Events | 2009.11.24
The nervous, noncommittal noughties can't end soon enough | John Harris
In a decade defined by fatalism and impotence, film-makers and writers have been quick to tap into our sense of impending doom
Just to make sure filmgoers leave the present decade on a high, this month brings two suitably upbeat blockbusters. The first is 2012 , which topped box office takings in the US and Britain at the weekend, and is directed by Roland Emmerich – who also brought us the aliens-blitz-Earth delight Independence Day and the eco-disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow . This time humanity\'s demise seems to be traceable to the horrors foretold in an ancient Mayan prophecy, though the standard plotline quickly materialises: John Cusack and on-screen family attempting to escape tsunamis, landslides and those obligatory aesthetic disasters whereby iconic global landmarks are ground into dust.
For those who want something that bit more cerebral, there is also the film version of Cormac McCarthy \'s The Road, out in the US later this month. True to the sparse, haunted spirit of the novel, gonzo urban destruction shots are restricted to quick flashbacks, and just about all the story is set in a world laid waste by an unspecified ecological disaster, in which a surviving father and son seek ridiculously unlikely safety and survival. "It is cold, and growing colder, as the world slowly dies," says the trailer – ideal, evidently, for a pre-Christmas cinema visit with the family.
But how true both films are to these fretful times: not just the current moment, with the Copenhagen summit looking shaky, the allied mission in Afghanistan faltering, and every failure and fear etched on our prime minister\'s face – but the 10 long years we must bathetically call the noughties. Just to seal the mood of ongoing dread, here comes a likely end-of-decade bestseller: having already published two volumes entitled Is It Me Or Is Everything Shit? , the writers Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur have just put out a sequel – Is It Just Me Or Has the Shit Hit the Fan?, subtitled: "Your hilarious guide to unremitting global misery".
What follows will seem equally despairing, but I\'d challenge anyone to argue with the basic story. It is not meant as any kind of denial of the woes of previous decades, and is inevitably defined by my own generation\'s passage through the optimistic period when we cut our teeth, and the altogether more troubled times that have followed it. Put another way, we thirty- and fortysomethings will probably always miss that brief interlude after the Berlin Wall had come down and taken most ideological argument with it, when to live in the industrialised west was to witness a giddy, often silly phase of human progress: the long economic boom, the sudden receding of the nuclear threat, and what some overexcited minds thought might be the end of history.
But then came the first big cracks. I can well recall how I entered the noughties: having left a job in the traditional media, I was in talks about possible work with a handful of the internet entrepreneurs who were seducing money out of venture capitalists, buying up domain names, and promising a largely painless future. The dotcom bubble soon burst, taking their hubristic dreams with it, while plenty of us anxiously clung on to print and paper.
This was followed soon enough by the great nightmare of 9/11, which in turn opened the way to the military adventure that squashed the conceit that was liberal interventionism, eventually did for Tony Blair, and arguably set off the crisis of political trust that has reached its apogee with the expenses meltdown. Consider also 7/7, and a very telling juxtaposition: the last stand of Cool Britannia-esque euphoria sparked by London being honoured with the 2012 Olympics, only for carnage, CCTV footage, and the obligatory martyr videos to remind us of the true spirit of the age. Meanwhile, rising panic about the overheating planet deservedly took an ever increasing share of the cultural-political foreground.
And then, though a lot of people would have us believe that our current economic woes unexpectedly fell from the sky the day Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, a low hum of anxious conversation began to build up. As usual, Americans were first on the case, as evidenced by such prophetic books as Anya Kamenetz \'s 2006 polemic, Generation Debt; and from the same year, The Great Risk Shift by Jacob S Hacker – an analysis of rising insecurity, stagnating middle incomes, and rocketing rewards at the very top, with the clear implication that a crisis loomed.
As also proved by such films as 28 Days Later (2002), Steven Spielberg\'s remake of War Of The Worlds (2005), and the wondrously stupid Cloverfield (2007), movie makers have had no problem tapping into our fears via various versions of the apocalypse. Musicians, by contrast, have returned time and again to the songs of balmy reassurance that have been the calling card of Oasis, Coldplay and Keane and lately converted into lachrymose show-stoppers for X Factor contestants: piano played with all the passion of a nodding dog, and a singer once again imploring us to "hold on".
Fatalism and impotence aren\'t the half of it. If you want historical comparisons, think back to the deadened early-to-mid 1970s, when leftist terrorism, the Opec oil price shock and the decisive arrival of deindustrialisation were often smoothed over by escapist progressive rock, or the airbrushed, complacent stuff that blared from the radio: the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Paul McCartney\'s Wings. Meanwhile, even if Hollywood wasn\'t quite going for the full end-of-the-world monty, there were films that made flimsy entertainment out of general mishap: The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure.
Anyway, once I\'ve got a viewing of 2012 out of the way, New Year\'s Eve will not come soon enough. Not that one should invest much hope in mere numerals, but the arrival of a new decade might just convince more people that they ought to start aiming higher, and begin to decry the mess we\'re in – or better still, to point to some kind of way out. Whatever. The nervous, noncommittal noughties cannot end soon enough. To use one of the decade\'s verbal tics: get me out of here.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]mmittal-noughties-end-too-soon
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