As art gallery attendances dwindled throughout the 20th century, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, among other institutions, began to show prevailing evidence for cinema being the favoured artistic medium of the Western world (ABS, 2010). With the new millennia coming into full view, it was only natural, then, that in 1999 the auteurs of the people’s chosen medium would come to reflect the fear and uncertainty that had become near-universal in the West. At a time where many expressed fears about the future, over 50% of people cited Y2K as something they genuinely feared (Rosen & Weil, 1999).
While watching the new millennium approach, society began to feel dissatisfied with the state of itself—‘why isn’t 2000 looking like it will be what we expected?’, ‘why aren’t things changing?’, ‘is this it?’. So although the films of 1999 do not claim to answer any of these questions, or solve any of the apparent problems, the most important factor, as is a virtue of art, was that the issues were being acknowledged and discussed. The broad tonal similarity in affirming society’s worries—the violent Fight Club and the experimental The Virgin Suicides thematically matching films such as the Oscar-winning American Beauty—is something that a single year of cinema cannot be said to have reflected so poignantly since.
Tyler Durden, in David Fincher’s cult classic Fight Club, summarised three decades of angst by declaring that ‘our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives’ (Fincher, 1999). The economic disenfranchisement portrayed here—reflective of falling mean income values for the middle class—rang true with many in 1999, perhaps because it revealed something about the audience themselves—in this case, a latent desire... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Fight Club, 1999. Film still. Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.
The Virgin Suicides, 1999. Film still. Courtesy Paramount.
