1999 in Film: Past, Present, and Future

I wrote the following paper in spring 2012 for a critical theory course called "Interpretive Approaches." The assignment was to analyze a single 1999 film using Joshua Clover's book The Matrix, which is part of the British Film Institute series, as a guide. My co-author, Isis Huizar, and I took a different approach by focusing on several films -- including The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, and, of course, The Matrix, all being 1999 films -- to demonstrate the influence they exerted on many of the films that have followed them. As our conclusion shows, however, the discussion we were trying to create extends to all films, even the most recent ones, much like Hollywood's own extension into all aspects of our culture as things "to be assimilated." Anyway, if you are studying any of the films mentioned above, or if you are just interested in film in general (especially 1999 films, a ridiculously good year in terms of the films that were released), then this paper may be worth reading. It is about 950 words.

Sources Used:

Clover, Joshua. The Matrix. BFI Modern Classics / BFI Film Classics (Series). British Film Institute, 2004.

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“I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin.” So Neo says at the end of 1999’s The Matrix, a passage that Joshua Clover isolates as evidence that The Matrix is “not a vision of the future, but a start to it” (23). As such, his analysis of the film hinges on its historical moment: America in 1999. What we want to do here is extend Clover’s argument about The Matrix and its historical setting by testing it against other 1999 films and those in the years that have since followed. If, as Clover writes, The Matrix’s “profound influence on visual culture meant that a broad swath of popular culture would bear the marks of its futurism forward” (23), then in much the same way the films of 1999 set the tone for Hollywood ever since.


1999 had many important films, but perhaps there is no better place to start than with The Matrix itself. In terms of its effect on Hollywood, the film congealed the concept of the blockbuster. Citing this film exactly, Sean Connery, in 2003’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, stated that the two reasons why he accepted the lead role were that he had turned down an offer to be in The Matrix and that he wanted to be in a blockbuster film like The Matrix--even though he did not quite understand them--because that was what everyone was talking about. The Matrix, with its revolutionary special effects and computer animation, also engendered the big-budget, CGI-heavy action film, perhaps the best followup of which is 2009’s Avatar. (In fact, director James Cameron put off filming Avatar for almost ten years until Hollywood possessed the technology to do it.)


The Blair Witch Project was also released in 1999, giving audiences a taste of what has since been referred to as the “found footage” film. Garnering an unsuspecting $140 million, the film gave way to many popular films of the same genre, such as the Paranormal Activity series beginning in 2007. To enjoy these films, we have to believe that what we are watching is real, similar to how Cypher desires to reenter the Matrix so that he can enjoy the taste of steak without being conscious of the fact that it is not real.


Another landmark film from 1999 was The Sixth Sense, a discussion of which perhaps deserves a separate paper altogether. Not only would this film be perfect fodder for Clover’s argument about Edge-of-the-Construct films--seeing as Bruce Willis’ realization at the end of the movie that he has in fact been dead all along eerily recalls the moment when one finds the edge of the construct--but more important, Sixth Sense popularized the “twist ending” in film, which has become a staple of movie-making ever since. Perhaps it should not surprise one, then, that 1999’s Fight Club also features an important twist ending, the moment when Edward Norton’s character realizes that Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) is part of his split personality.


Speaking of Fight Club, it was based on a 1996 novel of the same name, which testifies to what is perhaps the most lasting feature of 1999 films’ on Hollywood ever since: its grand urge to subsume. In describing how the film industry subsumed the video game industry with respect to The Matrix, Clover writes that “Hollywood understood the challenge, as it has mostly understood such insults to its supremacy, as something to be assimilated” (25). Fight Club, like The Matrix, was successful financially, as were several other 1999 films based on preexisting, written stories (The Iron Giant, Tarzan, and Eyes Wide Shut). From 1999 on, Hollywood assimilated almost all of the best (and worst) books as an easy way to make movies and thus make money. This month’s first installment in The Hunger Games trilogy is just one good example of this tendency.


But perhaps the books-converted-to-movies example is too often repeated these days, almost to the point of being trite. In other words, what else has Hollywood, in its quest to win what Clover calls “the endgame of millennial merger mania” (74), subsumed? Certainly the superhero genre beginning with 2000’s X-Men. (In fact, in 2009 Disney, one of the biggest producers of Hollywood films, acquired Marvel.) Adding to this, since 1999 Hollywood took over: kid’s cartoons (The Smurfs); playing card games (Pokemon: The Movie); fairy tales (Shrek); television shows (Star Trek); music festivals (Woodstock); the Beatles (Across the Universe); theme park rides (Pirates of the Caribbean); history (The King’s Speech); and, the New Testament (The Passion of the Christ). And let us not forget its assimilation of Facebook, the most popular social medium in the past decade, with 2010’s The Social Network (which itself was based on a book), commodifying it for its own benefit. The whole process resembles Elaine Scarry’s notion of replication as beauty, but almost seems to pervert it massively when one considers that the endgame of all this replication is economy and totality.


One might ask: is anything safe from this assimilation? The Oscars weighed in on this in favor of Hollywood, showing as they did that nostalgia for the silent films of an era before Hollywood, before the rise of films like The Matrix, are also fair game for commercialization, since The Artist, a silent film, took the Academy Award for Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Picture. Perhaps the world we live in is simply one where we exist solely to re-exist on the big screen.

Quest, Antiquest, Hybrid Quest: Depicting the Arthurian Quest in Three Parts

The following essay was written as a final paper for an online English course I took this summer called "Arthurian Legend." The purpose of the course was to become familiar with the legend of Arthur from its origins up through present day, and to accomplish this we studied, among other things, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, Sir Thomas Malory, Walker Percy, and several films. In this paper, I was tasked with tracking the development of the quest in three different sources from the course and determining whether the quest is about, as it has been argued, "a knight’s search for personal identity projected onto his pursuit of some external object or person." Here I argue for a three-part development of the quest as (1) quest, (2) antiquest, and (3) hybrid quest. As I reread the paper, I think that my most interesting reading is of Gilliam's film as an example of a hybrid quest. I think a lengthier paper could certainly build on this point, or hybrid quests in general. Anyway, for anyone studying quests, the Arthurian legend, or any of the three major sources in this paper (Chrétien's "Perceval; or, The Story of the Grail," Walker Percy's novel Lancelot, or Terry Gilliam's film The Fisher King), this paper may prove useful.


Sources used:

Chrétien de Troyes. Perceval, or The Story of the Grail. Arthurian Romances. Ed. and trans. William W. Kibler. London: Penguin, 1991. 381-494. Print.

The Fisher King. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Jeff Bridges, Mercedes Ruehl, and Robin Williams. Columbia, 1991. Film.

Percy, Walker. Lancelot. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1977. Print.

(Note: I was, unfortunately, strained by a maximum word count of one thousand words when I wrote this, so the paper as a whole may feel lacking in depth.)


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Throughout this course, we have witnessed the development of the quest in the context of the Arthurian legend. In this paper, I will argue for a three-part characterization of the quest. I will analyze a traditional quest (“The Story of the Grail”), an antiquest (Lancelot), and a hybrid quest (The Fisher King) to demonstrate how each one sketches a related yet unique picture of the quest’s intersection with the search for identity.

“The Story of the Grail” features Perceval, a naïve, somewhat rude but still enthusiastic youth who wishes to serve as a knight in King Arthur’s court. Perceval succeeds in many of his early objectives: he defeats the Red Knight, rewarding himself with his armor, and also wins the hand of Blancheflor by protecting her castle against enemies. One suspects, though, that these are more challenges for Perceval than they are quests—“pre-quests,” perhaps—designed to boost his ego as opposed to truly testing him.

Thus, they serve as foils to Perceval’s later interaction with the Fisher King, when his true quest begins. Dining with the Fisher King at his castle (but still very unaware of whom his dinner partner is), Perceval first observes the mysterious grail and the bleeding lance. He does not, however, ask the Fisher King about it, perhaps following the advice of Gornemant, who earlier instructed him “not to talk too much” (Chrétien 402). Soon after leaving the castle, Perceval learns from his cousin that not asking about the grail was a grave mistake: “Ah, unlucky Perceval, how unfortunate you were when you failed to ask . . . because you would have brought great succor to the good king who is maimed”(Chrétien 425).

This experience seems to change Perceval more than any of the others leading up to it. Returning to the court of King Arthur, he swears “a different oath”: that he will learn “who was served from the grail” and the “true reason why [the lance] bled.” More importantly, Perceval will “not abandon his quest for any hardship” (Chrétien 439). Here Perceval shows none of the naivety and rudeness that characterized him earlier in the story. Instead, he exudes determination and selflessness—truly knightly traits. Thus Perceval demonstrates growth by his story’s end.

Many of these quest elements are both inverted and perverted in Lancelot(1977). Whereas Perceval is youthful and innocent (thus demanding growth by his very nature), Percy’s titular character is elder and jaded, often wallowing in his own repulsive ideas, and thus beyond growth. And while Perceval discovers love with Blancheflor during one of his pre-quests, Lancelot’s discovery that he has been cuckolded by his own wife (an ironic twist on Lancelot’s adulterous affair with Guinevere in more traditional sources)—his lack of love, in other words—is what prompts his antiquest in the first place.

Above all else, Lancelot perverts Perceval’s traditional quest by seeking something quite different—“the Unholy Grail”—in a “quest for evil” (Percy 138). It perhaps need not be asked whether Lancelot’s behavior throughout the novel—during his antiquest as well as his recounting of it—tarnishes his identity. Lancelot certainly seems unworthy of his namesake, belonging as it does to arguably the greatest of Arthur’s knights, one who places great value on his name and reputation in Chrétien’s “The Knight of the Cart.” Moreover, in trying to expose the immorality of others, Percy’s Lancelot only ends up exposing himself (and, consequently, his reputation). In short, one wonders whether Lancelot, a man who “cannot tolerate this age,” occupies a wasteland of a world that will only be healed if he redirects his own quest in life toward a nobler end (Percy 154).

With this in mind, one may ask where redemption lies given the bleak portrait of the contemporary world offered by Lancelot? One hopefully prospect is The Fisher King (1991), a film that shows the unlikely friendship and redemption of Jack Lucas and Parry through their separate yet interconnected quests to understand love, life, and, above all else, themselves. Gilliam’s film presents audiences with a dark world replete with poverty, personal trauma, and murder, much like Lancelot, yet it is ultimately more explicit about sending a positive message.

Jack Lucas, the film’s protagonist, is a big time radio host before a few insensitive comments he makes inspire a listener to undertake a murderous shooting spree. Losing everything, Jack spirals downward before finally deciding to commit suicide. While attempting this, however, he is saved by Parry, a homeless and rather insane man on a quest to find the Holy Grail (which is actually nothing more than a trophy at the home of a famous architect). From this point forward, the story focuses on how Jack and Parry help one another—yet not without a dramatic realization: that the man who went on the shooting spree killed Parry’s wife that same night, which causes Jack to feel responsible for her death. Still, even an obstacle like this can be overcome in The Fisher King, which reminds viewers that life itself is nothing less than a series of quests.

Most importantly, the film reveals that each of us is a Fisher King since we are all in need of redemption in our own lives. For this reason, Jack and Parry play the part of both redeemer and redeemed, with Jack renewing his own prospects through Parry’s example, and Parry being rescued by Jack in both his love life and his own life (for Jack, in the spirit of Perceval, recovers the trophy grail in hopes that it will miraculously bring Parry back from a catatonic state brought on by a traumatic memory over his wife’s murder—which it does).

Jack and Parry each grow through their interconnected quests, but not without overcoming some of the hardships of contemporary existence that similarly plague Lancelot. Consequently, The Fisher King is best characterized as a hybrid quest, mixing elements of Chrétien’s traditional quest narrative with Percy’s darker portrait of the antihero’s antiquest in the face of the contemporary world. 

BoConcept & Multifunctionality

I wrote the following paper for one of my English courses in spring 2012. The course was called "Interpretive Approaches," and it fulfilled my "Critical Theory" requirement (English Literature is my primary major). The assignment was to apply the work of Roland Barthes in his book Mythologies (1957) -- what we might formally denote semiotics -- to an advertisement (not of our choosing, I might add!). Mine focuses on the multifunctional furniture offered by the Danish company BoConcept. Rereading this paper, the very idea of "multifunctionality" strikes me as a strangely contemporary problem, or at least an explicit contemporary problem. Anyway, if you are working through Barthes yourself, or even doing contemporary furniture analysis (who knows?), this paper may prove useful. It is rather short (between 500-750 words, or thereabouts), so it's not a burden to read.


Also, the edition of Barthes' book is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and translated by Annette Lavers.


(Note: I did my best to locate the advertisement online, but what I found only reprints 2/3 of it. Keep this in mind as you tread through the first paragraph.)

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We're staring at a triad of adjacent prison cells. Two of these cells, the ones on the left and the right, play host to all of the familiar prison sights—sink, toilet, shelf, and table, all trapped behind closed bars, dull and lifeless. Their primary function reveals itself through juxtaposition, for it is the third prison cell, the one in the center decorated with three compact pieces of stylish BoConcept brand furniture—sofa, bookshelf, and hanging lamps—that focuses our attention through contrast.

This is an advertisement about limited space—how to optimize it and maximize it—a myth that is signified by the 5x9 jail cell trying to pass itself off as a standard living room.

More important, this focus on limited space gives historical meaning to the small, white caption in the upper-right hand corner of the advertisement informing us that we are at the well-known, former federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco. For, located at what is nearly the westernmost point of the continental United States, it dawns on us that we, Americans, have run out space (or, at least, desirable space). The frontier, as Frederick Jackson Turner argued, no longer exists. Limits, it seems, have at last been discovered. And with this realization, the myth of westward expansion can be no more.

Yet this news will serve as no impasse for BoConcept, a global company based in Denmark that specializes in "urban design." Adopting the motto "no limits in small spaces," BoConcept here provides consumers with a practical solution to this problem of space: multifunctionality.

Thus, the image below the three prison cells of a sofa that co-opts as an air mattress and a coffee table that serves as both a storage unit and a place where you can eat your meals. These products and others like them draw their power from what Barthes would call their ability to turn themselves into "a multitude of more and more startling objects" (97) that ultimately become "a spectacle to be deciphered" (97): they are life-size puzzle pieces. And unlike plastic, which demands a machine for its "transmutation of matter" (97), this time the consumer himself assumes the place of the machine.

Pay no attention to their exorbitant—although here discounted—cost: this is the price we must pay to function in a world with rapidly diminishing Lebensraum. This is a universal problem, and BoConcept provides a universal solution.

But hasn't this always been a world of "anything can be"? In other words, is multifunctionality anything but an always-has-been concept? The buffalo, for instance, provided almost everything that the Plains Indians needed to stay alive, including food, tools, and clothes—that is, before we Americans began our westward expansion. And this is just one example of our natural tendencies as humans to look for multifunctional uses.

BoConcept has simply taken this natural process and turned it on its head by commodifying it. Will they soon be asking us to defecate into the same object that we use to brush our teeth and wash our face, all for the sake of multifunctionality? But perhaps this is a line of inquiry not worth pursuing, because at the system of signs, BoConcept's multifunctional furniture amounts to nothing more than a tautology in a world where everything already is and always has been multifunctional.