Let us now take you back in time to another world. A world where face masks are just kooky accessories and cell phones exist but nobody uses them. A world where Napster has been invented but CD sales are at an all-time high. It’s a post-internet, pre-social media world, which means everyone feels futuristic but still has to leave the house to see other people. And so they do. They crowd into small cars and sweaty rooms and dance their faces off at raves until dawn, unimpeded by selfies, sobriety or—*checks notes*—sheltering in place.
How can we transport you back to this land that time forgot, you ask? Via three movies—Groove, Human Traffic and Go. Each of which provides a perfect snapshot of rave culture as the new millennium approached. Back then, dance culture was big enough to be internationally popular but small enough to remain independent and scrappy.
Go was by far the shiniest of the bunch. To start with, Human Traffic, set in working class Wales, and Groove, set in San Francisco’s pre-condo “warehouse district,” are both indies. But they also both offer grittier realities, in which no one would ever confuse aspirin for ecstasy, as green teens do in Go. What all three movies do have in common, however, is a thirst for escapism, a passion for irresponsible behavior and—we mention this up front so you have the option to leave if you wish—a very cavalier attitude towards illegal drug-taking.
That was not unusual for the time. Between 1998 and 2001, dance culture brought with it the first open, mass acceptance of hard drug use since the Summer of Love 30 years before. According to an in-depth 2011 study, ecstasy use during those years “rose sharply [and] doubled among 12th graders, college students, and young adults, and nearly doubled in the lower grades. In 2000 even the 8th graders showed a significant increase in use. Among young adults, the increase in use occurred primarily among those under age 29.”
Human Traffic doesn’t just reflect that period, it actively endorses it. In one scene at the club, a voiceover from protagonist Jip dreamily states: “We forget all the pain and the hurt in life. We want to go somewhere else. All our insecurities have evaporated. We’re in the clouds now. We’re spacemen orbiting the earth. We risk sanity for moments of temporary enlightenment. We embrace an overwhelming feeling of love. We flow in unison. We’re together.”
