Defining the aughts style

The farther removed you get from a particular decade, the easier it is to see the hallmarks of that decade in the culture – most notably in things like wardrobes, hairstyles and technology, but certainly as well in an area that gives a showcase to all three: movies.

We all know what a 70s or 80s movie looks like, and movies from the 1990s are starting to have a certain flavor to them as well. But what of the movies from the aughts? We are either still too close to it, or those movies don’t have a defining quality that speaks to where we were as a culture at that time.

I may have found a defining quality.

Jaco Van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody, which I rewatched last weekend, has an interesting position of straddling two decades. It played film festivals in 2009, even receiving a ten-minute standing ovation at one of them, but then it had a very circuitous route to distribution, doing poorly on its initial run in Belgium and then even more poorly when it finally received a limited U.S. release in 2013. I saw it in early 2014 after it finally got its video release on the back of that U.S. theatrical release.

I was quite taken with the movie, giving it five stars on Letterboxd and bemoaning that I felt I couldn’t consider it for my best of the teens because of its technical 2009 release date. I still liked it quite a bit on this viewing, but I now properly see it as part of a distinct 2000’s trend at the movies: the head-trip movie involving causation, fate, alternate timelines, and romance. If butterfly wings make an assumed or actual appearance, all the better.

You might say some of these things didn’t really take over the culture until the last few years, as the multiverse has become a popular concept delivered at a level that it can be consumed by comic book fans (the MCU) and Academy voters (Everything Everywhere All at Once). The actual multiverse itself may not have taken off until then, but ideas of paths chosen or not chosen, and the sort of elevated indie style that characterizes a movie like Mr. Nobody, were huge in the 2000’s.

It may serve you better to be familiar with Mr. Nobody to understand why this movie qualifies so well for this particular 2000’s aesthetic, but let me give you a couple examples of the sorts of things you would find in these movies.

1) Time lapse photography. Any will do, but best is if there is an animal decomposing in chronological or reverse chronological order.

2) A section of the film where a throwback version of a scientist from a previous decade explains a concept that will have a secret relevance to the film’s themes.

3) Uses of montage and multiple film stocks.

4) Non-linear storytelling.

5) Dabbling in science fiction, preferably with at least one scene in space, even if (especially if) it runs contrary to the rest of the story.

6) A central tragic romance.

Now, you could just say I’m fresh off Mr. Nobody, which contains all these things, so I am just listing characteristics of this particular movie. That may be. But you can find elements of these things in other big movies from the decade, some of which were written by (or inspired by) Charlie Kaufman but some of which have no connection to Kaufman and just pick from things that were in the air at the time.

Coming at the end of the decade, Mr. Nobody feels like a particular summation of what we learned during the past ten years of filmmaking. This piece would probably be stronger if I went and listed a number of other films that exemplify what I’m talking about, and even stronger if the best example I can think of, Cloud Atlas, weren’t from 2012, two years after the decade ended. But as it happens I'm on vacation right now. I suppose also it’s possible it was more of a 2005 to 2015 thing.

In any case, the real point of writing this post is that I now realize we are far enough away from those years to have certain films feel like a true time capsule of that era, and Mr. Nobody does that more so than most. It’s still a really good movie, and well worth the viewing if you haven’t seen it. But instead of feeling as original to me as it did in 2014, it now feels like the consummate example of a number of films that clearly inspired it.