Intersperses headline events, popular film, postmodern theory, and fictional vignettes in order to capture the elusive cultural imaginary of our twentieth-century fin de siecle.Natoli offers observations from a postmodern point of view of American culture "speeding" toward the millennium in the years 1993–1995, a time sandwiched between mounting anxieties at the beginning of the nineties and the desperate final journey of the Heaven's Gate cult in the latter half of the decade. Sometimes a whole life, like the Unabomber's, defies our logical grasp. What motivated Susan Smith, the mother who sent her two babies strapped into their car seats to the bottom of a lake? Why did we pay so much attention to the O.J. Simpson trial? Are we crawling toward our own end beyond the horizon of the New Millennium while at the same time thinking we are speeding to new positions in cyberspace? Speeding to the Millennium reviews the headlines and seeks the Big Screen to give some framing to the disturbingly contingent, to the seemingly senseless.
