TURN-OFF OF THE CENTURY

By BRUCE HANDY

Lee Lorenz, the longtime cartoon editor of the New Yorker, has confirmed my suspicions: the magazine is running fewer and fewer cartoons featuring bearded men in white robes holding placards emblazoned with some variation on the end is near. This strikes me as odd since, at least from a strictly millennial point of view, the end is near. Shouldn't we be seeing more of these guys, both in real life and breaking up the gray columns of Joe Klein articles? "It's just one of those cartoon cliches that are pretty well played out," Lorenz says. "It's like desert-island cartoons. You always think you're never going to want to publish another one." True, and the same probably goes for husband-and-wife-in-armchair cartoons.

And yet the decline of the prophet cartoon also seems to coincide with my sense that, the infectious enthusiasm of crazy comet cults notwithstanding, the new millennium is itself well on the way to becoming played out. For those of us who are neither waiting around for aliens nor gearing up for a fire fight with the new world order, the big rollover is shaping up as the Super Bowl of infrequent calendrical events: overblown and unsatisfying in equal proportion, the last in a long line of 20th century hot-air generators. Newspapers and magazines have already struck up regular millennium sections; special issues are in the works, as are numerous book and TV specials--if you loved the pack hunt for meaning in the 25th anniversary of Woodstock or the death of Jackie O., you'll love 2000. Merchandisers are horning in too: La-Z-Boy offers Millennia office chairs (the "tie-in," a La-Z-Boy executive offers, is that the chairs have "a very contemporary look"), while Elizabeth Arden has its Millenium skin-care products. A brochure explains the connection to exfoliation: "In the present and future of every skin, there is a turning point--where it begins to appear tired, dry and older-looking. But now there is an alternative. Millenium."

"The whole millennium thing is basically a hype," says Robert Halmi, who is producing a millennial extravaganza for abc and thus knows whereof he speaks. "But," Halmi continues, "just try to make a reservation for New Year's Eve 1999 at any of the landmark restaurants around the world. It's sold out. So obviously the hype works." In that spirit, ABC asked Halmi, the chairman of Hallmark Entertainment, to come up with something about "what the year 2000 means." A tough question, so Halmi has passed the buck to 10 of America's leading playwrights--John Guare, Larry Gelbart, David Mamet, Steve Martin, Elaine May, Terrence McNally, Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, Wendy Wasserstein and August Wilson--each of whom will contribute a teleplay about the millennium that will be broadcast during a single week of the November 1999 sweeps.

At least two of the playwrights seem to be duly flummoxed by the nebulousness of the assignment. When asked what the year 2000 means, Gelbart, after some extemporizing, offers that it's a time for "taking stock." Wilson sees the millennium as offering humanity "a clean slate," although he's unsure what that might mean in practice. It will be interesting to see what these artists come up with, and whether any of their pieces will prove that this subject isn't, in fact, best handled by the makers of skin-care products.

Aside from maybe Arbor Day, it would be hard to think of an event more contrived than the millennium, unless one accepts that history unfolds in tidy hundred- and thousand-year cycles beginning with the birth of Jesus Christ. Or, to be more precise, his briss, which the inventor of the Anno Domini system of reckoning, a Scythian monk named Dennis the Diminutive, calculated--surely errantly--to have taken place on Jan. 1, A.D. 1. At any rate, the history of the past thousand years shows that mass psychology--if not events themselves--tends to behave in predictable ways when multiple zeros loom on the calendar. So if not plagued by incipient hype-induced ennui, how then should we be feeling as the 20th century winds down? "Convinced of exhaustion, extreme peril, exorbitant risk, explosive transformation." This is historian Hillel Schwartz's description of the fin-de-siecle mind-set in his definitive book Century's End. Schwartz was writing in 1988 and looking forward to a bang-up final decade. Indeed, the 1990s got off to a respectable fin-de-siecle start, what with the Gulf War and the fall of communism, the L.A. riots, even the apocalyptic rhetoric of the Republican revolution. But in the two years since Oklahoma City, the rough edges of the national psyche seem to have been sanded down a bit, as if we'd taken a collective dose of lithium. The economy is performing nicely, crime is down, we're finally bored of O.J. This isn't end time--it's quiet time.

Bill Clinton may waft on about building bridges to the 21st century, but it was Ronald Reagan who really talked the millennial talk, what with his loose chat about Evil Empires and Armageddon. Surely, the 1980s would have made a better closing decade than the relatively placid late '90s--just about any decade of this cataclysmic century would have. And maybe that's why the millennium already feels like a dud. Compared with where we've been these past hundred years, the new age seems to promise normality more than doom or utopia. Which isn't a bad thing--it just doesn't offer much prospect for funny cartoons, or riveting drama, or even, alas, spiffy office chairs.