By Jennie Lightweis-Goff
Cinema's legendary year, 1999, produced two magisterial Christmas movies. There's Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, where bright lights twinkle in a pre-Bloomberg New York. Tom Cruise's body is hazarded by AIDS; by gay bashers; by potential entrapment by men trafficking in minors; and by a fattening box of knishes. (Jewish neighborhoods are famously sensitive to gentrification, so I wager only the last of these phenomena has reached extinction in New York City, the playground of the ultra-rich.) Kubrick aimed to adapt Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (1926) – a dreamscape of interwar Vienna – long before he'd heard of Nabokov's Lolita or Stephen King's The Shining. Kubrick transforms Schnitzler's Fridolin into a doctor so WASPy that the character's name – Bill Harford – evokes a Connecticut city. The film feels curiously out of time and place: wholly of interwar Europe and the post-Shoah Bronx, of von Hindenburg and Clinton, purity and danger, Weimar and the end of history. It is Kubrick's New York in miniature, a little fiefdom he built in London, a training camp that turned Nicole Kidman into a grand dame and Tom Cruise into an action hero in search of a cliff from which to fling high-handed prestige directors.
And then there is Doug Liman’s Go, a film that resides in a specific, tangible, sensory Los Angeles. The mise-en-scene smells like the devilish Santa Ana winds; I sometimes feel myself tipping into dehydration as I watch the driving scenes. This is not the city of dreams, but of amateur drug deals, Las Vegas sojourns, and Christmas-themed warehouse raves. I recognize Ronna, Sarah Polley’s desperate grocery store clerk; her seemingly chaste friend Claire, played by Katie Holmes; and Mannie (Nathan Bexton), who stays fucked up for most of the film. As a recovering addict, I am a connoisseur of drunk and druggy performances, and so I delight in his sweaty mien and fantasies of destroying a produce aisle to the strains of Los del Rio’s “Macarena” (1993). The film’s three interlocking sequences circle back to Ronna clocking out at the grocery; she’s desperate to pay her landlord $380 to avoid eviction. Each chapter begins with Simon (Desmond Askew) offering her a triple; he is the film’s signifying monkey with a Cockney accent. He fills her pockets with cash in exchange for covering his shifts when he goes to Las Vegas. The chase scenes on the strip are perfect, save for Philip Steir’s EDM-remix of Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” (1968). I’d wash that out of my mind if I could.
Simon’s money offers Ronna a cash reserve to take an “evolutionary leap up the drug food chain,” as Mannie says. Now she can pay for some weight: just enough MDMA to take you from possession to trafficking. She is lured to the lair of Officer Burke (William Fichtner) and then saved from arrest by closeted gay actors Adam (Scott Wolf) and Zack (Jay Mohr). Later, they will hit her with a car, leave her for dead, and then return out of guilt; their giddy drunk driving unintentionally saves her from Todd Gaines (Timothy Olyphant). After the rave, Todd advances on her with a gun, holding a bottle of the decoy baby aspirin she gave him. Then…boom! The people who save you maim you, too.
I saw Go in a South Carolina mall that’s subsequently been condemned. Back then, I liked to park on the top floor of the parking garage, then take the noisy escalator down to the theater floor. The metal of the moving stairs clanked and shredded as they rotated. They had rusted, exposed to the elements on the parking garage roof. Columbia, South Carolina is no Los Angeles, but I recognized their city in mine. They had raves and ecstasy; we had gas station speed and truck stop peep shows on Two Notch Road. My friends were all textbook sexual deviants; only Adam and Zack’s (wounded) monogamy struck a false note in my crew. After they discover they’ve both slept with Jimmy (Shann Beeman) – a makeup artist with a lion’s mane of gold hair – they shear him for revenge. And team-building. My coupled-up friends would never have wasted a likely third like Jimmy.
Without cell phones, Ronna, Mannie, and Claire designate a diner for morning meet-ups after they get wasted and separated. We had two that I remember: a wings and beer joint near Williams-Brice Stadium – which looked like a bug on its back on what skyline Columbia possessed – and Rising High, a breakfast place that sold t-shirts inscribed with a now-hackneyed joke: we wake and bake so you don’t have to. So much of it is gone. Early in the film, Ronna, Mannie, and Claire drive through the Los Angeles of palatial Blockbusters and all-night Chinese joints with BT’s diegetic song “Movement in Still Life” blasting from their car windows. The drive is no less alien than the one that Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) takes just a few months before the Manson murders in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) with the surging soundtrack of early Bob Seger. Back then, we had cities, but we decided to torch them – paradoxically, not for warmth but an aspirational chill.
These days, it’s a Trader Joe’s, then a Fresh Market, a sea of flamable 5-over-1 condos , a a handful of sterile coffee shops where everything tastes the same, and a smattering of "quirky" time-wasters like axe-throwing or escape rooms. Within a few years of graduation, I’d be studying the literature and culture of cities in a graduate program and mourning what Hurricane Katrina wrenched away from New Orleans, the home I made after graduation. I’d drive through my beloved geographies blasting the Pretenders’ “My City Was Gone” (1982), but Rush Limbaugh had long ago appropriated it as a theme for his long-running radio show, so I spared myself the embarrassment of mistaken intent. Or aesthetics. Politics always came second for me; I can admit that now. The Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” (1969) would have to do. On a bad day, I think that we didn’t know how good we had it in the 90s. Rent was cheap; Ronna only owes $380 to her landlord. I wrote $415 checks for a palatial one-bedroom apartment a few steps from the University of South Carolina campus. Most mornings, I left the door unlocked so friends could take a nap or a hit of my grimy drugs-and-liquor stash while I was at class. Locked doors and deadbolts were for nighttime, when I used an achingly slow internet connection to steal Public Image Limited and Television deep cuts through Napster’s sparse interface. The flyer for a double-header at a dodgy venue in West Columbia – a working-class semi-suburb accessible by a footbridge across the Congaree River – promised wall-to-wall provocation by bands with names like Jeffrey Dahmer’s Polaroids and Confederate Fag.
The general affect was unshockable and unshakeable, as in Go’s freewheeling conversation between Simon, Marcus (Taye Diggs), Tiny (Breckin Meyer), and Singh (James Duval) on the drive between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. It’s laden with slurs and sexual disclosure, but time doesn’t move in one direction toward an ever more liberated future. My phone’s voice-to-text censors the phrases motherfucker and glory hole, though I could take one click over and find outré porn featuring plenty of both. While we were torching our cities, we sawed a line through the middle of pop culture: dreck for children and the perpetually "adulting" stayed attached, and real films for actual adults plummeted into the darkness. I suspect that most of the mid-budget movies of 1999 – from Go to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia – would be condemned to prestige streaming, where their running times would swell to pad out 12 episodes. What a world, where Oscar Isaac and Robert Pattinson jockey to play superheroes rather than Hamlet. Übermensch rather than, simply, men.
Find Go on Netflix. You’ll recognize its cover as an artifact of the time, even if you didn’t pile your 1988 Dodge Dynasty – midnight blue with gray velvet interiors – with miscreants to see it on opening weekend, April 9, 1999. The cover shows a forced perspective downward angle of Polley and friends, a familiar sight from movie posters and myriad Spin magazine covers. The mustards and reds, the leather jackets and frosted tips, tempt us into thinking that “the past is a foreign country.” Perhaps that aphorism was true when L.P. Hartley wrote it in 1953. But since my misspent twenties, I’ve been haunted by the ever-eroding present, the sense that nothing changes because nothing ever feels new. We’ve invented nothing: the camera, foldable map, digital watch, typewriter, telephone, and battery-powered calculator are twentieth-century inventions that we simply shrunk to the dimensions of our jeans pockets. Baggy then skinny, pegged then tapered in cycles that make it impossible to really date a photograph by looking at its denim. Now we have the fake 1980s portraits of Generative AI, a technology that scarcely strikes me as revolutionary. I could praise and delude myself without its assistance. I could dwell in the “necropolis of prose” by picking up a shitty airport paperback. That phrase comes from Martin Amis’s withering review of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal, another member of the class of 1999, in Talk magazine. The novel had even shorter legs than Go, whose reviews suffered with structural comparisons to Pulp Fiction (1994) and Four Rooms (1995).
Perhaps I’m too enamored of W. David Marx’s Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century (2025), in which he argues that our epoch is characterized by risk-aversion, cultural stagnation, and malignant stasis. I’d add that the greatest trick of the present is power feigning innovation and unprecedented change at every turn. Contemporary American life is designed to make you say oh wow a dozen times a day, but I cannot muster shock for Donald Trump after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney killed a million Iraqis, with no contrition or repair from the U.S. regimes that followed them. And I cannot be surprised by the fecklessness of tech guys after the construction of the vast surveillance state in the wake of 9/11. At the end of 1999, I broke up with my first boyfriend at a departure gate in SeaTac airport; he died of COVID-19 twenty years later…almost to the day. Those strange temporal benchmarks will make you more sensitive to sea change, but it simply isn’t here. There’s only social rupture and manufactured crisis.
These days, I see Ronna, Mannie, and Claire in the faces of the aimless kids on my working-class block in New Orleans. Our generation had William Julius Wilson’s When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996); their generation has the allegedly flexible work options of what Sarah Kendzior calls “a post-employment economy.” We had Naomi Klein illuminating the ubiquity of branded space; they have Klein warning that the End Times are a real possibility in their lifetimes. We had the vague promise of a booming stock market; they have the dubious consolations of “content creation.” And when we succeed in cruel economies, our successes are parasitic, violent, and temporary. After all, Ronna buys her way out of eviction, but it is only by cheating the ravers and learning the language of dealer Todd Gaines: one hit per headbanger, none of that crunchy herbal rave shit, show me your tits, and the easy analogy between giving head and giving favors. Survive, like the parasites and middlemen who will sell you human suffering; the story ends, one way or another, with you limping back to your cash register after the brief, bright flash of a fat new bankroll.
Jennie Lightweis-Goff is a lyric essayist and an academic in recovery from booze, pills, and the heavy armor of academic jargon in her prose. She is the author of two scholarly books, Blood at the Root (SUNY Press) and Captive City (UPenn Press)—long-listed for the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize—and myriad essays in venues as varied as Global Souths and The Point. She considers Liberties her intellectual and artistic home base. Her next project, Vigilance Lessons, is a hybrid memoir about risk tolerance, told in a series of essays about the Cold War, COVID, true crime, and the hidden terrors of a 1980s childhood. She has also completed Cosmic American Road Trip: Driving the South’s Weird Century, which frames “getting lost” in time and space as a new method for understanding the U.S. South. She has edited a series of essays, Stephen Foster at 200, for a Palgrave Macmillan book and podcast series that will be released in time for the songwriter’s bicentennial in 2026. A nomadic academic, she has sometimes lived in Memphis; New York; Seneca, South Carolina (one of the shooting locations of John Boorman’s Deliverance); Huntsville, Texas (Prison City, USA), and Beijing, but New Orleans is home.