the fine line between genius and madness.
It says everything about the movie that Max escapes his hellish situation by putting an electric drill to his temple, then boring a hole through his own brain. To stop the noises in his head, he eradicates an essential component of his own identity. From the perspective of the most paranoid members of Generation X, Max assassinates his uniqueness in order to live in peace with the drones who populate modern life. Max’s shocking action, which is both self-destruction and self-preservation, can be interpreted as a metaphor for a Gen Xer tossing aside his or her generational identity—be it slackerdom, antiauthoritarianism, alternative sexuality, what have you—to go with the flow of a culture that doesn’t tolerate the new ideas of a new generation.
The fear of having to sacrifice personal identity in order to blend into contemporary culture is hardly the exclusive province of Aronofsky’s work, though. The same fear drives the anarchists in Fight Club, and, for that matter, the post-collegiates in Reality Bites and Before Sunrise and all the other movies about Gen Xers confronting the realities of modern society. Yet no filmmakers have taken this anxiety to a greater extreme than Larry and Andy Wachowski, the wunderkind filmmaking team who made their name with the Bound and then became superstars with their sophomore effort, the science-fiction adventure The Matrix. Because of what the Wachowskis use their sophomore film to say and how they use the medium of film to say it, The Matrix is, thus far, the ultimate cinematic expression of Generation X’s collective identity.
Fittingly, the film is a dark parable about oppressive institutions, and both its content and technique examine the dehumanizing possibilities of technology. Yet within the darkness and technological fetishism lies wishful imagery of a Gen-X messiah—a messiah who, importantly, bears more than a passing resemblance to that most enduring of Gen-X icons, Star Wars protagonist Luke Skywalker. For even while The Matrix makes a powerful statement about what it means to live in contemporary American society, it makes an equally powerful statement about how a youth spent at the movies taught two members of Generation X to dream of better ways of living in contemporary American society. The postmodern, recycled nature of the film’s statement—which is unmistakably a modernization of a previous film’s statement—is yet another reason why The Matrix so acutely encapsulates the cinematic identity of Generation X.
The Wachowskis show viewers that The Matrix is something fresh right at the beginning of the film, when a pair of government-agent types assault a slinky computer hacker named Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss). To evade them, Trinity leaps into the air and assumes a kung fu-style fighting pose—then hovers in mid-air while the camera whirls around her in an impossible 360-degree angle achieved through a technique the filmmakers call “bullet time,” created by digitally stitching together images captured by a ring of still cameras. This moment tells viewers that characters in The Matrix will manifest a brand of superhuman ability never previously shown in films, but also that the vocabulary of the movie itself will be ingrained with cutting-edge technology. Later revelations underline that the theme and technique of the movie are inextricably entwined.
Trinity eventually makes contact with another hacker, Neo (Keanu Reeves), and a series of tantalizing clues suggest that she’s about to share a life-changing secret with the reclusive computer nut. She teases Neo—and the audience—even further with an insinuating monologue proving that she’s privy not only to secrets that are important to Neo, but secrets about him:
TRINITY: I know what you’ve been doing. I know why you hardly sleep at night, why you live alone, and why, night after night, you sit at your computer. You’re looking for him. I know because I was once looking for the same thing. And when he found me, he told me I wasn’t really looking for him. I was looking for an answer. It’s the question that drives us, Neo. It’s the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I did.
NEO: What is the Matrix?
TRINITY: The answer is out there, Neo. It’s looking for you. And it will find you if you want it to.
Despite the story’s futuristic setting, the facts of Neo’s lifestyle are very clearly extrapolated from commonplace late-twentieth-century behavior: He’s a young, disenfranchised man who has replaced the flesh-and-blood human community with the ones and zeros of the online community, interacting more comfortably with technology than with people. And the existential quality of the endeavor that links him to the rebellious, seductive Trinity—“It’s the question that drives us”—identifies him as an archetypal Gen-X protagonist. Other such characters pursue their search for meaning by removing themselves from consumer-driven society to investigate questions of inner life and spirituality, but Neo, because he’s a creature of the Information Age, seeks the meaning of life not by discussing philosophy or deconstructing pop culture, but by journeying through the Internet. His quest is coldly logical and framed in the vernacular of an online culture: Surely all the answers can be found, he thinks, if I can type the right question into my keyboard.
Rage against the machine: Messianic hero Neo (Keanu Reeves) uses blazing machine guns and cyber-age savvy to overthrow an Orwellian power structure in The Matrix, a science-fiction hit created by brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski (Warner Bros.).
Neo’s quest is given new import when he becomes the target of the same agents who pursued Trinity at the beginning of the picture, and when the Wachowskis stage several mind-bending sequences that call into question whether Neo actually is being persecuted or whether he’s simply imaginative and paranoid. After a series of harrowing close calls, Neo is brought before an enigmatic figure named Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne), Trinity’s mentor. In a scene that clearly echoes the Star Wars moment in which young hero Luke Skywalker first learns of “the Force”—the energy field that binds all characters in the Star Wars universe—Morpheus offers Neo a chance to gain a greater understanding of his world.
MORPHEUS: You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, that is not far from the truth. Do you believe in fate, Neo?
NEO: No.
MORPHEUS: Why not?
NEO: Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my own life.
MORPHEUS: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you’re here: You’re here because you know … that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there—like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad…. Do you know what I’m talking about?
NEO: The Matrix?
MORPHEUS: … The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us…. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
NEO: What truth?
MORPHEUS: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself…. After that, there is no turning back.
This exchange is suffused with the ennui, introspection, and existential angst that permeate many of the best Gen-X films. The “slavery” allusion, while literal in the context of the film, echoes figurative language that pops up throughout Gen-X movies about work—for what are the characters in Office Space, American Beauty, and other films if not slaves who rebel against their captors? And the idea that the modern world is an illusion is a hyperbolic manifestation of the disenfranchisement that drives so many Gen-X characters away from societal institutions. Yet while other characters feel disconnected from family, churches, governments, and other societal bedrocks, Neo actually learns that the very fabric of his reality—the institutions that ground him to a sense of existence—are false. Therefore, it’s crucial to underline that Neo is poised to learn one possible answer to the eternal question facing Generation X: “Who am I, and where do I belong?”
Morpheus reveals that in the future, man created intelligent machines that eventually rebelled against mankind—a familiar theme in science fiction, which perpetually returns to the Frankenstein parable about men who play God. These future machines enslaved the human race into a massive web of pods, in which life energy is sucked from human bodies to power machines. To keep the humans from fighting their captivity, the machines created the Matrix, a virtual-reality simulation of the modern world that is piped directly into the minds of the pod-dwelling humans. So even though Neo and millions like him believe themselves to be walking and eating and sleeping and breathing in a physical world, they actually only are dreaming themselves into that world at the prodding of the machines. Morpheus and Trinity are among a tiny group of people who were freed from their pods, and who are building an army with which to overthrow the machines and free humanity from enslavement.
This story line is presented as pure escapism, as are stylized action scenes in which Trinity, Morpheus, and Neo use martial arts and gunpower to fight the computer-generated agents within the Matrix. (These scenes recall how a human entered a video game in the early-1980s fantasy film Tron, yet another movie whose audience included vast numbers of Gen Xers.) Beneath the escapism, however, is a poignant expression of frustration at the homogenization and pointlessness of a modern world in which humans replace each other with machines, both for utilitarian tasks and, in the Internet age, for companionship. While the use of “bullet-time” photography and other high-tech elements prove that the Wachowski brothers and their collaborators are fans of at least some technology, the unease they have about humans’ ability to steer an even keel into the waters of technological advancement is palpable.
The filmmakers’ nervousness about where modern society is headed finds its ultimate manifestation in Neo, whom the other characters perceive as an Information Age messiah. The miracle he performs is not rising from the dead or turning water into wine, but reading computer code. He is the first human who can think faster than the machines, so once he becomes actualized, he looks at the Matrix and sees not the utterly convincing illusion that Trinity and Morpheus see, but the ones and zeros that the machines use to manufacture the illusion.
In the Wachowskis’ cautionary worldview, the Matrix is the anti-Force, the benevolent collective spirituality of George Lucas’s universe reimagined as a drug used to drown the consciousness of all humanity. Accordingly, Neo’s first major victory against the machines—which concludes The Matrix and sets the stage for the film’s sequels—is achieved by venturing deep into the inner space of his own mind, a mirror image of how Luke Skywalker achieved his greatest victory by venturing deep into outer space. What joins both characters is that each must sublimate his own persona beneath a force greater than any individual, giving power to the idea that collective effort is the only truly useful tool for fighting oppression.
The Matrix is an exhibition of how the unique forces that defined Generation X’s upbringing both help and hinder the evolution of this generation’s filmmakers. It’s at once stimulating and superficial, intellectual and escapist. Viewers who simply crave visual and aural stimulation can watch the fight scenes and the trick shots and the images of sexy actors zipping around in form-fitting clothes. Yet viewers who crave something meaningful can find that, too: In the most generous reading of the film, Neo is the first Gen-X protagonist to truly learn what caused his generation to be what it is, and it’s therefore significant that he sees not the hand of God—proof of an omniscient creator—but a wholly rational mechanism.
This is the most cynical concept buried in The Matrix, which constantly bounds between the extremes of heroic optimism and dismal pessimism: The meaning of life is not some ephemeral spiritual concept, but the solution to a math problem. In this reading, The Matrix is the saddest possible proof of how deeply Gen Xers have lost faith in societal institutions, because it suggests that by losing faith in everything that grounds life, Gen Xers have lost faith in the mystery of life itself.
Accordingly, as Gen-X scholar Geoffrey T. Holtz noted, the nihilistic attitude that pervades The Matrix is far from anomalous:
In many ways [Gen Xers] have absorbed the ever-growing fatalistic attitude of society in general. There is, to be sure, a vein of hopelessness that runs through this generation. One college professor who has been teaching English composition for more than twenty years recently noted a marked difference between the plots of her students’ fiction today and those of previous students. In the past, she observed, “students plotted their stories so that all kinds of terrible things would happen to their protagonists, but in the end […] everyone, alone or together, would work their way out of danger and get on with their lives.” Today, however, “violence enters the story without benefit of plot, as if by metaphysical caprice. Not a caprice of the student writers but of forces way beyond their control.”1