Are You Watching Closely?: Cultural Paranoia, New Technologies, and the Contemporary Hollywood Misdirection Film, by Seth Friedman

Abstract

In the spring of 2019, the website The Ringer launched an ongoing series of articles and podcasts to mark the twenty-year celebration of what is popularly recognised as one of the greatest years in US film history. That same spring, Simon & Schuster released Brian Raftery’s bluntly titled Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen. Raftery and The Ringer presented extended treatments for the usual suspects—The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski), The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan), The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez), Fight Club (David Fincher), and Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson), all released in 1999. What these and other “classics” from the era have in common is pretty clear: they bend, some would say break, key classical principles of narrative film. Academics took note. These were “puzzle” films or “narratively complex” films or “mind-game” films. Many of the scholarly discussions centred around whether or not these movies represented a new, “postclassical” age for popular US film.

Keywords

• puzzle films
• dvd
• misdirection
• fandom
• gender