1999 was, simply, the weirdest year in the history of American cinema. As fall turned to winter, the most talked-about films seemed to grow progressively stranger. American Beauty closed with a shot of the central character’s bleeding head and told us it was pretty (and it was). Brad Pitt told us that we were never going to become movie stars. In The Insider even our most powerful weren’t exempt from powerlessness. And then there was our wunderkid Matt Damon off in Italy lusting after young men in a bizarre, slow psychological thriller about the pursuit of the self, of all things. Not to mention falling frogs.

The moneymakers are even harder to explain. A film about a mouse makes 100 million. A horror flick shot on video comes through with a couple Newsweek and Time covers and a tidy sum of 150 mil. Keanu realized all of life was a lie, shot up a bunch of people, and walked away with 170 million. And then there’s the requisite 300 million, which goes to….a ghost story about a guy who doesn’t know he’s dead? What the hell happened here?

It makes some sort of sense that in a tidy house of prosperity and well-kept cordiality, the dirty laundry has still gotta flap in the wind for all the neighborhood to see. We’ve certainly become complacent in the official public sphere – we don’t appreciate surprises from people we might vote for, and candidates don’t enjoy alarming us. And yet (I know this is a leap here) the year’s two most successful films were specifically meant to alarm us, and moreover to show us that only when we face and come to terms with our fears will they recede. At their most basic level, The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense are about dealing with fear. We get the sense in the former that no one would have ended up whimpering in the corner if those filmmakers had thought about what the woods might hold, while the ghosts of the latter grow friendly once they are acknowledged.

Yet these blockbusters can be read as distinctly individualistic calls to responsibility, not as any critique of our national worldview at the end of the century. Blair Witch and The Sixth Sense are certainly not challenging films, but they share with the year’s most surprising cinema an attempt to come to terms with the terrifying realities of our lives. Together, the fall’s most interesting films form a distinct portrait of America at midlife crisis. At the end of the American century, amidst static celebration of consumer life, Hollywood suddenly decided nothing mattered.

Al Pacino, that bastion of rugged American masculine integrity, walks out of the offices of 60 Minutes, that bastion of rugged American journalistic integrity, at the end of The Insider with this gloomy valediction, "What’s been broken here can’t be put back together again," typifying the fall release’s disillusioned, and ultimately passive, view of our time. In The Insider integrity isn’t just bought–it’s first questioned as valuable in and of itself, and then tossed aside after it may or may not be worth the fight that it involves. Values aren’t just expendable in a world of corporate dominance; they are a meaningless liability. This is mirrored in The Talented Mr. Ripley–the characters dispose of values and morality in the name of some utilitarian self-destruction. He kills in the same impersonal way CBS’s business deals are cut–after weighing the results and opting for continued affluence. Unlike The Inside, which is ultimately submissive, The Talented Mr. Ripley approaches real insight when it hints that Ripley’s total lack of identity is a flaw he can’t overcome because he shares it with the people he is trying to become. It is the way we pursue the images of affluence, and not something inherently wrong in those images, that is condemned. Both films, while questioning what we sacrifice for success, leave us with little alternative; this is the way the world works, they tell us. We are left with nothing–with a shattered world licking its lips, preparing to continue eating itself.

There were films that attempted to find some sort of resolution and hope within this valueless void. But as Fight Club and American Beauty showed, it’s hard to get tucked in after such a sweaty nightmare. It is no coincidence that both films open with their protagonists playing the narcoleptic. What makes these films so interesting is that they not only criticize the dream-like world of middle-class consumerist banality, but attempt to address the dismal ways we try to wake ourselves from these sleepy worlds. Both get off on the alarm clock’s macabre ring–we laugh at the site of Kevin Spacey toking up to Zeppelin and chasing blond cheerleaders; we sit rapt as Ed Norton does some old school ultraviolence to other young urban professionals.

But both films attempt to expose the lies in those responses–we’re left with Kevin Spacey staring at his family’s portrait with tears in his eyes and Ed Norton shooting himself in the head. American Beauty attempts to embrace what’s valuable in the forgotten world through some sort of transcendental acceptance, while Fight Club blows it up and instead looks hopefully to some New World to be made.

But these films can’t bear the weight of their own critique. In American Beauty reconciliation comes in the form of nostalgia’s façade, as the tortured father realizes his own truth in black and white memories, while little has changed in the world he felt compelled to abandon. In Fight Club the only answer is of ironic self-destruction. In the end, we’re told to appreciate what we have or to blow some shit up–basically, what the politicians and the glam bands have been telling us for years. Neither film can escape the worldview it wants to critique.

It is telling, but maybe not so surprising, that in a year whose most popular movies told us to acknowledge our world from the safe distance of spirits and witches, that there would be so many movies that couldn’t bear the weight of doing just that from a more intimate perspective. It is undeniably disturbing that the year’s most ambitious films saw no plausible way of dealing with a world they found so vacant, but Hollywood remains Hollywood, even in an introspective mood.

Fight Club’s original script ended quite differently, and the change epitomizes the difficulty in finding worldly resolution within a medium we devour because it is so much larger than life. In the original version, Edward Norton’s narrator stops the plot to blow up the city’s skyscrapers, and instead escapes as his underlings stare skyward waiting for an explosion that will never come. It is all too fitting that this finale and its commitment to struggle was canned and replaced by the screen-ready shot of the burning skyline. Even in Hollywood’s most ineffectual hour, we still need to be assured that our screen sized heroes can do something.

While these films attempted to expose our empty belly, they weren’t about to say anything that might slow the spoon’s steady flight to the mouth. And now, with Next Friday, The Green Mile and The Hurricane reigning at the cineplex, we can get back to patting ourselves on the back while shoveling more of the same down our throats. We can tuck ourselves in gently, stare down at the blood of the last century seeping through to this one, and, like Wes Bentley’s troubled teen in American Beauty, look down and smile.