“I feel it had mostly been used to describe a certain aesthetic for clothing, music, era of films, era of time,” Zegler explains. “It wasn’t something that my parents talked about. No one had really briefed me on it.” Yet when the script came along, she found herself diving to the strangest corners of the internet.
Says Zegler, “I had come across a survival video that was like a VHS tape that was processed and put onto YouTube, and it was just the most bizarre thing I had ever seen. And that sent me down a rabbit hole with the videos of Bill Clinton talking about what was going to happen.”
While Y2K was already a historical obscurity by the tail-end of the 2000s, its phenomenon was not. After all, Zegler, like all the twentysomething stars of Y2K, remembers the next supposed apocalypse we were supposedly doomed to live through: New Year’s Day 2012 when the Mayan calendar ended.
“I feel like that was our version of Y2K,” Zegler considers. “I was 11 when that took place, and I was on a camping trip with the Girl Scouts and everybody was crying. It was such a weird moment. But it [represents] one of those mass hysteria moments where an idea catches fire with everybody, and they start making up other stories about what they think is going to happen until that snowballs into something crazy. And then nothing happened. Just like Y2K.”
Hence the appeal of the movie Y2K which allows us to live, if vicariously, in an alternate history where the worst fears of the “millennium bug” come true—perhaps even more so as the movie features killer Roombas and iMacs.
“I think there is probably a species-wide collective death drive,” muses Evan Winter who co-wrote Y2K with Mooney. “It’s like a form of escapism and it’s something that you don’t want to live through in real life, so you [try to] get a fix on it in a story, and you can get the thrill of it, but then also the safety of it not being real.”