They say everything happens in cycles – the past few years, millennials have started to experience a minor existential crisis at the sight of Y2k fashion plastered on the covers of Vogue and GQ, shivering at the realisation that Murder on the Dancefloor was 23 years old when it stormed back into the charts last year. Much like music or fashion, cinema too is cyclical – trends wax and wane with the years.
I remember sitting with my mum, one January night in 2006, Jaffa Cakes in hand, watching the first episode of the BBC’s sci-fi period drama Life on Mars. My mum, a child of the 1970s, couldn’t stop talking about how her first boyfriend had that exact haircut, how her sister had played that T. Rex album until the record was distorted. The 12-year-old me may as well have been watching The Age of Innocence.
Yet as I sat in my local cinema on a November evening in 2022 to watch Charlotte Wells’ blistering Aftersun, I wondered if the sound of the Macarena and the sight of men in bucket hats would play in much the same way to Gen Z viewers. Recent years have provided us with no shortage of films set in an era of flip phones and low-rise jeans: Saltburn, I Like Movies, Bad Education, BlackBerry, and Uncut Gems are just a few. But how, exactly, do you make a millennial period piece?
The Look
First thing’s first – you might want to think about shooting on film. The 2000s and early 2010s saw one of the biggest technological shifts in filmmaking since The Jazz Singer pioneered sync sound, with the likes of David Fincher, Michael Mann, and even Agnès Varda eschewing celluloid for the flexibility promised by digital cinematography. To Gen Z the HD images of Marvel films might be what defines the aesthetics of cinema, but to filmmakers whose adolescence was spent browsing the VHSs at their local Blockbuster, their cinema is defined by celluloid. It’s no wonder Saltburn and Bad Education were shot on 35mm – they emulate the texture of the films that shaped their formative movie-going experiences, all while giving No Fear t-shirts and brick phones a distinctly cinematic sheen.
However, film isn’t the only format at your disposal. Both Aftersun and Chandler Levack’s semi-autobiographical 2003-set I Like Movies, open with boxy camcorder footage shot by their protagonists. With so many millennial period pieces being exercises in autobiography, it seems VHS tapes, defined by their track marks and rewind wear, are perhaps the most tangible way to capture millennial youth. Using a medium that documented the holidays and school plays that made up our childhoods not only submerges audiences in a time and place, but creates an intimacy and tactility that the 8mm cameras of Spielberg’s youth predate and the sharp resolution of an iPhone camera postdate.
The Music
Much was made of Saltburn’s narrative similarities to Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, but where Minghella time stamps the 1950s set tale with the sounds of Chet Baker and Dizzy Gillespie, Emerald Fennell plants us firmly in the 2000s with needle drops from Bloc Party and The Cheeky Girls. While the genre-defining work of jazz legends might not seem immediately comparable to Flo Rida’s Low, this blurring between what’s considered ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, is key to making a millennial period piece.
Fennel’s mining of our collective pop culture consciousness began in Promising Young Woman; despite its contemporary setting, her debut reclaims socialite and noughties tabloid regular, Paris Hilton’s Stars Are Blind (which featured in Complex’s 50 Awesome Guilty Pleasure Songs We’re Ashamed to Like (But Not Really)) in one of its most vibrant moments. Millennial period pieces are as much about reclamation as they are nostalgia. Saltburn’s use of Sounds of the Underground by Girls Aloud is less about recognition than it is a taking back of cultural artefacts previously deemed kitsch by Boomers and Gen X.
The Costumes
Much like the era’s music, the fashion of the ‘90s and ‘00s have, until recently, been widely considered as… regrettable. We may all cringe at the cap beanies and copious denim that once filled our wardrobes, but much like Howie Ratner embraces the tackiness of his bejewelled Furby in Uncut Gems, filmmakers and the wider culture have now embraced garish Y2K fashion.
To properly deploy a wardrobe of millennial throwbacks, it’s important to know your characters. Jacob Elordi’s eyebrow piercing and polo shirts tell us almost everything we need to know about a character that oozes indie sleaze, Paul Mescal’s Britpop-coded outfits in Aftersun go a long way to helping us understand a father old beyond his years, mourning a youth he feels he’s lost. Whether your characters listen to Britney or Avril Lavigne, understanding who needs a crop-top and who needs cargo trousers, can make your millennial period piece get to the root of its characters.
Cultural Moments
Music and formats aren’t the only way to ground your audience in an era, and weaving real life events within a fictional tapestry has long been used as a shortcut to place characters within a past its audience recognises. Whether that’s Mad Men centring an episode around the Kennedy assassination or the teens from Stranger Things walking past a cinema marquee advertising The Terminator (the closest equivalent for the Blockbuster generation is Saltburn’s aristocratic family gathered round to watch 2007’s Superbad). Millennial period pieces are no exception. The plot of Uncut Gems hinges on the 2012 NBA season, I Like Movies’ protagonist’s excitement for the release of Punch Drunk Love plays a key role in its character development, and Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry uses the smartphone race of the 2000s to trace an entire decade. Adding a kernel of truth to a fictional story can help to establish a sense of authenticity while also activating nostalgia sirens for the audience, but it can also serve as a convenient way of indicating a time period without resorting to irritating exposition.
Filmmakers have always been drawn to looking backwards at the eras and times that shaped their lives, and in these uncertain times it may be increasingly comforting to do so. As more millennials forge careers in the film industry, it’s likely we haven’t seen the last of these achingly unhip period pieces, immediately transporting us to a time before Instagram, where the jeans were baggy, the phones without touchscreens, and The Ketchup Song could sell over seven million copies.
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