Ticked off? @#$& right!

There’s one memorable scene in this fall’s otherwise forgettable Woody Allen movie, “Anything Else.” Woody plays the older mentor to the main character (Jason Biggs), and in the vivid scene in question, Allen is about to take an empty parking space on a crowded New York street when another car whizzes into the spot ahead of him.

When Woody tries to confront the two bruisers in the car, they taunt him mercilessly. At first he seems cowed, but instead of backing off, an enraged Woody returns and smashes their car with a crowbar before driving off in triumph. It is a side of Allen we haven’t seen in earlier movies; up to now he’s played the insecure nebbish who might be passive-aggressive but never violent.

In “Anything Else,” Allen shrewdly puts his finger on the pulse of the times and apprehends a new mood of savage anger that suffuses many of our social interactions. He is not alone in identifying this alarming rise in rudeness and hostility. There’s an undercurrent of rage in many 2003 movies -- “Anger Management,” “The Hulk,” “28 Days Later,” “Duplex,” “The Human Stain,” “Mystic River,” “Runaway Jury,” “21 Grams,” “Monster” and “House of Sand and Fog,” to name a few that focus on characters consumed with ferocious resentments.

These stories range from the comic book spectacle “The Hulk,” which recounts the exploits of a mild-mannered scientist who morphs into a green giant when his anger erupts, to the more austere and poetic “Mystic River,” which scrutinizes two working-class Boston men (Sean Penn and Tim Robbins) unable to control the enmity that drives them to kill. But even more modest character studies bubble over with surprising fury. The sly tale of comic book artist Harvey Pekar, “American Splendor,” focuses on a testy misfit who disdains the aggressive optimism of mainstream American society. “The Barbarian Invasions” revolves around a dying history professor who rages against everyone in his universe -- his estranged son, the Canadian health care system and the nun who offers him solace.

What’s producing this wave of movies about angry malcontents lashing out at real or imagined enemies? The amateur sociologist buried inside the movie critic inevitably seeks an explanation. It’s tempting -- if a bit facile -- to zero in on 9/11, which fostered a new mood of fear and antipathy toward strangers. Economic instability has also frayed tempers. Pundits analyzing California’s gubernatorial recall and the election of an actor best known for playing barbarians and terminators frequently referred to the angry mood of voters. But I think some of these dissatisfactions had been brewing even before the cataclysms of the new millennium. A whole series of social changes large and small have converged over the last several years, and it’s interesting to look to the movies for the insights they provide into our growing malaise.

Chayefsky’s foresight

The first movie that predicted this widespread social agitation was “Network” in 1976. Everyone remembers the movie’s mantra, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore,” and the scene in which the demented newsman played by Peter Finch persuaded thousands of New Yorkers to shriek from their windows at the top of their lungs. Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky foresaw the angry spirit that would simmer and grow as people lost control of their lives in an age of massive corporate takeovers and insidious media manipulation.

Another less heralded film that proved eerily prophetic was a thriller from 1996 called “The Trigger Effect,” written and directed by David Koepp (who also wrote far more commercial movies such as “Spider-Man” and “Mission: Impossible”). The movie imagined a sinister breakdown of all civility during a massive power blackout that paralyzed Los Angeles.

A less apocalyptic movie of 1997, “As Good as It Gets,” also caught the new mood of anger and incivility in Jack Nicholson’s brilliant characterization of a cynical misanthrope railing against all the irritants of modern life. This emblematic character polarized audiences; some viewers detested what he represented, and others secretly identified with his venomous tirades against all forms of political correctness.

Clearly, there are a lot of people out there who are mad as hell. (One survey estimated that in the past year, nearly one in three callers had raised their voices at customer service representatives and one in 10 had cursed at them.) Given this mounting frustration, it’s not surprising that movies are full of characters plotting revenge against big corporations (like the hero and heroine of “Runaway Jury”) or contemplating murder to ease the tensions of everyday life (like the yuppie couple in “Duplex”).

Revenge stories are not in and of themselves anything new. Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River” follows in a tradition that includes several westerns or cop movies in which Eastwood himself played the leading role. But in most earlier movies, the vengeful character has a moral awakening before the last reel. What makes “Mystic River” more unsettling is that the man hunting his daughter’s killer never does purge his violent impulses. His rage continues to fester, giving an uncommonly dark tone to the movie’s conclusion.

Among the most provocative of the angry movies is the futuristic British thriller “28 Days Later.” It begins with a terrorist act committed by a group of animal rights activists who unwittingly unleash a strange virus that turns people into feral beasts. These monsters are the angry counterparts to the pod people depicted in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” The vicious, cannibalistic mutants of “28 Days Later” embody today’s terrors just as the robotic body snatchers reflected the fears of numbing conformity that were so prevalent in the 1950s.

In “The Human Stain,” Anthony Hopkins captures the fury of Coleman Silk, a professor whose world unravels when he is accused of making a racist slur. He seethes with anger because he feels a life of distinction has been trashed and devalued by a new generation that scoffs at his achievements.

And this bitter resentment is what connects him to the man who ultimately kills him, the wasted Vietnam veteran played by Ed Harris. The vet feels his wartime service has been belittled and forgotten. His own sense of neglect makes him more susceptible to the poison of prejudice, and he’s consumed with hatred toward the Jewish intellectual who’s sleeping with his ex-wife; the rich irony is that he doesn’t realize his rival is not a Jew at all but an African American who’s concealed his racial identity for most of his life.

The theme of prejudice is an undercurrent throughout “The Human Stain,” and this theme is carried further in “House of Sand and Fog,” which focuses on a real estate battle between an American woman and an Iranian family. Jennifer Connelly loses her house through a series of bureaucratic foul-ups, and she decries the intractability of the legal system that stymies her. But she’s also angry because her house is being usurped by an immigrant family; she doesn’t want these foreigners on her turf.

On the other side, the Iranian father played by Ben Kingsley vents his fury because of all the humiliations he has to endure at the hands of Americans whom he sees as weak and overly pampered. The film warns of the tragic consequences of the escalating war between natives and newcomers in our increasingly polarized society.

Perhaps today’s filmmakers are selling crackpot paranoid fantasies. But it’s also possible that one day historians will look back on the movies of the last year and see ominous hints of a spiraling social breakdown in the rage of so many truculent characters nursing hurts and wounds that may never be healed.

Stephen Farber is a film critic and author.