Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a film about looking back on your past, trying to figure out whether it’s worth it to keep mining your memories for meaning, or whether we’d be better off letting go of them entirely. Which brings me to my favorite “New Sincerity” movie of them all, the one that’s inextricably linked to my own impressions of the early aughts. Not because I’m worried about what my love for them says about me, but because I want to keep my feelings about them big, bright, and overwhelming, in the way of all teenage emotion. (For more, read this essay on Garden State by my colleague Jesse David Fox.) It’s possible that much of this is Old Millennials being too harsh to our younger selves, but all the same, I’ve been refraining from revisiting most of my high-school favorites. Values have shifted hyperarticulate sensitivity has given way to moral forthrightness. When these movies are discussed now, it’s often with a slight cringe. It’s a little sad that the most lasting specimen of this subculture turned out to be Seth Cohen from The O.C., but few of us get to choose our monuments. These Searchlight and Focus movies weren’t exactly small or obscure, but I think of them now as baby steps for budding cinephiles. And we usually missed it, so these outings quickly became all-day affairs the effort involved was part of the point. If you missed it, the next one didn’t come for another hour. Before we could drive, if my friends and I wanted to see a movie with subtitles, we had to literally travel by train, taking the lumbering SEPTA R5 to an arthouse theater a few towns away. (Searchlight was owned by Fox, of course, while Focus Features was part of Universal.) A few got wide releases, but others were just slightly inaccessible, in a way that feels foreign in the streaming era. The early ’00s were a golden age for indie cinema, even if the term “indie” was by then a bit of a misnomer, as most of the genre’s hallmarks were released by wholly owned subsidiaries of major corporations. They could be precious and over-aestheticized, but there was also something shaggy and handmade about them. You heard it from bands like the Postal Service, Bright Eyes, and the Polyphonic Spree, and all over the subgenre Matthew Perpetua dubbed “modular pop.” And you especially saw it at the movies, in a selection of gems that make up a key part of the Millennial Canon - The Royal Tenenbaums, Amélie, Garden State, and more. Amid the trauma and violence of the age, my favorite artists cosseted themselves in fantasy worlds filled with pure, childlike emotion: a heart on the sleeve of a thrift-store sweater. (Think Paris Hilton, or Girls Gone Wild.) But it was also the time of what was called “the New Sincerity,” a strain of culture that, as one manifesto explained, was a strange amalgam of artifice and innocence. These were the early Bush years, where the dominant aesthetic was shiny, spiky, and a little rank. Why not escape into the past?īecause there’s not much else to do these days besides brood, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the films I loved in high school. Head to Vulture’s Twitter to catch his live commentary, and look ahead at next week’s movie here. This week’s selection comes from senior writer Nate Jones, who will begin his screening of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on August 21 at 7 p.m. Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.Įvery week for the foreseeable future, Vulture will be selecting one film to watch as part of our Friday Night Movie Club.
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