You don’t have to be deeped in fashion to know Y2K has been having a moment. Characterised by a Matrixy outlook, RGB colour ways, lots of denim, metallics and faux-leather trench coats, the O.G. Y2K style emerged, in part, as a response to the contradictory feelings of optimism and anxiety around the millennium; would the zeroing of the world clock mean “the end of the world as we know it” (to cite R.E.M.) and would that be a good or a bad thing? Guy Oliver’s latest film, Millennial Prayer, is a somewhat nostalgic reflection on the lead-up to and the aftermath of the millennium. Specifically, the self-reflective documentary hones in on a manish brand of Y2K culture, exploring the end of the world feeling it incites.
Millennial Prayer unfolds as a mixtape-like essay performed to camera. Writ as a semi-satirical monologue, with a characteristically British sense of humour throughout, here Oliver conducts close readings of various cultural artefacts from the millennium era, mapping these to a more general sensibility. Despite its meandering nature — jumping from Prince’s song 1999 to the 1999 solar eclipse, from news footage of the bemused HRH EII not singing Auld Lang Syne beside Tony Blair to Apple Macintosh TV adverts — the film is wonderfully coherent. The connection Oliver makes between Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 film Strange Days and Fatboy Slim’s 1998 song Right Here, Right Now, and their sociocultural resonances of the time, evidences this (I am not going to provide a spoiler, you will have to watch the film). In uniting cultural stuff in this way, I read Millennial Prayer as a portrait of the time, one told through the awkward perspective of an inbetweener-ish late teen. It’s of note that Oliver was born in 1982, belonging to a niche generation of ‘Xennials’ who reached adulthood literally in time with the millennium.
Compositionally, Millennial Prayer is an escalating narrative, with cultural stuff from Y2K building to evidence a coeval relationship between anticipation and angst. The film begins with Oliver speculating about the death of cultural innovation seen in the late 1990s, with social life becoming an ever-more digital thing. The critical peak of the film comes when Oliver incites the Netflix documentary Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 (2022), exploring how the once happy-huggy-hippy-fest — aka the Woodstock festival of 1969 — malformed into the hell-fire spectacle of the millennium. Visually appearing as an apocalyptic dance, the footage of the 1999 festival included in Millennial Prayer images Oliver’s thinking about the death of culture in the ‘90s; it is as if the rioters of Woodstock ‘99 not only destroyed the festival site but put an end to a haptic cultural world. Oliver’s subsequent digressions into the theme park spectacle that is the Millennium Stadium and the rampant misogyny in TV shows such as Jackass underscore this point, revealing the mindlessness of early 21st-century and noughties culture.
Rather than stating “culture died with the millennium, full stop”, throughout his film, Oliver draws an eerie parallel between culture’s decay and the rise of digital technologies. Reading David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome prophetically, Millennial Prayer alludes to the ways in which digital technologies have become the invisible power structures that physically and metaphorically shape us. Critically pursuing a sinister side of this connection, specifically how digital technologies fuel a toxic brand of sociality, alongside Woodstock 1999, Oliver positions the Columbine massacre (the first mass shooting in a US school), suggesting that these events stand as zero points for contemporaneous expressions of extremist violence and the type of male rage that is often associated with reactionary online cults — read the manosphere. Indeed, zooming out of Oliver’s film, there seems to be a horrific similarity between Woodstock 1999 and contemporaneous manosphere-led events, namely the 2021 Capitol Attack; both featured dishevelled Gen X men, hyped on rumour, rampaging. I wonder how many of these bros participated in both events?
Coming almost a generation after the failed prophecy of Y2K, Millennial Prayer enacts more than a coy looking back. The film nods towards sociocultural and political similarities between that age and ours — in the UK, for example, the new Labour Government is stalling, there’s an even more controversial Republican in the US’s Oval Office, and this year we are facing Putin’s silver jubilee, all good reasons to clutch Sci-fi escapism. Indeed, often appearing as a Neo-like figure, wearing a plasticky leather trench and dupe Balenciaga sunnies, it seems the low-fi stylings Oliver dons in his artwork tap into this social sensibility, pastiching Y2K aesthetics to surface a subconscious want for an end to the world as we know it.
Guy Oliver, Millennial Prayer – September 28th jupiterartland.org
