Watching Movies Like it’s 1999: The Golden Year of Independent Cinema

Have you ever asked yourself what the best year of filmmaking is? While this question is inherently subjective, there is one that arguably rewired the mainstream, introducing the world to another wave of auteur-driven movies inspired by pushing the envelope forward. It is a year many of us in the Fathom office remember fondly, even being touted by Fathom-favorite podcast The Big Picture, film Journalist Brian Raftery (who wrote a book about it), and other publications as being the best. That year is 1999, which gave us The Matrix, Fight Club, American Pie, The Sixth Sense, Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, and The Blair Witch Project, a time when the world was worried about the technological rapture of Y2K and the birth of the digital age.

The 25^th anniversary of The Matrix is coming to theaters this September, so we are unlocking 1999 and making a case for why the dawn of the digital age, the turn of millennium, and the independent film craze made this year the best time for cinema.

The Dawn of the Digital Age

The wheezing infancy of web culture, the looming age of social media and our online identity were top of mind for those of us who were old enough to participate. Lana and Lilly Wachowski, the visionary directors of The Matrix, injected these ideas into their film, and helped push Hollywood into the digital age. Viewers were blown away by the idea that reality and their growing online existence could be interchangeable, thus setting off a virtual identity crisis. Keanu Reeves spoke about it in a recent interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: “The Matrix changed [my] life and then over these years, it’s changed so many other people’s lives.”

The film reinvented how Hollywood handled postproduction. From the revolutionary CGI visual effects that gave us “bullet time” to sound designer Dane Davis choosing a purely digital postproduction for his sound department, all are techniques still used today.

Another film that examines the digital age, more aimed at the dark side of internet culture, is Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, written by Charlie Kaufman. The movie thrusts us into a world where puppeteer Craig Shwartz discovers a portal that leads into the mind of actor John Malkovich.

Being John Malkovich is Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s debut feature film, and they both have stated they wanted to examine the cultural shift towards recasting our identity with a virtual one. Eerily similar to the effects of the current landscape of social media. Algorithms and parasocial relationships were foretold in a film that came out 25 years before we were scrolling endlessly, looking for trends, and ultimately getting lost in other people’s lives.

The Matrix and Being John Malkovich made a lasting impact on society, and according to Brian Raftery, author of Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen, both films “get at what the internet has become in a lot of ways, and the way identities can be hijacked and morphed, and your life can literally be kind of replicated or ripped off online now” [1]. Social media and the internet have become the information pipeline for billions of us today, and 1999 explored the cultural shift that would define the information age.

The Turn of the Millennium

With the seeds of a looming digital existential threat (Y2K), there was a slice of cinema in 1999 that examined the coming of age at the turn of the millennium. Two films that illustrated this, albeit in much different ways, are American Pie and Fight Club.

American Pie modernized the comedic formula of teenage growing pains, providing impressionable moments for Gen Xers and Millennials. It sucker-punched audiences worldwide and stuck around in the zeitgeist of our culture. From Jim getting personal with a warm apple pie to Stifler’s mom, the movie was a distraction to the 21st century and its dreaded apocalyptic Y2K fears. American Pie emphasized the importance of friendship during the most challenging time in modern American culture: the urban jungle of high school.

David Fincher’s thriller Fight Club examined the inner conflict felt by many Americans who work tirelessly only to buy materialistic items until they die. The film punched its way into the minds of viewers because of its very real messaging: the vicious cycle of trying to buy status, asking us – much like The Matrix – to wake up and take life into our own hands.

In addition, it challenged the idea of toxic masculinity and mental health, offering a cautionary tale of using violence to solve our problems.

The Unique Filmic Experience

While filmmakers and movies in 1999 were tackling the digital age and our shifting culture, another subset created distinctly unique experiences that couldn’t be done using our current digital landscape of spoiler culture and constant PR updates. Notable films that exemplified this were M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense and the “found-footage” sensation The Blair Witch Project.

This film craze started with the surprising horror film The Blair Witch Project, offering a breath of fresh air to the stagnating horror genre; the movie set in motion the perfect storm for the resurgence of found footage. While it certainly didn’t invent the genre, what it did do was utilize a new tool society had been adopting: the World Wide Web.

Filmmakers Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick launched a real website with a fake message, looking for information about missing film students (the film’s main protagonists). As college students started to find this website, the duo trickled information about the Blair Witch, creating a backstory. The film launched a few weeks later, and the first viral craze erupted as viewers flocked to theaters to see what they thought was actual footage from a missing documentary crew.

With an unrecognizable cast and a shoestring budget of $60,000, The Blair Witch Project grossed $248 million internationally and inspired a new generation of horror films [2].

Another sensation that took the world by storm, only months after The Blair Witch Project, was the breakout film by M. Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense. The film was the summer surprise of 1999, competing against both Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and Toy Story 2. Moviegoers were blown away by the beauty of a complicated third-act twist, which would become the hallmark of M. Night’s directing style. Much like Blair Witch, spoiler culture wasn’t a thing. There were no haphazard social posts spoiling the “I see dead people” reversal, only word of mouth by viewers who wanted to share the film’s impact.

The Sixth Sense was nominated for six Academy Awards (including Best Picture, which was rare for a horror movie), and was the second-highest-grossing film in 1999 [3]. Only six other horror films had ever been nominated for an Oscar up to this point. The Sixth Sense remains the movie people reference when talking about 1999.

Best. Movie. Year. Ever.

1999 was a golden year for cinema, and while each of the movies mentioned in this blog is vital to rewiring the mainstream, there are even more films from this year that did the same thing. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut, Election, American Beauty, and more contributed to making 1999 the, as Brian Raftery said, best movie year ever.