It was a bright, sunny day, as most days on Seahaven Island seemed to be. The storm had passed, leaving Truman Burbank near-dead but still alive. He was sailing farther out to sea than he had ever dared sail before; he was going to explore the lands that had previously been hidden from him.

And then… SMASH. There was nothing to crash into, and yet his sailboat had stopped. He stood and walked across the boat to see what had happened. All he saw was clear blue sky with white, puffy clouds. And he reached out and touched it.

It was a wall with a sky painted on it.

The Truman Show hit theaters on June 5, 1998, followed by Pleasantville on September 17, 1998, The Matrix on March 31, 1999, American Beauty on September 8, 1999, and Fight Club on September 10, 1999. While Truman Burbank was crashing into the sky, the dot-com bubble was bursting. While Tyler Durden was leading a group of disenfranchised men in pummelling each other mercilessly, the American economy was struggling to stay afloat.

Of course, the filmmakers had no idea that the bubble was going to burst at the same time that their new movies were being released. A movie takes a long time to make, so all of these films - including the ones released in 1999 - were being written, filmed, and produced while the economy was still going strong and the future still looked bright. If all of pop culture serves as a reflection of a culture’s current thoughts and concerns, movies tend to reflect what people were thinking a few years prior. I’d say that this collection of movies released in 1998 and 1999 have a few choice words to say about the American mindset in 1995 and 1996.

The ’90s will most likely be remembered as a Golden Age. At no other point in history had so many people been so rich. At no point in the future will the affluent of our culture be quite so affluent again. (That is, unless we manage to sidestep Peak Oil by inventing cars that run on fairy dust and happy thoughts.) For teenagers and young adults, it seemed quite likely that they’d be able to work for a few years in the tech industry, make an obscene amount of money, and retire before they even so much as lost their youthful acne. All in all, things were looking up.

So what kind of screenplays did people start writing around this time? Stories about people trapped in artificial, shallow, and deeply unsatisfying worlds. Mostly these were fictional allegories (The Truman Show, Pleasantville, The Matrix). Fight Club and American Beauty took the theme a little more literally. Such stories are common in science fiction, and occasionally surface in popular movies. But five of them, all released within the span of about a year? As I said, pop culture tends to reflect the general mindset of its culture. So apparently, amidst the greatest economy the world had ever seen, and will ever see, the richest nation in the richest culture in the richest time in history was collectively thinking: I’ve got to get out of here.

Like generations before them, they went to the movies in search of escapism, in search of fictional characters saying and doing the kinds of things they only wished they could do and say. And so they watched heroic Truman brave the artificial elements in order to escape his ever-televised cage. They watched the people of bland, wholesome Pleasantville realize a world beyond 1950s conformity, and in so doing, become genuine, colorful human beings. They watched Neo break out of the Matrix and join a group of resistance fighters. They watched Lester Burnham tell off his boss, quit his job, get his dream car, and smoke a lot of pot. They watched Tyler Durden create a cult of men pounding each other into oblivion, just so they could feel something.

Movie heroes tend to be the people that movie audiences want to be. Or, as Tyler Durden put it, “All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.”

If ever there was a better argument that wealth does not equal happiness. And if ever there was better evidence for Joseph Tainter’s assertion that a major sign of impending collapse in any complex society is the emergence of the idea that maybe such a complex society was not a good idea. Now, obviously anarchism is nothing new; even primitivism has been around for quite some time. (Rousseau, anyone?) So I don’t agree that these ideas only start circulating once collapse is already inevitable. But the ideas might start getting popular around that time. Maybe everyone won’t go out and start forming tribes. Maybe it’ll just be a tiny seed of doubt, hiding in the backs of everyone’s minds, perhaps only coming out in the stories they write.

In the end, The Truman Show was hailed as a clever response to reality TV. Pleasantville was enjoyed as a special effects-driven feel-good comedy, then pretty much forgotten as soon as it left theaters. The Wachowski brothers released two sequels to The Matrix, which nobody liked except for Jason and Mike. American Beauty won approximately 50 billion zillion kajillion Oscars and the director went on to make surrealist gay porn. Fight Club was quoted - and is still quoted - by stoned college students all over the country. And before anyone could think too deeply about these issues or develop these worries into something tangible, the American Left became single-mindedly devoted to thwarting the Bush administration’s various whacky schemes to take over the world. I don’t think anyone ever connected these movies as being part of the same general theme. I don’t think anyone thought a lot about that theme much at all, after September 11th. Everyone just kind of forgot about it and focused on smaller issues like terrorism and war and civil liberties. Which is a real shame.

Maybe now, with the movie version of V for Vendetta (directed, interestingly enough, by the same dynamic duo that brought us The Matrix), Hollywood is starting to pick up where it left off. Maybe it’s a sign that Americans still have the desire, however subconscious, to sail on until they hit that sky-painted wall.