Love actually: The story of the '00s

Though it's easy to forget, the 2000s didn't begin with 9/11: They began 20 months earlier, when Y2K didn't happen. Filling water jugs or partying like it was 1999, many breathed a sigh of relief when the world didn't end. Or they chuckled. Had the threat ever been real?

And so an element of disbelief entered the new century. As it turned out, the experts had done their jobs. A tech workforce had been raised from Indian outsourcing. Corporations, whose reach had extended into every aspect of our lives, rewarded us with the comforts of a newly wired, increasingly wireless world.

And when cataclysm threatened again, many took sides -- either for or against the authorities, the doomsayers, or both -- as a matter of faith. Like the islanders on "Lost" or the humans fighting extinction on "Battlestar Galactica," they listened to the whispers about how the story might end.

This decade was enough to test anyone's faith in anything. There was the breakdown of U.S. elections in 2000, the televised mass-murders-by-airplanes in 2001, victory without peace in Afghanistan, the near-collapse of Iraqi society after the U.S. invasion, the manmade disaster of levees and recovery in New Orleans, and an infrastructure so hollowed out that a highway bridge literally fell out from under us in Minneapolis. Then came a mortgage and financial collapse with all the surreal abruptness of the sun turning black in the sky. Would anyone trust the experts again?

The definitive movie of the '00s was actually 1999's "Office Space," a flop in theaters that became a hit on DVD, the new format. The comedy caught the defiant cheer of anyone seizing what little they knew or could control. Damn, it felt good to be a gangster, and no, I don't need 37 pieces of flair to express myself. If cable news leaned pro-corporate and anti-immigrant, the culture went the other way, smarting over Enron, downloading M.I.A., cheering slumdogs over millionaires, X-Men over Lord Voldermort. The decade enshrined "indie" for a reason.

But with the fall of the Taliban came a wishful new fantasy: trauma as baptism. The United States was Jason Bourne, not Tony Soprano, a killing machine blessed with amnesia and the chance to make things right. It took Abu Ghraib, Walter Reed, Pat Tillman and "Generation Kill" before even James Bond had to admit that revenge was a hype. Fool me once ... you can't get fooled again.

It's easier to love than to hate, anyway. Behind the popularity of "Brokeback Mountain" was the recognition that true love is sexual, the longing more resonant for being forbidden. "Secretary's" happy spanking and the bromance comedies of Seth Rogen acknowledged sex as a form of love -- leaving homophobia, rather than sexuality, the butt of Michael Scott's try-curiosity or Eminem's self-loathing. So gay marriage arrived early. "Cast Away" offered love as something made rather than found, while "Shrek" gave beauty back to the beholder. It was the decade of the sensitive male, relatively speaking, whether hip-hop (half-naked D'Angelo, emo Slug) or vampire ("Twilight," Jack White) -- a dick in the box for every Oprah book of the month. It's hard out there for a pimp.

Was "hope" the flip side of a fear that came from exposure without power, a larger crowd in which to be alone? Reality had become what you could see, in an era where everything from WMD to global warming became rumor. So documentaries hit multiplexes, cats became YouTube stars and "The Hills" blurred the line. Yet the sense of unreality sharpened. Once the drama of Katrina passed, the Gulf Coast sank back into the forgotten America that exists only to surprise us in the Super Bowl. Kanye West saying "George Bush doesn't care about black people" missed the point: The problem was faith acting as an envelope, shutting out people of any kind.

Step out into the world and talk to your neighbors: That was the inspiration, method and subject of "The Wire," possibly the last word on the '00s. A long prayer against the drug war, the HBO series was an askance meditation on the same hierarchal inanity that "Office Space" lampooned, but with gangsters complaining about the same problem. It may be our best fictional portrayal in any medium of public schools, addiction, policing or the devaluation of labor in a hot, flat world.