“Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘the world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.”

So said William Somerset, played impeccably by Morgan Freeman, via voiceover during the final, moribund moments of the 1995 film, Seven—a visceral maelstrom of a movie. Indeed, it was one of several films released in the 1990s that seemed to perpetuate a long-running, paradoxical conceit first introduced into the lexicon of film making during the seventies: “Despite the fact that our world is deeply troubled and nothing you’ve seen here suggests a reason for optimism, let’s all try to be optimistic anyway.”

And somehow, that was enough. Freeman’s character needn’t have said another word; he perfectly encapsulated what the film (and ultimately, the world it epitomized) had to say. Face it, the world is a frightening place, but we have no choice but to have faith that we can make it better. If we don’t, what else is there?

This theme of conflicting ideology was prevalent throughout many of the finest films to come out of the 1970s, including Taxi Driver, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and The Deer Hunter. Movies such as these reflected—directly or indirectly—the pulse of the times that produced them (political and social unrest, and everything on the periphery), and consequently defined a decade. Seven represented, in its own austere and relentless fashion, an indelible companion to decade-defining films of the ’90s, many of which didn’t stray too far from the why-are-humans-so-awful-to-one-another farm.

The Silence of the Lambs, for example, is incontrovertibly a defining film of that decade to the extent that it both horrified and even charmed—a pervading dichotomy throughout most of those 10 years. It offered a mosaic of some of the darkest, most reprehensible places to which humans can travel internally, and yet in the final moments, the film took us some place we weren’t expecting with Hannibal Lecter serenely reassuring Agent Starling over the phone, “I have no plans to call on you, Clarice. The world’s more interesting with you in it.” And then he promptly strode off to have “an old friend for dinner.”

As the decade of the double 0s enters its eighth year, you’d be hard pressed to identify one film that could truly be considered a “defining” movie of the period. In late 2007, however, that void got its ass kicked with the release of the magnificent No Country For Old Men. Yes, all the hype you may have heard is 100 percent justified [see Adam Neal’s review from the Dec. 13, 2007 issue]. The movie, which recently finished up a week-long run at The Lyric Theatre in Blacksburg, is a tour de force of contemporary filmmaking—a chilling exposé of the modern American West, tragedy induced by greed, and an insidious, psychopathic killer that makes Hannibal Lecter and Darth Vader look like Mother Theresa and Winnie the Pooh respectively.

To watch this movie is like watching fire at zero gravity: a breathtakingly gorgeous dance that portends harm in spite of its beauty. At one point early in the film, a deputy remarks to his sheriff while surveying the carnage of a drug transaction gone brutally wrong, “It’s a mess, ain’t it, Sheriff?” The sheriff, played stalwartly by Tommy Lee Jones, replies pointedly, “If it ain’t, it’ll do ’til the mess gets here.”

And indeed, that one exchange characterizes the current climate in which we live. As the fate of our world becomes more and more tumultuous and unpredictable, as emotions continue to run rampant and tempers boil over social and political issues, as war and genocide remain constant all over the world, and as we Americans march toward the most important election of, arguably, the last 20 years, we’re not sure what “mess” awaits us. But we’ve had plenty to contend with already.

And yet the film, again at the last minute, attempts to instill a vague sense of hope. (If you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil it for you as a great deal of controversy surrounds it.) Because once more, what other choice do we have but to be as optimistic as we possibly can?

“You can’t stop what’s comin’,” says a character at one point in the film. Maybe not. But we can at least try to deal with it effectively whenever it gets here.

Todd Guill sees a lot of movies and has Jessica Simpson’s Blonde Ambition next on his list.