Like the band The Clash, who couldn't decide, the new breed of post-punk films just aren't sure. Films like Fight Club, Requiem for a Dream, and julien donkey-boy are up to a kind of narrative and visual experimentation that there hasn't been a lot of in American film since the 1960s. Not since the New Hollywood films of Easy Rider, Medium Cool, and The Wild Bunch have American films dared to so aggressively disrupt the classical Hollywood formula. And like the New Hollywood films of the late 1960s, post-punk films of the 1990s and 00's are visually experimental, avant-garde forays into the steady rockbed of the American built-for-speed formula. One only need think of Fight Club's self-reflexive, freeze-frame moments ("let me tell you a little bit about Tyler") or of Requeim's sledge hammer editing or split-screen sequences, or of Tape's whiplash panning back-and-forth between characters.

Yet the weird truth is that the most exhilarating post-punk films are also the most unabashedly nostalgic and conservative, even as they are visually radical. Whereas American Beauty laments the Passing of the Great White Man into Obsolescence, Fight Club drapes its Ramboesque male domination fantasies under the cloak of a larger critique of the very consumer culture that ostensibly feeds such violence. But both films are basically nostalgic lamentations for some mythic, uncomplicated, pre-consumer culture moment, which American Beauty imagines as a hazy, pot-smoking, carefree, comfortable hippie-era, and which Fight Club imagines as a homosocial, primitive, Nietzsche-on-speed culture where emasculated men struggle to regain their Lost Status as Great White Males.

If the 1980s and 1990s were characterized by a kind of David Letterman-esque postmodern cynicism, irony, and playful deconstruction of the "rules," (culminating in the Scream films) the new sensibility is newly sincere. Films like Blair Witch Project, Being John Malkovich, Run Lola Run, Magnolia, Memento, and the Dogma 95 films (notably The Celebration and Dancer in the Dark) reject postmodern cynicism in favor of a new sincerity that's not defensive because it doesn't need to be. These films are so thoroughly at ease with the metaphors of self-reference, irony, simulation -- in short the entire short-circuited dream logic of Baudrillard -- that to parade them as Godard's first-wave postmodern films did is pointless.

Why? Because mainstream American culture has already absorbed -- an in many ways surpassed
-- the theorizations that seemed so radical in the 1970s and 80s. As David Foster Wallace has suggested, TV itself, as early as the 1960s, absorbed many of the radical visual and narrative elements of the postmodern avant garde, including jump cuts, discontinuity editing, self-referentiality, camp, and, through the juxtaposition of "real" news, series, repeats, and commercials, the flat conflation of the real and the hyperreal. Today, Memento's complex temporal dislocations, or any number of Cartoon Network's "Shorty" promotions, make Godard's Breathless look like a timid experiment. The punk logic of New Wave innovation -- once a badge of cynical iconoclasm -- is now part and parcel of mainstream fare like Blair Witch and Fight Club and the Dogme 95 films, whose visual styles conjure audiences' own crude experiments with in-camera editing on camcorders and computers.

Yet if the post-punk films have absorbed the visual and narrative logic of what was once extreme postmodern aesthetics -- self-reflexivity, irony, jump-cut editing, hypertext -- they've taken a new turn, a turn that involves the audience in ways that earlier experimental films by the likes of Godard and Warhol, for instance --never did. Postmodernism's distancing effect -- a residual effect of modernism's layered complexity -- is rejected in post-punk film in favor of a kind of democratic return to the audience, one acknowledged in Lars von Trier's (sincere or ironic?) Dogma 95 Manifesto: "Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratisation of the cinema. For the first time, anyone can make movies. But the more accessible the media becomes, the more important the avant-garde." In other words, post-punk films want to have their stories and deconstruct them, too.

The secret allure of post-punk films isn't simply their radical visual style and storytelling techniques, but rather the way in which those radical techniques bundle the most traditional, classical stories, ranging from Memento's revenge story, to Blair Witch's ghost story, to Requiem for a Dream's doomed love story, to Traffic's family melodrama. These are films for those who believe that narrative matters, and that mere style is not a substitute for a good story. They are made by a generation of directors who fuse what used to be called (but can no longer be called) experimental style with the most basic, genre-driven narrative. And it's this profane, under-the-table handholding between anarchic, rule-breaking abandonment (or, what director Harmony Korine refers to as "mistakist cinema") and orthodox stories that characterizes the best post-punk films.

It's precisely this reintroduction of sincere, unironic nostalgia that separates post-punk films from formally postmodern films such as Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers, which forbade cool audiences from forming sincere attachments to their characters. If postmodern films made sincerity something to be ashamed of, there is no escaping sincerity in today's post-punk films. The contrasting reactions to Eyes Wide Shut and Traffic are instructive here: two potentially "art-house" films, made by auteur directors with deliberate styles, both cautiously happy endings, one embraced one panned. In just a few years, it's now critically safe to embrace a sincere, even sentimental film like Traffic. While Eyes Wide Shut left critics waiting for the "ironic turn" that never came, Traffic gets away with its irony-free melodrama because it's visually stylized enough to inoculate it against its own melodrama. Like Soderbergh, Kubrick played the tenderness and reconciliation straight, using the long take to frame intimacy in ways that always delayed --inevitably as it turns out -- the turning of the worm. Accused of being retro guard, out of touch, even puritanical, Eyes Wide Shut's cautious but happy ending echoed Blue Velvet's: the non-ironic restoration of order after turning back from the path not taken. And Kubrick's film came under especially heavy fire for its supposedly naive sentimentality because he was one of the postmodernist boys, whose The Killing had been an early example of the cut-up method in film and whose Clockwork Orange was the gold standard for detached, cynical irony. So Eyes Wide Shut, with its measured restraint, its serious evocation of the old, familiar values of love lost and almost lost, its invitation to take these characters unironically and to adopt their points of view, was seen by many elite film critics as a real betrayal, a loss of nerve, a sign that Kubrick had finally fallen behind, had slipped back into the naïve, sentimental world he had helped to shatter. Against the harsh mocking cynicism of Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino, Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut seemed, well, overly sincere. But that sincerity meant everything coming from Kubrick the cold one, and as his parting gift it made it possible for the new generation of post-punk directors to indulge in melodrama (Dancer in the Dark) in ways that would have been dismissed as maudlin and sentimental by critics just a few years earlier.

Indeed, post-punk films combine a call-to-arms visual style with a storytelling desperation that verges on melodrama: the sincere confessionals in Magnolia and The Celebration, the desperate, obsessive love in Being John Malkovitch and Amores Perros; the sledge-hammer emotional pitches of Requiem for a Dream; Selma's weepy gloom in Dancer in the Dark, the lover's revenge tale in Tape. These films-and their tamer counterparts in music, such as The Strokes and The White Stripes, emerge from the punk, fuck-you, assaultive tradition, but without its accompanying formal irony. In the case of Requiem for a Dream, the strategy barely (but beautifully works), as Aronofsky has abandoned the complexities of irony altogether -- the satire is so deliberate, so in-your-face, so unmistakable that the film at times verges on a high-school driver's ed. drunk-driving shockumentary full of bloody car wrecks. The viewer is left with absolutely no room to imagine anything: the characters are driven by their simple addictions and we see the horrific, catastrophic consequences of those addictive urges. The result is a strangely flat literalizing that Aronofsky achieves through, for instance, the coming-alive of Sara Goldfarb's refrigerator. "Every scene," Aronofsky has said, "my D.P. and I would say, 'OK, where is Addiction in this scene? What is Addiction thinking? What is Addiction doing to basically make these characters suffer more?' That's what Addiction does: It's a terrible monster that eats the human spirit." This is a sincere message movie that's not afraid to be a message movie, a powerful signal that we've moved into a post-postmodern era, where the once-radical strategies of critique now serve the most nostalgic and heartfelt of stories.

For all their rule-breaking innovation, post-punk films like Fight Club ("The first rule of Fight Club is . . .") outwardly yearn for the very rules they helped dismantle. The result of this tension has been some of the most compelling and strange American movies to come along in thirty years. But they also beg the question: once the old rules are gone, what is there left to rebel against?

Nicholas Rombes is an associate professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy, where he teaches classes in film and literature, and were he co-founded the Electronic Critique Program (www.e-crit.com).

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