Studies in Recent American Cinema

24/09/2026

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To understand recent American cinema, we could take a number of approaches. One approach is to trace the industry's technological shifts, from the move to digital in the late 1990s and early 2000s, to the question of AI twenty-five years later. We could focus on streaming platforms, with cinema screenings no longer having a privileged place, as films get shown simultaneously online and in theatres. We could equally attend to films that no longer have a central place on the big screen, but are hardly deemed a priority in one’s home either, with films increasingly designed to be inattentively watched while doing other things, like looking at a second screen. Will Tavlin writes very well about this in n+1, “One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: ‘casual viewing.’ Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention.” Then again we could ignore most of these elements, and concentrate on cinema as an art form, and wonder which auteurs American cinema has produced in the 21st century, or all but ignore the aesthetic, and see film reflecting the social and political concerns of the time: from 9/11 to MAGA, from the economic crash in 2008 to Covid 19. This could be seen as a turbulent era that demands film be seen through these difficult times.

But our purpose is chiefly to address the specifics of the film image, with the political, social, technological and cultural aspects pertinent, but not central to the discussion. If cinema is to survive as an art form, it needs to be seen as a thing in-itself, not a byproduct of socio-cultural concerns. At the same time, if a work is of value, it will often inevitably reflect its moment, capturing a broader purpose than its own diegetic, narrative parameters. The French New Wave came out of a new generation, with the term first used in the context of young French lives in the midst of France’s post-war economic boom. As Adam Thirwell noted, “Youth, in the end, was still the basic definition of the Nouvelle Vague.” The phrase ‘La Nouvelle Vague’ was first used in 1957 by the journalist Françoise Giroud. New Hollywood might have been about young directors adopting many of the techniques from various 60s New Waves, including the French, the Czech, the Polish and the British ones, and where many directors from these countries became involved in the New Hollywood (including Jacques Demy, John Schlesinger, Karel Reisz, Roman Polanski and Milos Forman). Yet they also reflected the times, never more evident than in the absorption of the hippie movement, Vietnam, Watergate and the two assassinations of 1968: Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. In understanding how film and the first quarter of the 21st century will be viewed, and the works evaluated, it is useful to think about this earlier period in American film.

But to understand our era, let’s narrow it to four films that highlight the categories we seek to explore, with reference to a handful of other works. The key films here are Her, The Hurt Locker, Mulholland Dr., and Margin Call, each of which can exemplify the particular idea we want to explore, without reducing the aesthetic singularity of the work under discussion. The films address technology, war, psychosis, and finance, respectively.  Her, for example, is a great film on combining affect with tech, feeling with science. It is also an unlikely romance, the sort of sub-genre that includes Harold and Maude, Lars and the Real Girl, and Out of Sight. Spike Jonze’s film brings together the romantically unlikely and the technologically hypothetical as a man in his thirties, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), tries to get over a breakup. He finds love with an operating system, Samantha, who seems to understand him better than anybody else, and with whom he can talk late into the night. The only problem is Samantha is a great emotional multi-tasker, and can do the same with hundreds of other people as well, as Her combines two apparently different qualities – the economic and the moral – to leave us musing over the category mistake Theodore makes. When someone cheats on their partner, isn’t it partly because they have devoted time to another person, and we mortals only have 24 hours in a day? It was a point Telly Savalas facetiously addressed when saying, and singing, “If a man could be in two places at one time, I’d be with you tomorrow and today.” The cheater is devoting time to another partner and can’t thus devote it to their supposed love. But Samantha can be in numerous places at once, because she isn’t really anywhere except in the heads of the hundreds who fall in love with her, and in the system that allows her to be all things to all people. Theodore asks if she is talking to anybody else right now, and she tells him yes, 8316 others. The film cuts to various people passing Theodore on the steps as he might be wondering how many of them might, too, be getting Samantha’s attention. She also admits that of these, she is in love with 641 of them, and says, “I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you about this.” It is both emotionally devastating and ontologically confusing. If your partner were to announce they were in love with over six hundred people, any feelings of jealousy would have to compete with feelings of vertigo. How many? This would be polyamory, suggesting the power of love as a mathematical problem over a simple awareness that you might not be quite as important as you thought.

Alex Garland’s excellent Ex Machina, made around the same time, also addresses similar technological concerns, through an AI intelligence in robotic form, yet with human qualities. The young man is in no doubt he isn’t interacting with a person, but this doesn’t stop him from developing feelings and being played by Ava. In both Her and Ex Machina, the leading characters are well-aware that they aren’t dealing with humans, yet this doesn’t stop them from falling into a humanist fallacy: developing feelings for a thing that cannot feel back. If Ex Machina feels like a noir, and Her like an impossible romance, it is because they draw on the components of each genre to get us to see how easy it is to fall into this fallacy. In noir, a central character often thinks the best about the worst, about someone who instrumentally uses the fall guy for (usually) her own ends. In the impossible romance, a person develops feelings, even though the romance cannot possibly work out: the person is married, there is an enormous age gap, they live on different continents. Ex Machina thus moves in the direction of noir; Her towards the impossible romance.  Both make clear you can put new technology into old generic bottles, and produce something fresh.

This also indicates that, for all the technological innovation, Silicon Valley and its adjuncts ought to see that any developments in ones and zeroes need to be rooted in established forms and sensibilities. Elon Musk might well say that “[The Tesla Bot] has the potential to be a generalized substitute for human labor over time. The foundation of the economy is labor. Capital equipment is essentially distilled labor… The fundamental constraint is labor. There are not enough people. I can't emphasize this enough. There are not enough people.” (TechRadar) But it is as if Musk and others have been reading too much utilitarian science fiction, and not enough classic works that emphasise first principles and primary emotions. Musk reckons that numbers will solve the problem: with ones and zeroes taking care of the demographic timebomb without maybe thinking through (or thinking through very astutely) the booby traps of such a process. If most labour will be done by robots, will this create a utopia of easy living, or a dystopian world where most are reliant on the munificence of billionaires, those who are already often resistant to paying more tax to help redistribute wealth? When California proposed a one-off 5 per cent levy on those worth more than a billion, billionaires fought back: “Google co-founder Sergey Brin has already spent $100m backing opposition to the tax – a fraction of the $13bn bill he could face.” (Guardian) It is as though the super-rich haven’t only been avoiding the classics, but seeing in the science fiction books they have read a narrative that suits them. “Billionaires who grew up reading science-fiction classics published 30 to 50 years ago are affecting our life today in almost too many ways to list: Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos prefers 1970s plans for giant orbital habitats.  Peter Thiel is funding research into artificial intelligence, life extension and seasteading. Mark Zuckerberg has blown $10 billion trying to create the Metaverse from Neil Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash.” (Scientific American) Yet usually science fiction is cautionary, warning us about the dangers to come rather than the success of the utopian. As Sarah Chan says, “The usefulness of fiction and imagination in bioethical discourse is evident when one considers that hypothetical scenarios, thought experiments and case studies are also a form of fiction. These tools are commonly used in ethics education, as well as in the development of ethical argument, often constructed to highlight a particular ethical dilemma or point of contention.” (NIH) Both Her and Ex Machina are excellent examples of that ethical comprehension, allying their sci-fi conceits to genres rooted in human feeling; others would include Monsters, Arrival, Children of Men, Ad Astra, and Upstream Colour.

If technology is an ongoing preoccupation, so also is war, with films made about conflicts that might not be deemed wars as WWI and World War II might be. In such instances, countries were at war with each other; now it is often that a country’s military is at war with another, and none more so than the US, where most of its citizens can go about their lives without much fear, while the countries the US fights against are constantly aware of their country’s war status. As Tom Engelhardt, born in 1944, says, “The United States has been at war, or at least in armed conflicts of various sorts, often in distant lands, for more or less my entire life.” (Nation) Some of these wars have involved a draft (Korea and Vietnam); more recent ones have relied on professional soldiers, thus distancing the general population from involvement in the conflict. If the homeland is safe from probable attack, and a draft unlikely, then disputes fought in one’s name needn’t be much of a concern.

For the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran or Somalia, this can be a pressing concern indeed, no matter if the films rarely pay much attention to the locals in Black Hawk Down, American Sniper, or The Hurt Locker. It might be why a better word for 21st-century American war films is conflict cinema, and we offer the term with an awareness of its twin sense: an external conflict that the US is involved in, and an internal conflict the central character feels. Whether it is The Hurt Locker, American Sniper, or Good Kill, the enemy is removed and distant. In The Hurt Locker, the central character is involved in high-risk operations as a bomb disposal expert; in American Sniper, the title character is still very much in Iraq, but behind a rifle, and at a distance. In Good Kill, the main character is making drone decisions from the safety of Nevada.

Good Kill hardly passes for a typical war film, but it can be viewed as the most aloof approach to conflicts, one possessing a high degree of this remove. If The Hurt Locker feels more traditional, it rests on William James (Jeremy Renner) in constant risk. Yet the film also emphasises the conflict within the conflict, as though it acknowledges there is reason for underlying doubt about the war, creating underlying doubt in the character. Sergeant James might just be addicted to adrenaline, and is looking for circumstances to manifest it. But while the typical adrenaline junkie can get their fix surfing dangerous waves, base-jumping and climbing free solo, James couches his in justifying that he is a soldier liberating a people. Does he really believe this? Does he go back yet again to Iraq to protect his family in the US, or to escape them into far more exciting terrain on the other side of the world? In American Sniper (based on a true story), Chris Kyle’s wife questions the idea that the US should be in Iraq, and at a certain stage in the film, it looks like Kyle is still there even when he is on American soil. He has PTSD, and so any noise might trigger a fight-or-flight response. The irony is that Chris’s family are at no risk from the Iraqis, but they do increasingly worry about him as a person who has taken the war home with him, an irony exacerbated in the film’s ending, when Chris will be killed by a fellow Marine who was himself suffering from PTSD.

In The Hurt Locker, Sergeant James may survive as Chris does not, but the more deployments in Iraq, the slimmer his chances of getting out alive. The film indicates the risks at the very beginning, as it shows another bomb disposal man, Thompson (Guy Pierce), killed while practising his profession. Using categorical point-of-view shots from Thompson, and also from a colleague, and other shots that could simply be medium long shots, or potentially a point of view from the locals, who may be friends or foes, director Kathryn Bigelow creates manifold suspense. Many films work with mono-tension: there is one focal point of threat, and everything else in the environment is benign, or at worst an obstacle: the various bystanders, boulders, one-way streets, and so on in car chase sequences in anything from The French Connection to The Bourne Identity. But while Thompson moves towards neutralising the bomb, he is in far from a neutral environment, as indeed one of the locals detonates the device.

One may see in Bigelow’s film an insidious xenophobia: that foreigners aren’t to be trusted, and are also all but invisible, given little characterisational texture. From another angle, why would they be trustworthy? The US might believe they are a benign presence, getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but they are also a foreign force driving through the streets in gun-toting Humvees and tanks. And while they killed Saddam, that was only after propping him up for many years. “US intelligence helped Saddam's Ba'ath Party seize power for the first time in 1963. Evidence suggests that Saddam was on the CIA payroll as early as 1959, when he participated in a failed assassination attempt against Iraqi strongman Abd al-Karim Qassem.” The piece adds, “In the 1980s, the US and Britain backed Saddam in the war against Iran, giving Iraq arms, money, satellite intelligence, and even chemical & bio-weapon precursors.” (Global Policy Forum) After all, though the US would talk about bringing democracy to nations, this was often only if consistent with the American way. As Henry Kissinger once said, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people […] The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” (Guardian)

While the US continues to make films about World War II (Flags of Our Fathers, Glory, Inglourious Basterds), these are war films and not conflict films: the war is deemed unequivocally honourable for the US, and the characters needn’t be in internal conflict over what they are doing on a foreign land. But in conflict films, are they liberating a nation, or liberalising finance? Katherine Griffith noted in 2005, “Halliburton, the world's largest military private contractor, has made at least $8bn (£4.3bn) in war-torn Iraq - doing everything from washing American troops' laundry to setting up vital oil supplies. Now, a critically well-placed army employee says contracts were unfairly awarded to Halliburton, whose chief executive used to be US Vice-President Dick Cheney.” (Independent)

Bigelow extended this notion of conflict cinema in her follow-up Zero Dark Thirty, and amidst the controversy over the film’s depictions of torture, noted Osama “Bin Laden wasn’t defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.” (LA Times) That might seem too easy a response, but within it contains an awareness that those involved ought to have conflictual responses to what they are doing, even if the purpose was finally to take out Bin Laden. The mission was successful, yet at what price to a humanity the US would claim it wants to preserve, against the in-humans they would claim to be fighting against?

While the US might be determined to rid the world of the most dangerous, evident in ongoing talk about the importance of Iran never having a nuclear weapon, the country has its fair share of the unhinged. So much so that there has even been a study which has identified “the U.S. states where you are more likely to find yourself living next to psychopaths, narcissists, and sadists”. (Independent) We should remember this is a nation that has a serial killer sub-genre, and where “The United States had, by far, the highest homicide rate of the G7 countries between 2000 and 2023.” (Statista) Yet the best psychotic films tend to bring out a quality of this insanity, without necessarily relying on generic expectations or action-sequence violence. If we regard Mulholland Dr., Zodiac, There Will Be Blood and Eddington as films that capture an American psychosis, they needn’t all be set in the present to bring out this quality in modern American life. It might have become ever more pronounced, but There Will be Blood makes clear it was there more than a hundred years ago. Zodiac may be set chiefly in the 1970s, but it has much to say about an ongoing sense of fear in American existence that can lead to that study of psychotic states and States.

However, we want to suggest, focusing on Mulholland Dr. and alluding to the others, that while many American films, decontextualised from their generic components, would show characters as crude, violent and dangerous, as the genre masks such traits, in Mulholland Dr. etc., the films emphasise the psychosis of the individual, and the dangers to society, without burying them in action, punctuated horror or gangster self-advancement. This doesn’t mean great horror, action cinema or gangster films can’t do this, and some do, but there is something nakedly revealing in these four films, even if only three are masterpieces, while Eddington is a very interesting curiosity.

In Mulholland Dr., the film isn’t about ambition but the psychosis behind ambition, with an actress, Betty (Naomi Watts), living a suspiciously happy life, one that we discover is unreal when she is thrown back into an actual existence, which shows her so envious of a successful actress that Betty/Diane takes out a hit on her, which leads to the beginning of the film, where the actress is hurt in a car accident, loses her memory, and is helped by Betty. To synopsise the film is to damage it, and the film’s plot folds back on itself in ways that defy ready reason. But what we can extract from David Lynch’s film is the deranged mind, someone who can live in states of blissful delusion, or vengeful insanity. It is as if two sides of the American notion that you can be anything you want to be, but, as George Carlin proposed, it is called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. Lynch shows what happens when you wake up, and warps his narrative into far from a horizontal weft. He suggests the best way to capture America’s rich tapestry is to create a work where reality and fiction dissolve into madness. What is left is Hollyweird indeed, as we might think of the title as showing what happens when someone shows Hollywood drive, when all that matters is the determination to get on and become a success. There is a scene where Betty auditions brilliantly, and with a disarming intensity, but this is within the story where everything is going Betty’s way, and before we see Diane’s apparent reality. It adds another layer to a tale that illustrates that in Hollywood, nothing is quite real: that the most authenticity will be found in the anxious ambition of a hopeful.

There Will Be Blood explores a similar drive but in the context of the early stages of the oil industry, where Daniel Plainview, in very different ways, pushes his ambitions into the psychotic. Like many an ambitious character, he will insist failure is not an option, but at a certain point, sanity is no longer available. In Zodiac, the film focuses on a serial killer we never for sure see, as various figures try to find out more about the killings. Instead, it looks like their own minds might crumble, spending years of their lives pursuing a man with ambitions of his own, as serial killing is a paradoxical form of celebrity culture. The murderer is both determined to make a name for themselves and, at the same time, wishing not to be caught. Most serial killers have a proper name: Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, revealed when they were captured. They reach the height of their celebrity at the moment they descend into the hell of incarceration, and their fame is their demise. The Zodiac killer is different, and remains anonymous, yet this hasn’t stopped this figure from entering the American consciousness, and books, documentaries and fiction films have all added to the mythology. No work more than David Fincher’s film has captured the ambiguity of fear that surrounded the Zodiac’s murder spree, and while horror cinema has long been practising murder most foul, through a subjective camera, Zodiac gives it a purposeful form, well aware that while someone is undeniably behind the deeds, they remain a shadowy executioner. It is a game of cat and mouse, with many scared mice and a cat that can’t be seen or shown. The Zodiac killer might be as crazy as Daniel Plainview or Diane, but all we can say is that he is likely to drive nuts anybody who devotes years of their lives to investigating him, as Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) discovers when his marriage disintegrates and his obsession deepens.

This leaves us with Eddington, a lesser film than the others no doubt, but very good at capturing a zeitgeist soup of influencers, conspiracy theorists, corrupt chancers, AI data centres, Covid 19, Black Lives Matter and Antifa. In the midst of all this is local sheriff Joe Cross, who commits a series of murders, though it is as if they are of no more significance than all the other chaos around him. This isn’t a murder mystery, but a mystified account of how the US finds itself in such a place; a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

While much could and should be said about other aspects of 21st-century American cinema (and much about Latin American and Canadian film), including independent productions, superhero cinema, and filmmakers focusing on black and gay culture, maybe few things have preoccupied 21st-century Americans more than finance, with the crash of 2008, the mid-crisis between 9/11 and Covid 19. Margin Call, Arbitrage, The Wolf of Wall Street, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and The Big Short. What is perhaps odd is that several of the films are, in a way, comedies. They blend finance with the absurd, showing that those involved in it didn’t always know what they were doing, but were very good at spending other people’s cash. If Margaret Thatcher could famously say “the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money", then it applies surely much more to advanced, financially focused capitalism. A good example is Bernie Madoff (whose story was turned into an HBO film, The Wizard of Lies), someone who generated an enormous Ponzi scheme that was inevitably going to run out of other people’s dollars. He went through billions. “The scam included a global roster of investors, from retirees on Long Island to the International Olympic Committee, to charities worldwide. So far, investors have said that they have lost more than $30 billion, according to an Associated Press calculation.” (NBC)

Madoff was the tip of an iceberg that was rapidly melting, as Bear Sterns had collapsed in March 2008, and The Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in September of the same year. It was the biggest financial crash since 1929, and suddenly the intricacies of finance became a topic worth exploring, even if one not always easy to understand. If many involved in the banking crisis didn’t quite comprehend what was going on, how could Joe Public, even if great sums of Mr Public’s money were required to bail out various institutions. Capitalists had proved every bit as culpable as the socialists at splurging other people’s money. Indeed, Madoff was spending Steve Spielberg’s, Kevin Bacon’s and John Malkovich’s, all of whom invested in, and lost cash over, Madoff’s ‘investments’.

In different ways, Margin Call and The Wolf of Wall Street play up the incomprehension that could allow Madoff’s frauds and the industry’s collapse. In Margin Call, the head of the bank that is over-leveraged wants a brilliant mind but relatively lowly employee to explain exactly what is going on. The CEO says the employee ought to detail this in terms so simple a child could understand, as he insists that it wasn’t brains that got him where he happens to be. From one perspective, this could be deemed clumsy narration, with the young banker explaining in a rudimentary way what the audience needs to know, but given how little comprehension many CEOS seemed to have of the imminent collapse, it doesn’t seem the film needed to demand too much artistic licence. It is low-key satire exposing high-finance stupidity, and yet of all the finance films, Margin Call is probably the one that least compromises with the intricacy of explaining to us what happened, as so many financial institutions went under. It might be a film that would go over the head of the CEO, but director JC Chandor reckons he wanted to make a film about smart people coming out of university and funnelling their skills into one particular industry.  “The abuse that I’ve seen over the last 14 to 15 years since I’ve graduated from college, the manipulation of that system, that training ground, essentially leading toward making money for money’s sake as opposed to banking that is actually serving a purpose was the heart of the movie for me.” Chandor adds, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m a capitalist. Some wanted this film to be more of an indictment of these people, and that’s not where I come from, obviously. A misuse of tremendous potential is what I wanted the film to be about, in a sort of sad way.” (Propublica) The employee explaining to the CEO what has gone wrong is a rocket scientist by education, and thus Chandor sees a twofold problem. Idiots reach the top, and smart people go into a money-making profession when they could more usefully be employed in other areas of society. It isn’t only that enormous sums of money get sucked up into the financial sector to the detriment of other areas. It is also that smart people get sucked into it too, as they can earn far more cash in finance than elsewhere.

Margin Call’s story rests on an investment bank going under and trying to save itself by selling its bad debt as quickly as possible before others know it isn’t worth buying. It tries to do so by cheating others, and this is central to the film’s ethical exploration. Being dishonest isn’t part of the company’s ethos, but it is central to its self-preservation. In contrast, The Wolf of Wall Street, set mainly in the 1980s and 1990s, though made in 2013, is about a chancer who takes full advantage of light-touch regulation all the better to swindle people out of their money. If Margin Call shows a stuffy industry turning suspect, The Wolf of Wall Street is consistent with director Martin Scorsese’s interest in petty criminality and gangsterdom. Jordan Belfort and his employees are men on the make and can hardly believe their good fortune, and the credulity of their customers. If in another life, Chandor’s characters would be pursuing research in the advanced sciences, Scorsese’s would probably be used-car salesmen, petty thieves and loan sharks. Instead, they find a market so deregulated that there are opportunities aplenty for the wily and the unscrupulous. Scorsese makes little of the financial subtleties (there seemed to be few), and instead focuses a lot of energy on Belfort and his colleagues spending the cash on coke, hookers, Lamborghinis and yachts.

But whatever the differences, Narrow Margin and The Wolf of Wall Street capture the two sides of the finance cinema coin. Does a film go in the direction of trying to take seriously high-finance, or concentrate on the high of finance; does it try and engage the viewer in understanding an industry that has rarely been put on screen (as opposed to medicine, law enforcement, the legal system, sport and education), or accept that it is best understood in its decadence? The Big Short tries to have it both ways, with Margot Robbie (Belfort’s wife in The Wolf of Wall Street), explaining sub-primes and shorting to the audience while taking a bubble bath.

These four areas (finance, conflict, psychosis and tech) have all been vital to 21st-century cinema, and while film isn’t there simply to capture the zeitgeist, it can be a useful way of understanding our given moment. If we have talked too little about form, while acknowledging it where we can, it is partly due to limitations of space, but also partly because of limitations in much 21st-century American cinema. While 70s American film drew a great deal from the innovations in Europe in the 1960s, many American films in recent years have retreated from the densely populated mis-en-scene of a Robert Altman, the shattered form reflecting psychic imbalance in Scorsese, the juxtapositional freshness of Peckinpah and Arthur Penn’s editing. There have been formally great films, and Mulholland Dr., Zodiac and There Will Be Blood are evidently cinematic. But our purpose has been to explore theme over form, content expressed socio-politically, rather than simply aesthetically.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Studies in Recent American Cinema

To understand recent American cinema, we could take a number of approaches. One approach is to trace the industry's technological shifts, from the move to digital in the late 1990s and early 2000s, to the question of AI twenty-five years later. We could focus on streaming platforms, with cinema screenings no longer having a privileged place, as films get shown simultaneously online and in theatres. We could equally attend to films that no longer have a central place on the big screen, but are hardly deemed a priority in one’s home either, with films increasingly designed to be inattentively watched while doing other things, like looking at a second screen. Will Tavlin writes very well about this in n+1, “One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: ‘casual viewing.’ Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention.” Then again we could ignore most of these elements, and concentrate on cinema as an art form, and wonder which auteurs American cinema has produced in the 21st century, or all but ignore the aesthetic, and see film reflecting the social and political concerns of the time: from 9/11 to MAGA, from the economic crash in 2008 to Covid 19. This could be seen as a turbulent era that demands film be seen through these difficult times.

But our purpose is chiefly to address the specifics of the film image, with the political, social, technological and cultural aspects pertinent, but not central to the discussion. If cinema is to survive as an art form, it needs to be seen as a thing in-itself, not a byproduct of socio-cultural concerns. At the same time, if a work is of value, it will often inevitably reflect its moment, capturing a broader purpose than its own diegetic, narrative parameters. The French New Wave came out of a new generation, with the term first used in the context of young French lives in the midst of France’s post-war economic boom. As Adam Thirwell noted, “Youth, in the end, was still the basic definition of the Nouvelle Vague.” The phrase ‘La Nouvelle Vague’ was first used in 1957 by the journalist Françoise Giroud. New Hollywood might have been about young directors adopting many of the techniques from various 60s New Waves, including the French, the Czech, the Polish and the British ones, and where many directors from these countries became involved in the New Hollywood (including Jacques Demy, John Schlesinger, Karel Reisz, Roman Polanski and Milos Forman). Yet they also reflected the times, never more evident than in the absorption of the hippie movement, Vietnam, Watergate and the two assassinations of 1968: Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. In understanding how film and the first quarter of the 21st century will be viewed, and the works evaluated, it is useful to think about this earlier period in American film.

But to understand our era, let’s narrow it to four films that highlight the categories we seek to explore, with reference to a handful of other works. The key films here are Her, The Hurt Locker, Mulholland Dr., and Margin Call, each of which can exemplify the particular idea we want to explore, without reducing the aesthetic singularity of the work under discussion. The films address technology, war, psychosis, and finance, respectively.  Her, for example, is a great film on combining affect with tech, feeling with science. It is also an unlikely romance, the sort of sub-genre that includes Harold and Maude, Lars and the Real Girl, and Out of Sight. Spike Jonze’s film brings together the romantically unlikely and the technologically hypothetical as a man in his thirties, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), tries to get over a breakup. He finds love with an operating system, Samantha, who seems to understand him better than anybody else, and with whom he can talk late into the night. The only problem is Samantha is a great emotional multi-tasker, and can do the same with hundreds of other people as well, as Her combines two apparently different qualities – the economic and the moral – to leave us musing over the category mistake Theodore makes. When someone cheats on their partner, isn’t it partly because they have devoted time to another person, and we mortals only have 24 hours in a day? It was a point Telly Savalas facetiously addressed when saying, and singing, “If a man could be in two places at one time, I’d be with you tomorrow and today.” The cheater is devoting time to another partner and can’t thus devote it to their supposed love. But Samantha can be in numerous places at once, because she isn’t really anywhere except in the heads of the hundreds who fall in love with her, and in the system that allows her to be all things to all people. Theodore asks if she is talking to anybody else right now, and she tells him yes, 8316 others. The film cuts to various people passing Theodore on the steps as he might be wondering how many of them might, too, be getting Samantha’s attention. She also admits that of these, she is in love with 641 of them, and says, “I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you about this.” It is both emotionally devastating and ontologically confusing. If your partner were to announce they were in love with over six hundred people, any feelings of jealousy would have to compete with feelings of vertigo. How many? This would be polyamory, suggesting the power of love as a mathematical problem over a simple awareness that you might not be quite as important as you thought.

Alex Garland’s excellent Ex Machina, made around the same time, also addresses similar technological concerns, through an AI intelligence in robotic form, yet with human qualities. The young man is in no doubt he isn’t interacting with a person, but this doesn’t stop him from developing feelings and being played by Ava. In both Her and Ex Machina, the leading characters are well-aware that they aren’t dealing with humans, yet this doesn’t stop them from falling into a humanist fallacy: developing feelings for a thing that cannot feel back. If Ex Machina feels like a noir, and Her like an impossible romance, it is because they draw on the components of each genre to get us to see how easy it is to fall into this fallacy. In noir, a central character often thinks the best about the worst, about someone who instrumentally uses the fall guy for (usually) her own ends. In the impossible romance, a person develops feelings, even though the romance cannot possibly work out: the person is married, there is an enormous age gap, they live on different continents. Ex Machina thus moves in the direction of noir; Her towards the impossible romance.  Both make clear you can put new technology into old generic bottles, and produce something fresh.

This also indicates that, for all the technological innovation, Silicon Valley and its adjuncts ought to see that any developments in ones and zeroes need to be rooted in established forms and sensibilities. Elon Musk might well say that “[The Tesla Bot] has the potential to be a generalized substitute for human labor over time. The foundation of the economy is labor. Capital equipment is essentially distilled labor… The fundamental constraint is labor. There are not enough people. I can't emphasize this enough. There are not enough people.” (TechRadar) But it is as if Musk and others have been reading too much utilitarian science fiction, and not enough classic works that emphasise first principles and primary emotions. Musk reckons that numbers will solve the problem: with ones and zeroes taking care of the demographic timebomb without maybe thinking through (or thinking through very astutely) the booby traps of such a process. If most labour will be done by robots, will this create a utopia of easy living, or a dystopian world where most are reliant on the munificence of billionaires, those who are already often resistant to paying more tax to help redistribute wealth? When California proposed a one-off 5 per cent levy on those worth more than a billion, billionaires fought back: “Google co-founder Sergey Brin has already spent $100m backing opposition to the tax – a fraction of the $13bn bill he could face.” (Guardian) It is as though the super-rich haven’t only been avoiding the classics, but seeing in the science fiction books they have read a narrative that suits them. “Billionaires who grew up reading science-fiction classics published 30 to 50 years ago are affecting our life today in almost too many ways to list: Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos prefers 1970s plans for giant orbital habitats.  Peter Thiel is funding research into artificial intelligence, life extension and seasteading. Mark Zuckerberg has blown $10 billion trying to create the Metaverse from Neil Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash.” (Scientific American) Yet usually science fiction is cautionary, warning us about the dangers to come rather than the success of the utopian. As Sarah Chan says, “The usefulness of fiction and imagination in bioethical discourse is evident when one considers that hypothetical scenarios, thought experiments and case studies are also a form of fiction. These tools are commonly used in ethics education, as well as in the development of ethical argument, often constructed to highlight a particular ethical dilemma or point of contention.” (NIH) Both Her and Ex Machina are excellent examples of that ethical comprehension, allying their sci-fi conceits to genres rooted in human feeling; others would include Monsters, Arrival, Children of Men, Ad Astra, and Upstream Colour.

If technology is an ongoing preoccupation, so also is war, with films made about conflicts that might not be deemed wars as WWI and World War II might be. In such instances, countries were at war with each other; now it is often that a country’s military is at war with another, and none more so than the US, where most of its citizens can go about their lives without much fear, while the countries the US fights against are constantly aware of their country’s war status. As Tom Engelhardt, born in 1944, says, “The United States has been at war, or at least in armed conflicts of various sorts, often in distant lands, for more or less my entire life.” (Nation) Some of these wars have involved a draft (Korea and Vietnam); more recent ones have relied on professional soldiers, thus distancing the general population from involvement in the conflict. If the homeland is safe from probable attack, and a draft unlikely, then disputes fought in one’s name needn’t be much of a concern.

For the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran or Somalia, this can be a pressing concern indeed, no matter if the films rarely pay much attention to the locals in Black Hawk Down, American Sniper, or The Hurt Locker. It might be why a better word for 21st-century American war films is conflict cinema, and we offer the term with an awareness of its twin sense: an external conflict that the US is involved in, and an internal conflict the central character feels. Whether it is The Hurt Locker, American Sniper, or Good Kill, the enemy is removed and distant. In The Hurt Locker, the central character is involved in high-risk operations as a bomb disposal expert; in American Sniper, the title character is still very much in Iraq, but behind a rifle, and at a distance. In Good Kill, the main character is making drone decisions from the safety of Nevada.

Good Kill hardly passes for a typical war film, but it can be viewed as the most aloof approach to conflicts, one possessing a high degree of this remove. If The Hurt Locker feels more traditional, it rests on William James (Jeremy Renner) in constant risk. Yet the film also emphasises the conflict within the conflict, as though it acknowledges there is reason for underlying doubt about the war, creating underlying doubt in the character. Sergeant James might just be addicted to adrenaline, and is looking for circumstances to manifest it. But while the typical adrenaline junkie can get their fix surfing dangerous waves, base-jumping and climbing free solo, James couches his in justifying that he is a soldier liberating a people. Does he really believe this? Does he go back yet again to Iraq to protect his family in the US, or to escape them into far more exciting terrain on the other side of the world? In American Sniper (based on a true story), Chris Kyle’s wife questions the idea that the US should be in Iraq, and at a certain stage in the film, it looks like Kyle is still there even when he is on American soil. He has PTSD, and so any noise might trigger a fight-or-flight response. The irony is that Chris’s family are at no risk from the Iraqis, but they do increasingly worry about him as a person who has taken the war home with him, an irony exacerbated in the film’s ending, when Chris will be killed by a fellow Marine who was himself suffering from PTSD.

In The Hurt Locker, Sergeant James may survive as Chris does not, but the more deployments in Iraq, the slimmer his chances of getting out alive. The film indicates the risks at the very beginning, as it shows another bomb disposal man, Thompson (Guy Pierce), killed while practising his profession. Using categorical point-of-view shots from Thompson, and also from a colleague, and other shots that could simply be medium long shots, or potentially a point of view from the locals, who may be friends or foes, director Kathryn Bigelow creates manifold suspense. Many films work with mono-tension: there is one focal point of threat, and everything else in the environment is benign, or at worst an obstacle: the various bystanders, boulders, one-way streets, and so on in car chase sequences in anything from The French Connection to The Bourne Identity. But while Thompson moves towards neutralising the bomb, he is in far from a neutral environment, as indeed one of the locals detonates the device.

One may see in Bigelow’s film an insidious xenophobia: that foreigners aren’t to be trusted, and are also all but invisible, given little characterisational texture. From another angle, why would they be trustworthy? The US might believe they are a benign presence, getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but they are also a foreign force driving through the streets in gun-toting Humvees and tanks. And while they killed Saddam, that was only after propping him up for many years. “US intelligence helped Saddam's Ba'ath Party seize power for the first time in 1963. Evidence suggests that Saddam was on the CIA payroll as early as 1959, when he participated in a failed assassination attempt against Iraqi strongman Abd al-Karim Qassem.” The piece adds, “In the 1980s, the US and Britain backed Saddam in the war against Iran, giving Iraq arms, money, satellite intelligence, and even chemical & bio-weapon precursors.” (Global Policy Forum) After all, though the US would talk about bringing democracy to nations, this was often only if consistent with the American way. As Henry Kissinger once said, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people […] The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” (Guardian)

While the US continues to make films about World War II (Flags of Our Fathers, Glory, Inglourious Basterds), these are war films and not conflict films: the war is deemed unequivocally honourable for the US, and the characters needn’t be in internal conflict over what they are doing on a foreign land. But in conflict films, are they liberating a nation, or liberalising finance? Katherine Griffith noted in 2005, “Halliburton, the world's largest military private contractor, has made at least $8bn (£4.3bn) in war-torn Iraq - doing everything from washing American troops' laundry to setting up vital oil supplies. Now, a critically well-placed army employee says contracts were unfairly awarded to Halliburton, whose chief executive used to be US Vice-President Dick Cheney.” (Independent)

Bigelow extended this notion of conflict cinema in her follow-up Zero Dark Thirty, and amidst the controversy over the film’s depictions of torture, noted Osama “Bin Laden wasn’t defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.” (LA Times) That might seem too easy a response, but within it contains an awareness that those involved ought to have conflictual responses to what they are doing, even if the purpose was finally to take out Bin Laden. The mission was successful, yet at what price to a humanity the US would claim it wants to preserve, against the in-humans they would claim to be fighting against?

While the US might be determined to rid the world of the most dangerous, evident in ongoing talk about the importance of Iran never having a nuclear weapon, the country has its fair share of the unhinged. So much so that there has even been a study which has identified “the U.S. states where you are more likely to find yourself living next to psychopaths, narcissists, and sadists”. (Independent) We should remember this is a nation that has a serial killer sub-genre, and where “The United States had, by far, the highest homicide rate of the G7 countries between 2000 and 2023.” (Statista) Yet the best psychotic films tend to bring out a quality of this insanity, without necessarily relying on generic expectations or action-sequence violence. If we regard Mulholland Dr., Zodiac, There Will Be Blood and Eddington as films that capture an American psychosis, they needn’t all be set in the present to bring out this quality in modern American life. It might have become ever more pronounced, but There Will be Blood makes clear it was there more than a hundred years ago. Zodiac may be set chiefly in the 1970s, but it has much to say about an ongoing sense of fear in American existence that can lead to that study of psychotic states and States.

However, we want to suggest, focusing on Mulholland Dr. and alluding to the others, that while many American films, decontextualised from their generic components, would show characters as crude, violent and dangerous, as the genre masks such traits, in Mulholland Dr. etc., the films emphasise the psychosis of the individual, and the dangers to society, without burying them in action, punctuated horror or gangster self-advancement. This doesn’t mean great horror, action cinema or gangster films can’t do this, and some do, but there is something nakedly revealing in these four films, even if only three are masterpieces, while Eddington is a very interesting curiosity.

In Mulholland Dr., the film isn’t about ambition but the psychosis behind ambition, with an actress, Betty (Naomi Watts), living a suspiciously happy life, one that we discover is unreal when she is thrown back into an actual existence, which shows her so envious of a successful actress that Betty/Diane takes out a hit on her, which leads to the beginning of the film, where the actress is hurt in a car accident, loses her memory, and is helped by Betty. To synopsise the film is to damage it, and the film’s plot folds back on itself in ways that defy ready reason. But what we can extract from David Lynch’s film is the deranged mind, someone who can live in states of blissful delusion, or vengeful insanity. It is as if two sides of the American notion that you can be anything you want to be, but, as George Carlin proposed, it is called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. Lynch shows what happens when you wake up, and warps his narrative into far from a horizontal weft. He suggests the best way to capture America’s rich tapestry is to create a work where reality and fiction dissolve into madness. What is left is Hollyweird indeed, as we might think of the title as showing what happens when someone shows Hollywood drive, when all that matters is the determination to get on and become a success. There is a scene where Betty auditions brilliantly, and with a disarming intensity, but this is within the story where everything is going Betty’s way, and before we see Diane’s apparent reality. It adds another layer to a tale that illustrates that in Hollywood, nothing is quite real: that the most authenticity will be found in the anxious ambition of a hopeful.

There Will Be Blood explores a similar drive but in the context of the early stages of the oil industry, where Daniel Plainview, in very different ways, pushes his ambitions into the psychotic. Like many an ambitious character, he will insist failure is not an option, but at a certain point, sanity is no longer available. In Zodiac, the film focuses on a serial killer we never for sure see, as various figures try to find out more about the killings. Instead, it looks like their own minds might crumble, spending years of their lives pursuing a man with ambitions of his own, as serial killing is a paradoxical form of celebrity culture. The murderer is both determined to make a name for themselves and, at the same time, wishing not to be caught. Most serial killers have a proper name: Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, revealed when they were captured. They reach the height of their celebrity at the moment they descend into the hell of incarceration, and their fame is their demise. The Zodiac killer is different, and remains anonymous, yet this hasn’t stopped this figure from entering the American consciousness, and books, documentaries and fiction films have all added to the mythology. No work more than David Fincher’s film has captured the ambiguity of fear that surrounded the Zodiac’s murder spree, and while horror cinema has long been practising murder most foul, through a subjective camera, Zodiac gives it a purposeful form, well aware that while someone is undeniably behind the deeds, they remain a shadowy executioner. It is a game of cat and mouse, with many scared mice and a cat that can’t be seen or shown. The Zodiac killer might be as crazy as Daniel Plainview or Diane, but all we can say is that he is likely to drive nuts anybody who devotes years of their lives to investigating him, as Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) discovers when his marriage disintegrates and his obsession deepens.

This leaves us with Eddington, a lesser film than the others no doubt, but very good at capturing a zeitgeist soup of influencers, conspiracy theorists, corrupt chancers, AI data centres, Covid 19, Black Lives Matter and Antifa. In the midst of all this is local sheriff Joe Cross, who commits a series of murders, though it is as if they are of no more significance than all the other chaos around him. This isn’t a murder mystery, but a mystified account of how the US finds itself in such a place; a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

While much could and should be said about other aspects of 21st-century American cinema (and much about Latin American and Canadian film), including independent productions, superhero cinema, and filmmakers focusing on black and gay culture, maybe few things have preoccupied 21st-century Americans more than finance, with the crash of 2008, the mid-crisis between 9/11 and Covid 19. Margin Call, Arbitrage, The Wolf of Wall Street, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and The Big Short. What is perhaps odd is that several of the films are, in a way, comedies. They blend finance with the absurd, showing that those involved in it didn’t always know what they were doing, but were very good at spending other people’s cash. If Margaret Thatcher could famously say “the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money", then it applies surely much more to advanced, financially focused capitalism. A good example is Bernie Madoff (whose story was turned into an HBO film, The Wizard of Lies), someone who generated an enormous Ponzi scheme that was inevitably going to run out of other people’s dollars. He went through billions. “The scam included a global roster of investors, from retirees on Long Island to the International Olympic Committee, to charities worldwide. So far, investors have said that they have lost more than $30 billion, according to an Associated Press calculation.” (NBC)

Madoff was the tip of an iceberg that was rapidly melting, as Bear Sterns had collapsed in March 2008, and The Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in September of the same year. It was the biggest financial crash since 1929, and suddenly the intricacies of finance became a topic worth exploring, even if one not always easy to understand. If many involved in the banking crisis didn’t quite comprehend what was going on, how could Joe Public, even if great sums of Mr Public’s money were required to bail out various institutions. Capitalists had proved every bit as culpable as the socialists at splurging other people’s money. Indeed, Madoff was spending Steve Spielberg’s, Kevin Bacon’s and John Malkovich’s, all of whom invested in, and lost cash over, Madoff’s ‘investments’.

In different ways, Margin Call and The Wolf of Wall Street play up the incomprehension that could allow Madoff’s frauds and the industry’s collapse. In Margin Call, the head of the bank that is over-leveraged wants a brilliant mind but relatively lowly employee to explain exactly what is going on. The CEO says the employee ought to detail this in terms so simple a child could understand, as he insists that it wasn’t brains that got him where he happens to be. From one perspective, this could be deemed clumsy narration, with the young banker explaining in a rudimentary way what the audience needs to know, but given how little comprehension many CEOS seemed to have of the imminent collapse, it doesn’t seem the film needed to demand too much artistic licence. It is low-key satire exposing high-finance stupidity, and yet of all the finance films, Margin Call is probably the one that least compromises with the intricacy of explaining to us what happened, as so many financial institutions went under. It might be a film that would go over the head of the CEO, but director JC Chandor reckons he wanted to make a film about smart people coming out of university and funnelling their skills into one particular industry.  “The abuse that I’ve seen over the last 14 to 15 years since I’ve graduated from college, the manipulation of that system, that training ground, essentially leading toward making money for money’s sake as opposed to banking that is actually serving a purpose was the heart of the movie for me.” Chandor adds, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m a capitalist. Some wanted this film to be more of an indictment of these people, and that’s not where I come from, obviously. A misuse of tremendous potential is what I wanted the film to be about, in a sort of sad way.” (Propublica) The employee explaining to the CEO what has gone wrong is a rocket scientist by education, and thus Chandor sees a twofold problem. Idiots reach the top, and smart people go into a money-making profession when they could more usefully be employed in other areas of society. It isn’t only that enormous sums of money get sucked up into the financial sector to the detriment of other areas. It is also that smart people get sucked into it too, as they can earn far more cash in finance than elsewhere.

Margin Call’s story rests on an investment bank going under and trying to save itself by selling its bad debt as quickly as possible before others know it isn’t worth buying. It tries to do so by cheating others, and this is central to the film’s ethical exploration. Being dishonest isn’t part of the company’s ethos, but it is central to its self-preservation. In contrast, The Wolf of Wall Street, set mainly in the 1980s and 1990s, though made in 2013, is about a chancer who takes full advantage of light-touch regulation all the better to swindle people out of their money. If Margin Call shows a stuffy industry turning suspect, The Wolf of Wall Street is consistent with director Martin Scorsese’s interest in petty criminality and gangsterdom. Jordan Belfort and his employees are men on the make and can hardly believe their good fortune, and the credulity of their customers. If in another life, Chandor’s characters would be pursuing research in the advanced sciences, Scorsese’s would probably be used-car salesmen, petty thieves and loan sharks. Instead, they find a market so deregulated that there are opportunities aplenty for the wily and the unscrupulous. Scorsese makes little of the financial subtleties (there seemed to be few), and instead focuses a lot of energy on Belfort and his colleagues spending the cash on coke, hookers, Lamborghinis and yachts.

But whatever the differences, Narrow Margin and The Wolf of Wall Street capture the two sides of the finance cinema coin. Does a film go in the direction of trying to take seriously high-finance, or concentrate on the high of finance; does it try and engage the viewer in understanding an industry that has rarely been put on screen (as opposed to medicine, law enforcement, the legal system, sport and education), or accept that it is best understood in its decadence? The Big Short tries to have it both ways, with Margot Robbie (Belfort’s wife in The Wolf of Wall Street), explaining sub-primes and shorting to the audience while taking a bubble bath.

These four areas (finance, conflict, psychosis and tech) have all been vital to 21st-century cinema, and while film isn’t there simply to capture the zeitgeist, it can be a useful way of understanding our given moment. If we have talked too little about form, while acknowledging it where we can, it is partly due to limitations of space, but also partly because of limitations in much 21st-century American cinema. While 70s American film drew a great deal from the innovations in Europe in the 1960s, many American films in recent years have retreated from the densely populated mis-en-scene of a Robert Altman, the shattered form reflecting psychic imbalance in Scorsese, the juxtapositional freshness of Peckinpah and Arthur Penn’s editing. There have been formally great films, and Mulholland Dr., Zodiac and There Will Be Blood are evidently cinematic. But our purpose has been to explore theme over form, content expressed socio-politically, rather than simply aesthetically.


© Tony McKibbin