Previous Post Because that's what this decade was - the Zeroes. The pits. The shits. An utterly fucking horrible period of history. One of the worst decades in at least a century. The fact that it's ending on a slightly up note does nothing to absolve the decade as a whole. During the '90s, I complained of the fact that so much of the era seemed almost exclusively devoted to nostalgia for previous decades, thanks to millennial angst, but in retrospect, there was actually at least a little bit of novelty there, albeit both good and bad. During the Zeroes, though, there's exactly four things that I can think of that I could qualify as even remotely novel - 9/11 at the start of the decade, Obama at the end of it, with Stephenie Meyer and the unprecedented transformation of communication media in between. Otherwise? This was a goddamn RERUN decade, as seen by the fact that I'm including Stephenie Meyer in the category of relative novelty, even though she's basically the unholy bastard spawn of the worst aspects of Laurell K. Hamilton, Anne Rice and Emily Bronte ("HEATHCLIFF EDWARD!!!") We had a Bush in the White House, a Clinton running for president, a trilogy of Star Wars movies, a reimagining of Battlestar Galactica (which was itself originally a ripoff of Star Wars), a revival of Doctor Who, a reboot of Star Trek, and movies devoted not only to '80s franchises such as Transformers and G.I. Joe, but also to decades-older creative concepts and series ranging from '60s-era superheroes such as Spider-Man, the Hulk and Iron Man, as well as '30s-era superheroes such as Batman and Superman, to the World War II-era The Lord of the Rings and (a remake of) the Depression-era King Kong, the latter two helmed by Peter Jackson. Yes, there's one hell of a lot of the superhero/sci-fi/fantasy pop culture in the above list that I enjoyed a great deal, but that doesn't change the fact that, even more than any previous decade - hell, even more than a fin de siecle decade like the '90s - the Zeroes are the decade when the last of our innovative thinkers in entertainment just seemed to fucking GIVE UP, because aside from my above-noted exceptions, we just did not seem to have a single original idea in our goddamn heads. So, this is it, then; this go down in history be the decade that nostalgia exhausted the last of its non-renewable natural resources, because aside from a few salty leavings from the '90s, the Zeroes were the decade when we strip-mined pop culture so thoroughly that we finally ran out of past. It's really rather dismaying to consider how fast we've burned through our reserves of potential nostalgia material, when you recall that the art deco movement of the '20s was inspired by Egyptian designs and architecture dating back to centuries before Christ, whereas during the '50s, the trend in movies was toward Biblical-era epics and the trend in TV shows was toward Old Westerns, but somehow, by the time we got to the '70s, we'd reduced the nostalgia gap from hundreds of years to 20 years at the most, with TV shows like Happy Days and movies like American Graffiti, the latter of which was set less than a dozen years prior. The problem is that potential nostalgia material has to be either drawn from generational memories (folks who have hit the prime of their adulthoods pining away for their childhoods, thus accounting for the 20-year rule) or else sparked off by relatively current events (once again, art deco emerged not long after King Tut's tomb was opened). Sadly, American culture has become so xenophobic and anti-intellectual that I don't think archeology can feed nostalgia anymore. However, given the fact that everything geek is now becoming chic, I think we might enter into an era in which people wax nostalgic for old-timey science fiction portrayals of what people in previous eras imagined our current era might be like, complete with retro-tech like ray-guns, rocket-packs and flying cars. Which would be a total kick in the ass, because it'd be nostalgia for the future of the past.

I had to cut my vacation with the family short to return to work this week, so while they're ringing in the New Year together tonight, I'm here at home, alone, about to watch my DVD of Less Than Zero, which seems an oddly fitting way to end a decade in which I spent so many of my holidays alone and far, far away from home.

I offer you the instrumentals of Thomas Newman:



Newman's score and Edward Lachman's cinematography are both so rich and vivid and atmospheric that they go a long way toward redeeming the many, many faults of this film, from the almost laughably miscast Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz to a studio-micromanaged screenplay that bore only marginally more resemblance to Bret Easton Ellis' original novel of the same name than the Halle Berry Catwoman movie did to the character and the comics that supposedly served as its inspiration.

This is one of those instances in which it's definitely better to see the movie before you read the book. The first time I saw this film in high school, it seemed profoundly deep and downbeat to my wide teenaged eyes, but compared to the novel that it was drawn from, it was practically a Disney animated feature. Ellis himself never fails to point out that not a single line of dialogue from his writing made it to the screen intact, and literally dozens of the book's most important scenes and significant supporting characters neither appeared nor even merited a mention onscreen.

And yet, in the intervening decades, Ellis himself has also acknowledged that, for as much as the movie glossed over both the details and the driving intent of his original work, it still somehow captured the essential, ephemeral, shimmery thingness of the 1980s as a decade. Ellis has praised the film for portraying "a certain youth culture during that decade that no other movie caught," and in 2008, the writers and editors of the Los Angeles Times named it the 22nd best film set in the city during the past 25 years, with one criterion for all films on that list being that they had to "communicate some inherent truth about the L.A. experience."

In spite of its faults, there's a lot to recommend this film. In addition to Newman's hauntingly synthesized score, this movie boasts a legitimately kick-ass soundtrack, featuring acts as diverse as Aerosmith, Glenn Danzig, Joan Jett, Roy Orbison, Poison, Public Enemy, Run DMC, The Cult, Slayer, The Bangles, Simon and Garfunkel, and LL Cool J, but that's what you get with Rick Rubin as a producer.

On a less shallow note, just as much as McCarthy and Gertz absolutely do not belong anywhere near this film, Robert Downey Jr. and James Spader deliver performances as intensely powerful and personal as a sucker-punch to the gut. As professional drug dealer Rip, Spader's character exudes such a disquietingly disingenuous reptilian charm that it trips the Uncanny Valley triggers that normally don't go off for me unless I'm watching especially creepy CGI attempts at fully human faces, and his dead-eyed stare and flat, affectless tone could freeze supernovas. And as for Downey? Yes, it's easy to crack wise about how his role as drug addict Julian must not have been much of a stretch for him, but goddamn, watching him explore the dark recesses of that character's crippling dependency in front of his fellow actors is like witnessing a self-exorcism.

More than the acting, though, and more even than any of the individual components of music or visuals, I continue to treasure this film for its sheer, eerie zeitgeist. This movie was what it felt like to be hollow-eyed with unblinking awakeness at 3 a.m. back in the '80s, when you felt as dark and dead and empty on the inside as the midnight world around you appeared on the outside.

... Huh. Less than three hours now, before the New Year comes and the odometer rolls past the Zeroes forever.

I don't know what the future will bring, but for the next couple of hours, I think I'll just sit back, relax, press "play," and immerse myself in secondhand memories of a decade that was at once something more and something Less Than Zero.