The image of the burning towers loomed front-and-center in antiwar documentaries, morose battlefield thrillers and home-front dramas and jingoistic “Why We Fight” military action pictures. It hid in the shadows of so-called torture porn, a genre infatuated with implacable evil and helpless fear. It was answered with revenge-themed thrillers and epic fantasies — popcorn pictures that treated evil as a real thing, a demonic force that must be fought. It lurked between the lines of TV’s most acclaimed long-form dramas, which created whole communities and then studied the moral codes and choices of their inhabitants. And you saw it in nine years’ worth of breaking news coverage, partisan talk shows and political commercials — many of which dealt, directly or obliquely, with the burning towers, wars fought in response to the burning towers, the relative correctness of constitutionally suspect laws passed to prevent more towers from burning. And you saw it in absentia — in TV shows, novels and comic books, songs and video games that made a point of not acknowledging the burning towers because, for God’s sake, there had to be safe harbors somewhere.

The World Trade Center attack was an occurrence, a catastrophe, a historical marker. But it also was — is — an image.

The attacks were the work of a lunatic. The image was the work of an artist.

The towers are gone. The image remains.

——

Eyewitnesses and TV viewers alike said 9/11 was like a movie, and in some palpable yet mysterious way, it did feel that way. And it’s worth asking if it was supposed to feel that way – perhaps not like a movie, exactly, but slightly unreal, iconic, representative, intended to stir imaginative as well as traumatic responses.

Yes, of course, the attacks were physical attacks, and yes, of course, they were planned and executed as attacks — acts of war meant to murder as many civilians as possible.

But the attack wasn’t just planned. It was designed and was choreographed, a mass murder in four movements built around four targets: Tower One, Tower Two, the Pentagon and whatever structure the Flight 93 hijackers were trying to destroy when the passengers rebelled.

The attacks were not just mass killings, but acts of pyrotechnic vandalism, directed against structures representing institutions the artist held in contempt: the Western capitalist economy (the World Trade Center), the American military and CIA (the Pentagon) and very likely the heart of government (the Capitol building? the White House?).

The choreography was equally calculated and purposeful. The first plane compelled the world’s attention. The suddenness and inexplicability of the impact summoned fear. Watch breaking news coverage from that day, and you’re reminded that at first, people didn’t know what they were seeing. (Some kind of explosion. Did a plane hit the tower? Somebody said they saw something going in.)

The second impact doubled that fear by establishing, beyond a doubt, that the first impact was no accident. What more economical way to get this salient fact across than by hitting two architecturally identical parts of the same structure in the same way within minutes?

The strike against the Pentagon tripled the fear by demonstrating that the mayhem was not confined to New York City, that it could, and in fact already had, struck at the heart of American government — specifically the five-sided heart of the military and CIA, headquarters of the people that were supposed to protect us.

The fourth plane, had it struck as planned, would have magnified the fear yet again, and sent the message that no one in America was safe.

The time between the first impact and the fall of Tower Two was about the length of a Hollywood feature. Even if one or more of the flights had been significantly delayed prior to takeoff, the most spectacular visuals of 9/11 most likely still would have been staggered and would have occurred within a comparable time frame.

The message of 9/11 was content. The attack was form. Whoever devised it had the mentality of a suspense film director: Don’t deliver all the whammies at once. Space them out.

There’s a word for all this. It’s showmanship — the thing we experience, or masochistically hope to experience, each time we go to the movies.

The image of the burning towers is clarifying symbol, a glyph that unifies the experience of that day — our memory of what it felt like, our sense of what it meant. Say the day’s two numbers, nine and 11, in the presence of any living soul, then ask what they just saw in their heads, and they’ll give the same answer: the towers.

The attack was its own emblem, its own insignia. It may even have been intended, as certain brazen horror film images are intended, to contaminate once-mundane events: riding in an elevator, climbing stairs, looking at a skyline, watching a plane land. The burning towers were meant to be photographed, written and sung about, sketched and painted, represented in film and video, on cotton T-shirts and black velvet canvasses, in watercolor and needlepoint and Lego. They were meant to persist in living memory and beyond. They are a memento of trauma devised by those who inflicted it.

Posters that sprung up after 9/11 declared, “We Will Never Forget.” As if there were any alternative.

The image maker, we’re told, is Osama bin Laden.

——

I’ll step back for a moment and acknowledge that some conspiracy buffs believe bin Laden wasn’t the architect of the image — that perhaps it was the CIA, or Dick Cheney, or the neocons and the CIA, or the Israelis or the Iranians or the Iraqis. This article isn’t a military detective story, so you want to substitute “the Mossad” or “bin Laden’s lieutenant, so-and-so” or “the Dread Cthulu” in place of bin Laden’s name, go right ahead.

That said, I don’t believe any government or institution or cabal is capable of conceiving anything as conceptually bold as 9/11. The atrocity has the hallmarks of a singular vision — a statement by someone who thought long and hard about what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. If a committee had devised 9/11, it wouldn’t have been as arresting. Committees strangle style, and 9/11 had style.

The attacks were consistent with other attacks by bin Laden. They bear what critics might call his directorial signature: multiple hits in separate locations, spaced far enough apart to give the audience for the first attack enough time to be astonished and terrified by the second attack. When the show is over, the artist appears on TV and explicates his work.

Bin Laden is believed to have done this kind of thing, or tried to do it, before. His stylistic fingerprints are all over the simultaneous Aug. 7, 1998, bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and he is believed to have been behind a thwarted attempt to bomb targets in Jordan, Yemen and the United States on Jan. 3, 2000.

But 9/11 was an evolutionary step up in conceptual sophistication. It wasn’t just an event. It was a show.

Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Hiroshima and Nagasaki predated live TV; the world’s collective image of these events was amorphous, a jumble of newsreel snippets, still photos, radio broadcasts, commentary and personal anecdotes, sifted through after the fact. Ditto the assassination of John F. Kennedy; that event’s aftermath unfolded in real time, but unlike 9/11, the inciting incident (as Robert McKee might say) didn’t play out for nearly two hours on live TV before a worldwide audience of billions.

That’s why bin Laden’s evil is so distinctive. He knows that 21st century terrorism isn’t just supposed to be talked about or studied. It’s supposed to be watched and responded to in real time, then obsessively reconstructed like the Zapruder film (or its first great cinematic representation, the photograph in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up”). Whoever did this has a showman’s audacity and an artist’s determination to get inside the viewer’s head and stay there.

The image of the burning towers destroyed the psychic wall separating life from its representation. It sent us down the rabbit hole and made us doubt the evidence of our senses. On that morning, New Yorkers looked out their windows and saw more or less the same image they saw on their TVs; the screen was a window frame, the window frame a screen.

When each plane hit and each tower collapsed, the immense structural and human damage and the media’s multiplicity of camera angles (custom-designed for rapid cutting and instant replay) unwittingly combined to evoke the visual grammar of a Hollywood action flick: like a movie/not like a movie/like a movie. One wonders, did the image maker know that because we are Americans — and Americans as a people excel at mixing rage and sentimentality — that before the day was done, TV news channels would air highlight reels backed by soupy orchestral soundtrack music? Or was that just an unforeseen bonus?

As a friend of mine put it a few days later, “Whoever did this knows what scares us.”

It’s still considered insensitive to talk about 9/11 in this way. But it needs to be talked about in this way, because the last eight-plus years of popular culture have treated the atrocity as both art and history. The response to 9/11 by painters, novelists, poets, journalists, essayists, songwriters, composers, filmmakers and graphic designers has amounted to an enormous collective attempt to answer one looming artwork with countless smaller ones. The image of the burning towers is a psychic gateway through which everyone must pass before considering 9/11 and the history that 9/11 set in motion. All other art created in its wake pales in comparison.

Bad-boy artist Damien Hirst got in trouble a year after 9/11 when he said the people responsible for the image of the burning towers “needed congratulating” because it was “kind of like an artwork in its own right” and that “our visual language has been changed by what happened on September 11.” My friend Godfrey Cheshire, a film critic, drew flak for writing that when he looked down Sixth Avenue that morning and saw the towers in flame, he felt as though it was the closest he would ever come to witnessing a biblical miracle. And the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was ostracized by his peers and renounced by his own daughter for saying that he felt the presence of satan on 9/11, and likening his presence to that of an omnipotent artist.

“Well, what happened there is, of course — now all of you must adjust your brains — the biggest work of art there has ever been. The fact that spirits achieve with one act something which we in music could never dream of, that people practice 10 years madly, fanatically for a concert. And then die. And that is the greatest work of art that exists for the whole cosmos. Just imagine what happened there. There are people who are so concentrated on this single performance, and then five thousand people are driven to Resurrection. In one moment. I couldn’t do that. Compared to that, we are nothing, as composers. … It is a crime, you know, of course, because the people did not agree to it. They did not come to the ‘concert.’ That is obvious. And nobody had told them: ‘You could be killed in the process.’” 

We can’t and shouldn’t move on from this event or its representation — not until we’ve considered the possibility that it was art as well as murder, and that the fusion of art and murder is the core of its lasting power to disturb. The image of the burning towers contains mysteries that have not been disclosed and revelations that could help us understand our enemy and ourselves. We need to keep looking at the image, asking what it means to confront a murderer with the mind of a showman, and trying to imagine our way inside the creator’s head before he can create another masterpiece.

The image maker must be destroyed. 

They’re here because they spent the decade working within the same entertainment industry that otherwise prizes reassuring clichés and flashy stupidity, and produced work that was more compelling and unified than the work of all but a handful of full-time movie directors. They’re here because their visions kicked down the doors of the audience’s and the industry’s preconceptions and showed them what’s possible. They’re here because their insights into human nature (not coincidentally the title of one of Kaufman’s scripts) are so sharp and evocative that when we want to remember what it meant to be alive in the aughts, we’ll only need to watch an episode of “The Sopranos” or a movie written by Kaufman and it will all come flooding back.

Charlie Kaufman is a former TV writer who worked on Chris Elliott’s series “Get a Life,” among other shows. He crossed over to theatrical screenwriting with “Being John Malkovich,” a film directed by Spike Jonze that opened in October 1999 and was nominated for three Oscars (for direction, screenplay and Catherine Keener’s supporting performance) in 2000. The plot concerns a schmucky puppeteer named Craig who finds a portal that leads to the inside of actor John Malkovich’s mind and turns it into a slapdash business venture. But the film’s plot is just a springboard for a deranged, often curiously moving exploration of the fluidity of identity, the urge to escape oneself, the artist’s inclination to play God (Craig ultimately enters Malkovich long-term and succeeds as a puppeteer by piggybacking on Malkovich’s celebrity as an actor) and the narcissist’s tendency to treat other people as means to an end.

Most of the characters in “Malkovich” define love in terms of possession: Craig wants to “have” his sarcastic, sexy coworker, Maxine, even though he’s married to a pet-obsessed woman named Lotte; Lotte enters Malkovich’s mind while he’s having sex with Maxine, gets in touch with her inner lesbian, rejects Craig as a partner and decides she must “have” Maxine; Maxine, meanwhile, wants to “have” Lotte, but only when Lotte is inside Malkovich. Craig and Maxine’s boss, who owns a mysterious filing company headquartered on the “7 1/2-th floor” of a downtown Manhattan office building, also wants to “have” Malkovich, not as a romantic partner or a vehicle to achieve artistic success, but as a means of achieving immortality — a vessel into which he can pour his soul when his body conks out. The film’s conceptual peak is the sequence in which Craig-as-Malkovich works his marionette magic before an adoring black-tie crowd: puppetry cubed. “Malkovich” found a preposterous but resonant metaphor for art-as-control and art-as-escape, and dramatized the dream of sloughing off the shell of the body through sex, performance and altered consciousness. And like another touchstone 1999 release, “The Matrix,” it had an ahead-of-the-curve fascination with real vs. virtual experience.

The above description barely scratches the surface of Kaufman’s gonzo inventiveness, his dedication to finding surreal metaphors for human desires and foibles, and his ability to maintain a distinctive voice without repeating himself. Kaufman defies Hollywood’s demands that lead characters must be “relatable,” that goals must be clearly defined (and preferably achieved) by the end of the story and that every event must be fed through the industry-sanctioned three-act-structure meat grinder. Each of Kaufman’s aughts screenplays had a different tone, a different point, and found a new portal into issues that obsessed him. Taken together, his scripts are more distinctive, creatively unified and relevant to modern life than the collected works of almost any contemporary filmmaker, domestic or foreign — a formidable achievement in a culture that views directors as gods and writers as chumps.

Kaufman’s follow-up to “Malkovich,” the Michel Gondry-directed “Human Nature” (2001), is his kookiest work — a sarcastic yet empathetic fable mocking humanity’s belief that it’s civilized. It’s a comedy about a behavioral scientist, a so-called “ape man” (actually just an abused child raised naked in the woods by his father) and a female nature-book writer whose body is covered with hair (she was briefly employed in a circus sideshow, climbing a scale model of the Empire State Building while being circled by a dwarf in a biplane costume). Kaufman’s script interweaves the three characters’ stories via voice-over. (The scientist tells his story from a white room reminiscent of Dave Bowman’s final resting place in “2001,” and he has a mysterious bullet hole in his forehead. “From my new vantage point,” he says, “I realize that love is nothing more than a messy conglomeration of need, desperation, fear of death and insecurity about penis size.”) Building on the fascination with performance and possession in “Malkovich,” “Human Nature” suggests that every core aspect of existence (work, sex, love, parenting, social interaction) requires pretending; that storytelling (whether by a filmmaker or an average citizen) is a means of asserting (often illusory) control over chaos, and that when we’re finally forced to admit the fragility of illusions, we revert to animal instinct.

“Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” (2002) — George Clooney’s directorial debut, based on game show impresario Chuck Barris’ “memoir” about his supposed secret life as a CIA assassin — was another examination of acting-as-lying-as-reinvention. But it was also a condemnation of Kaufman’s former industry, TV, as a wasteland where art goes to die, an industry every bit as addicted to glitz, sleaze and lies as the film industry Kaufman had recently joined. That same year, Kaufman wrote “Adaptation,” a screenplay that started out as a straightforward adaptation of journalist Susan Orlean’s nonfiction book about an orchid thief but turned into something quite different when Kaufman suffered writer’s block and warped the tale into a grotesque cinematic cousin of a Philip Roth novel — a meditation on the multiple meanings of the word adaptation, and an assault on the mainstream filmmaking habits that Kaufman loathes.

The main character, a whiny, balding screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman, is hired to adapt Orlean’s book and is close to giving up when his shallow twin brother Donald shows up, offers some mostly dumb but commercially attractive ideas and ends up implementing them, completing the script and becoming the sought-after hack that Charlie could never be. As I wrote in a 2002 New York Press review, “Until you look back over ‘Adaptation,’ you might not realize how thematically tight it is. It tells two parallel stories, a la ‘The Godfather, Part II.’ One story concerns Susan’s original fact-finding trip to the Everglades and her subsequent attempt to expand her original New Yorker article into a book. The other follows Charlie, a social autistic who lucked into Hollywood riches, as he tries to give Susan’s book a commercial structure without betraying everything that made the book worth reading. Both stories are about talented writers engaged in a doomed and perhaps dishonest enterprise. They’re both desperate to find a magic key that will let them explain the motives of the people they’re writing about — a Rosebud.” Screenwriting guru Robert McKee — a real-life menace whose books and seminars urge would-be scriptwriters to adhere to the three-act structure, the inciting incident, and other ingredients from the mass entertainment shopping list — gets torn to pieces by Kaufman, Jonze and actor Brian Cox, who plays McKee as a pompous enemy of art. (“And God help you if you use voiceover!” he thunders from the stage, stopping the hero’s own voiceover in midsentence.)

Kaufman’s talent for nestling metaphors-within-metaphors gets another workout in “Adaptation.” Charlie Kaufman has no twin brother named Donald; the real Kaufman invented him to set up the Brechtian insanity of the script’s action thriller-ish final section, which is (intentionally) as arbitrary, stupid and cynically executed as the Hollywood studio norm. These and other flourishes are all of a piece — aspects of a movie that attacks institutionalized dishonesty (in Hollywood, in book publishing and in individual lives) by constructing falsehoods within falsehoods within falsehoods and highlighting their ridiculousness. (A hilariously stark final title card dedicates “Adaptation” to the memory of the nonexistent Donald.) The film’s integrity becomes crystal-clear only when the credits roll and you realize you’ve seen a whopping lie that illuminates many truths — and a film about compromised and compromising people that compromised nothing.

Kaufman’s second collaboration with Gondry, 2004′s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” may be his masterpiece. It revisits many of the topics and devices showcased in other Kaufman scripts, but this time they take a backseat to an affecting story of a doomed great love. The hero, Joel — a typically sad-sack Kaufmanesque basket-case narrating his own pathetic life in voice-over — undergoes experimental treatment to remove all memory of his great love, Clementine, only to realize mid-treatment that he doesn’t want to erase those memories after all, because they’re a part of his life — a part of  him. The film’s second half expands on the set piece from “Malkovich” in which the spurned, gun-toting Lotte chases Maxine through Malkovich’s subconscious, scrambling around inside memories staged and lit like theatrical tableaus. Re-encountering Clementine within his own slumbering mind makes Joel fall in love with her again. He comes to understand that there are no such things as “good” and “bad” memories, only memories — and that one cannot find peace without accepting the totality of experience. The film’s title quotes Alexander Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard,” a poem based on a true, tragic love story that’s also referenced in “Malkovich.” The eternal sunshine of a spotless mind — one purged of darkness — is what Joel realizes he doesn’t want. But when he tries to hide memories of Clementine within other memories from childhood and young adulthood (more Kaufman-style Russian nesting-doll madness), the scientists hired to eradicate memories of Clementine respond to Joel’s gambit by carpet-bombing his subconscious.

Like most Kaufman screenplays, “Eternal Sunshine” fuses romantic comedy, satire, farce and science fiction (the writer is indebted to many forebears, but none more than Philip K. Dick, whose fiction explored the difference between reality and virtual reality before the terms became common). But it avoids cluttered pastiche by clinging to core obsessions. One is the modern tendency to trust science to end unhappiness. The selective erasure process is a high-tech version of self-medicating with drugs or alcohol– a comparison made explicit when Howard, the boss of the erasure team, tells Joel, “technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but it’s on a par with a night of heavy drinking.” Another is the impermanence of love and life and how both can be made to seem permanent through remembrance — and storytelling. Reuniting in Joel’s mind, Joel and Clementine revisit their treasured moments together, and re-hear and reinterpret personal stories they traded in the past. Kaufman makes a point that’s rarely broached in romantic comedy: the most comforting thing about long-term relationships is the chance to bear witness to another person’s life.

Is it possible to top a work as all encompassing as “Eternal Sunshine”? Probably not — but Kaufman’s debut as writer-director, “Synecdoche, New York,” dares to try. The hero, a depressed middle-aged playwright named Caden Cotard whose marriage is decaying along with his body, receives a $500,000 MacArthur genius grant and uses it to stage an immense open-ended theater piece, a “play about everything” produced in a warehouse containing a mockup of a metropolis and staffed with hundreds of performers whose characters, lines and motivations are devised on the fly by Caden. (At the start of each day’s rehearsal, he hands key players scraps of paper with such terse notes as, “You lost your job today.”)

Again, Kaufman gives us a story too diffuse and tangled to summarize; in fact the film’s story isn’t a story but the heart of a dream film that you don’t so much watch as inhabit. “Synecdoche” converts Kaufman’s distrust of commercial narrative conventions into a sustained assault that leaves the viewer as unmoored as Caden himself. He’s Shakespeare’s Prospero reimagined as a schmuck; his characters (and actors) overwhelm him and subsume the work they’re supposed to embody. It’s hard to say if the narrative spans many decades or a few months (some characters age faster than others) or if it’s all a free-floating showbiz drama-as-deathbed-fantasy in the vein of “All That Jazz.” There’s a play within Caden’s play and a warehouse within the warehouse. Caden adds a Caden-like character to the ensemble and fills the part with an actor who eventually takes over Caden’s play and hires yet another actor to play him. The totality of “Synecdoche” recalls a tattoo glimpsed on the arm of a character in “Adaptation” — a snake swallowing its tail.

Whether you adore Kaufman’s work, view it with chilly respect or flat-out despise it (Slant critic Fernando F. Croce called “Synecdoche” “a formless display of undigested neuroses”), it’s hard to deny his ambition, consistency and restless sense of play — much less make a case that popular culture would be a more interesting place without him. “Originality is a much sought-after property in Hollywood these days,” wrote Guardian film critic John Patterson, “and you can tell how rarely it’s achieved by the fact that the only time you ever hear the word uttered is when a new Charlie Kaufman script gets filmed.” Less than three years after his “Malkovich,” the near-simultaneous release of “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” and “Adaptation” had already marked Kaufman as a rare screenwriter-auteur who set the terms by which directors, critics and viewers would interpret his work — not by virtue of industry clout (at the time he didn’t have any) but because the writing was so strong that it became each movie’s true star, apt to be discussed in terms normally reserved for directors. In the last-half century of commercial cinema and TV, only a handful of scriptwriters could be similarly described. The short list includes Paddy Chayefsky (“Marty,” “The Hospital,” “Network”), Marguerite Duras (“Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” “Mademoiselle”), Jean-Claude Carrière (“The Return of Martin Guerre,” “Les possédés,” “Birth”); Elaine May (“Heaven Can Wait,” “Primary Colors”); David Mamet (“The Verdict,” “The Untouchables”) and Dennis Potter (“The Singing Detective,” “Pennies from Heaven”).

David Chase belongs on the list as well, for many reasons — starting with his series’ seismic impact on popular culture.

“The Sopranos” transformed HBO from a boutique cable operation into an entertainment industry powerhouse. Its popular and critical success — and its post-TV triumph in the form of pricey DVD box sets that sat on bookshelves like fat novels — empowered HBO and its rival U.S. cable outlets and broadcast networks to greenlight their own densely plotted, often dark or surreal series, including “The Wire,” “Deadwood,” “Heroes,” “Six Feet Under,” “Rome,” “The Shield,” “Rescue Me,” “Saving Grace,” “Breaking Bad,” “Lost,” “Damages,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “Queer as Folk,” “The L Word,” “The United States of Tara,” “Nurse Jackie” and “Dexter.” The combined success of all these shows established TV as the preferred home for character- and atmosphere-driven fiction so detailed that audiences couldn’t sort of half-watch them while folding laundry; they had to commit to them, as people once committed to films in theaters.

The near-total elimination of medium-budget, classically styled adult dramas from mainstream film production this decade coincided with the rise of “Sopranos” and shows that drew inspiration from “The Sopranos.” It’s impossible to identify the chicken and the egg in that process. Either way, feature films became more like the Marshall McLuhan-era academic’s kneejerk stereotype of TV (jumpy, trashy and stupid), while the best of aughts TV, led by Chase, embraced classically cinematic storytelling rhythms and visual grammar. “The Sopranos” was filmed with a single camera, movie-style. It often let significant action play in wide shots, wrote surreal encounters and narrative ellipses into scripts without feeling compelled to explain every one of them, and paced its dialogue as meticulously as exchanges in a Jim Jarmusch, Todd Solondz or Mike Leigh film. And more so than any series since David Lynch’s groundbreaking “Twin Peaks,” “The Sopranos” trafficked in the language and texture of dreams, to the point of building long sections of key episodes (most spectacularly Season Five’s “Test Dream” and the first two episodes of Season Six) around the REM-sleep adventures of its main character, beleaguered gang boss Tony Soprano.

While it trafficked in post-”Godfather,” guy-pandering subject matter (beat-downs and rubouts, double-crosses and visits to strip clubs), “The Sopranos” was uncommonly intrigued by the mundane and often stifling facts of domestic life. Its central female characters (Carmela, Livia, Meadow and Janice Soprano; Dr. Melfi; Adrianna La Cerva) were as idiosyncratic, as blazingly alive, as any of the show’s men. And it treated gangsterism as a metaphoric prism through which to examine larger social, economic and political trends in the United States: the relocation of the American dream from cities to suburbs to exurbs (expressed visually in Tony’s drive home in the show’s opening credits); the reflexive materialism that contaminates personalities, relationships and whole civilizations (each time Tony gets caught cheating, he has to buy Carmella’s forgiveness with a bigger prize, ending with a new house); the constricting stereotypes of “male” and “female” behavior passed down through generations like a disposition toward heart attacks or cancer (Tony’s son A.J. develops a sadistic streak not unlike his dad’s, and Meadow becomes her dad’s apologist and enabler, a la Carmella).

The series also asserted the necessity of moral standards by exploring a subculture in which the only golden rule was, “Don’t get caught.” The extremes of sickness and health were represented by Season Six’s “Kennedy and Heidi,” in which the title’s bit players cause a fatal car accident, and the driver ignores the passenger’s distress and keeps going; and Season Three’s “Employee of the Month,” which finds Tony Soprano obliquely offering to avenge Dr. Melfi’s rape, and Melfi responding with a single word: “No.”

Filmgoers starved for this type of viewing experience had trouble finding it at the local movie house during the aughts. They were looking for a reason to stay home. Chase (and the writer-producer auteurs following in Chase’s footsteps) gave it to them.

All this would be enough to earn Chase, who’s technically more a writer-producer supervising a team of collaborators than a director, a spot on this list of the decade’s most important filmmakers. He’s perched at the top for the same reason as Kaufman: because of the sustained audacity, complexity, consistency and relevance of his vision, which he marked with a personal stamp that’s as auteurist as it gets.

“Sopranos” viewers seeking more arguments for Chase’s significance can find them here. For now I’ll offer a couple more.

First, there’s the ingenious way in which Chase embraced TV’s default mode of characterization — the vivid personality that stays more or less the same throughout a show’s run — and transformed it, so that it stopped seeming like a retreat from the reality of human experience and instead became a means to examine it.

“The Sopranos” was never more cutting than when it showed characters surviving traumatic events and resolving to change their lives, then slipping into old, bad habits. This process was demonstrated most unnervingly in Season Six, which kicked off with Tony getting shot by his demented Uncle Junior, roaming through a purgatorial dreamscape that translated his moral lapses into symbols, emerging from a coma, briefly becoming more introspective and less belligerent, then slowly morphing back into the old Tony. “They say every day’s a gift,” Tony grumbles, “but why does it have to be a pair of socks?”

All that therapy with Dr. Melfi had little effect on him; if anything, it seemed to make him a more effective gangster and provide him with language with which to manipulate rivals, employees and loved ones. Like so many of the show’s major characters (notably the catchphrase-spouting gargoyle Janice), Tony luxuriates in self-help concepts without applying them — a dynamic that reaches its pathetic zenith on a Las Vegas mountaintop in “Kennedy and Heidi” as Tony, fresh from a peyote trip and a tryst with his dead protégé’s girlfriend, stares at the horizon and bellows, “I get it!” A brain twitch passing for an epiphany.

Last but not least, there’s the show’s ending, or non-ending, or cut-off point, which many viewers mistook for a cable outage. Whatever label you hang on it and no matter what you thought of it, Chase’s final flourish was proof of his nerve and the payoff to years of bullheaded fidelity to his muse. It inspired debates about what constitutes good storytelling and whether dramatists are obliged to repay the audience’s loyalty with closure. No theatrical film released this decade sparked as many arguments about art as the last five minutes of “The Sopranos.”

Charlie Kaufman must have loved it.

“Yes, indeed,” Hanks said. “I am America’s babysitter.”

He was only partly right. Thanks to repeat showings of the “Toy Story” films on DVD and cable, Hanks’ animated alter ego has doubtless mesmerized millions of tots for untold numbers of hours. But America’s true babysitter is Hanks’ employer on the “Toy Story” films, Pixar, along with the other animation houses, including Disney and DreamWorks, that have competed for pieces of the family entertainment business that Pixar has dominated since “Toy Story 2″ came out a decade ago.

Granted, Pixar wasn’t created to crank out lovable time killers. The company’s guiding lights — president and co-founder Ed Catmull and longtime creative director (and sometime movie director) John Lasseter — trumpet Pixar’s ability to make commercial entertainment with charm, visual wit and a sense of moral responsibility, and with rare exceptions (the stupefyingly lame “Cars“) they walk the walk. “A Bug’s Life,” “Monsters, Inc.,” “Finding Nemo,” “The Incredibles,” “Cars,” “Ratatouille,” “Wall-E,” “Up“: We’re not talking about Hanna-Barbera’s Carter-era trash factory, but a studio that takes pride in its work.

No, I’m calling Pixar “the Babysitter” for the same reason that I’m classifying a studio as a director in this series: For rhetorical purposes, the better to contrast their remarkably unified output (that is, the Pixar “brand”) against the work of Hayao Miyazaki, the founder of Japan’s Studio Ghibli and arguably the most innovative and accomplished mainstream animation auteur after Walt Disney himself.

Miyazaki, who turns 69 next week, is still underappreciated in the United States. His last four features, “Princess Mononoke,” the Oscar-winning “Spirited Away,” “Howl’s Moving Castle” and “Ponyo” were released stateside by Pixar’s parent company, Disney, in dubbed versions, earning critical praise but not a fraction of Pixar’s usual box office haul. Worldwide, however, Miyazaki’s last three features as director made about $700 million. That’s a Hollywood-studio-level number that’s noteworthy on its face, but it’s even more striking for those who appreciate Miyazaki’s willingness to depict situations, emotional conflicts and moral struggles that neither Pixar nor any of its U.S.-based competitors would dare touch. If Pixar is the Babysitter — the smart, likable professional you can trust — Miyazaki is the Grandfather: a wise and beloved elder who understands kids as deeply as (in some ways more deeply than) their parents do, and knows that while the ability to delight and comfort children is a rare talent, it’s not the only one worth cultivating.

I’m not here to run down Pixar. Its films are consistently good, sometimes enthralling. They thrill and amuse. Sometimes they move (the “When She Loved Me” montage from “Toy Story 2″ and the first few minutes of “Up” are as elegantly composed and edited as they are sentimental). On occasion, Pixar evangelizes; thanks to the green polemics of “Wall-E,” generations of kids will subconsciously associate pollution and gluttony with apocalypse — an agitprop victory that five decades’ worth of Saturday morning TV messages can’t claim.

And for sheer filmmaking craft, Pixar is tough to beat. Nearly every moment of its best work is both dramatically efficient and compositionally sturdy, sometimes gorgeous (the assembling of the fake bird in “A Bug’s Life”; the chase through the dimensional door assembly line in “Monsters, Inc.”; the wordless opening section of “Wall-E”; the action-packed and at times almost abstractly beautiful final stretch of “The Incredibles”). From Pixar’s early, Oscar-winning short films to the “Toy Story” movies through this decade’s unbroken string of hits, the studio has earned a deserved reputation for making features that feel at once polished and personal. Lasseter and his regular stable of filmmakers — a group that includes Pete Docter, Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton — have a knack for smuggling poignant or meaningful moments into otherwise light entertainment. Think of the fearsome critic Anton Ego in “Ratatouille” as he samples the title dish, flashes back to childhood and drops his pen on the floor, his momentary return to innocence showing young viewers what it means to be transported by art; or the title family in “The Incredibles” working in concert against their enemies, literally discovering powers they didn’t know they had, and illustrating the idea that a family is stronger united than divided; or ace frightener Scully in “Monsters, Inc.” realizing his power over children and seeming disturbed instead of proud — an introspective moment that might help children understand parents, and parents understand themselves.

At the same time, though, Miyazaki’s presence points up the limitations of Pixar, which are the limitations of American commercial entertainment generally. Pixar landed on this list, and in the penultimate slot, not strictly on its own merits (which are, as I’ve said, considerable), but because of its imaginative dominance of family entertainment, and its capacity to shape future moviegoers’ sense of what animation (and entertainment) should be. Pixar represents the best of what American commercial filmmaking is. But Miyazaki shows what might be possible without Pixar’s inhibitions (or constraints, take your pick).

Factor out the few dark and disturbing moments in Pixar’s films this decade (there haven’t been many, really) and you’re looking at a body of work that’s fairly easy for even the youngest children to grasp and process, and ultimately not challenging compared to Miyazaki. In Pixar films, good characters sound (and usually look) conventionally lovable. Good and evil are clearly defined, and no “good” character’s goal is left unmet. And no potentially confusing or disturbing apparition, incident or twist is left unexplained for long.

Contrast this with Miyazaki’s much freer and deeper approach to family entertainment, and you start to see the aesthetic gulf between his work and Pixar’s (and, by extension, between the splendid array of animation that thrives internationally and the homogeneous, Pixar-inspired type that dominates U.S. screens). Miyazaki’s films are just as visually imaginative as Pixar’s and often more so — more painterly and less beholden to the rules of “realism.” More importantly, they are never content to define characters as good or evil, or even mostly good or mostly evil, and be done with it. Through a canny combination of sharp draftsmanship, clean animation and simple dialogue, Miyazaki throws children (and often adults) off balance, leaving them unsure what to make of a certain character or situation and forced to grapple with what Miyazaki is doing and showing.

The little spider servants, the white dragon and the giant-headed old woman Yububa in “Spirited Away” seem scary, or at least intimidating, on first glance, and never quite lose those qualities (especially Yububa) even after they’re revealed to be benevolent creatures. In “Ponyo,” about the friendship between a land-dwelling boy and a half-human, half-fish sea creature, we’re primed to react to Ponyo’s wizard father, who fears and loathes surface dwellers, as a killjoy who will eventually come around; but even at the end of the film, dad’s apprehension hasn’t been allayed, and Miyazaki has made such a point of showing us humanity’s blithe poisoning of the sea (Ponyo’s dad has dedicated himself to cleaning it up) that we can’t root for a conventional, can’t-we-all-just-get-along finale.

With its spindly chicken legs, clanking engines and scaly iron armor, the title structure in “Howl’s Moving Castle” is classically nightmarish, but it’s revealed as a wondrous place (albeit one staffed by neurotics such as the passive-aggressive and very needy fire demon Calcifer). But the title character is one of the most complicated heroes in mainstream animation this decade — a teenager who’s deeply insecure and lonely, and thus ripe for manipulation by competing kingdoms that recruit him as a warrior. Howl carries himself like an entitled prince, but he’s a pawn.

In place of the conventional, reductive versions of morality and psychology shown in Pixar’s films, Miyazaki gives us something closer to actual experience, treating good and evil not as a binary equation but as a sliding scale and presenting people (and characters) that often don’t know why they do what they do and latch on to reductive explanations at their peril. Characters can be scary and then friendly, threatening and then reassuring, honest and then misleading; they can shift identities and change shape, succumb to spells and then break out of them. That Miyazaki built so much of the plot in “Spirited Away” around the mysterious presence of a character named No-Face (his visage an expressionless mask) is hardly accidental. It’s what inside that counts, and Miyazaki takes the sap out of that formulation by making his characters’ interiors as malleable — and often as unformed — as their exteriors. A boy becomes a dragon becomes a boy again in “Spirited Away”; the rooms change shape and size in “Howl’s Moving Castle”; Ponyo becomes fond of the land (and develops a taste for ham!) and sprouts the budlike beginnings of legs. Watching Miyazaki’s movies, one gets the sense of humankind (and its fantastical stand-ins) as creatures in a permanent state of evolution, able to transform from year to year, week to week, even moment to moment. In Miyazaki’s work, people are what they choose to be, but they’re also what other people have decided they are — and the tension between those two definitions (plus the complicating factor of characters not having a strong sense of themselves, much less knowing what they want from life) makes Miyazaki’s features more complex than almost anything being made in the American studio system, animated or live action.

Parents will testify that a child who sees his or her first Miyazaki film after a steady diet of Pixar and Disney is apt to experience a perhaps troubled reaction, much deeper than “That was fun” or “I liked it.” Miyazaki challenges every preconceived notion about family entertainment that Pixar and its ilk conditions children (and adults) to have. Pixar’s very best work this decade — “The Incredibles,” “Wall-E” and “Up,” and moments of “Monsters, Inc.” and “Finding Nemo” — is wonderful; it gives children lots to see and a fair amount to feel. But Miyazaki’s work does more than that. His art is engrossing and beautiful but also challenging. He urges children to understand themselves and the world, and then shows them how. The Babysitter mesmerizes children. Grandfather changes their lives.

This may seem an odd claim considering how reflexively the Coens are diminished, even in positive reviews, as brilliant pranksters — snickering film geeks churning out high-grade pastiches so gripping and tactically opaque that some moviegoers mistake them for art. But if one sets aside the received wisdom about the Coens — which, 25 years after their debut feature, “Blood Simple,” and two years after their multiple-Oscar-winning “No Country for Old Men,” still clings to their filmography like the dye that stained dunderheaded bank robbers Gale and Evelle Snoats in “Raising Arizona” — I think their work bears out the assertion.

Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman were likewise described as loftily detached, misanthropic, cynical — and I don’t think the complaints had merit in their cases, either. Like Buñuel, Kubrick and Altman, the Coens aren’t warm filmmakers and make a point of letting you know they’re not. They do, in fact, sit in judgment on their characters, often portraying them as selfish, stupid, vicious, weak or deluded — sometimes all at once. But it’s possible for a dramatist to be merciless toward his characters while caring deeply about humankind and taking pains to show the fundamental struggles that unite every member of the species, even the ones you wouldn’t mourn if a flood washed them away or an assassin with a Prince Valiant haircut shot them in the forehead with a cattle gun.

Kubrick, Buñuel and Altman showed us how. They didn’t cut characters any slack as individuals. But all three cared deeply about the human race, and their signature works — Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” “2001″ and “Barry Lyndon”; Buñuel’s “Exterminating Angel,” “Belle de Jour” and “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”; Altman’s “M*A*S*H,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Nashville” and “Short Cuts” — combined scalpel-sharp dissections of individual psychologies with a lament (subtle but always detectable) for the evil that people do to each other, and for the institutions, governments and belief systems that humans create and sustain in order to justify and perpetuate evil. In their own unique ways, these directors all illustrate Charlie Brown’s credo: “I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.”

So do the Coens. The Minnesota-reared writing and directing team loves to kill off main characters in startling and often horrifying ways (the final stretch of “Burn After Reading” contained their most surprising and savage screen deaths since “Fargo“). And their career-long default mode — half-satirical, half-fabulist — encourages, perhaps demands, a caricaturist’s eye. Nobody but Jim Jarmusch is better at showing the chasm between a character’s puffed-up self-image and the world’s low opinion of him via an unflattering haircut, an unwittingly clichéd item of clothing or an annoying verbal tic (Walter Sobchack hit the trifecta in the Coens’ “Big Lebowski” with his flattop haircut, khaki hunting vest and apropos-of-nothing rants about Vietnam).

But an attentive and open-minded viewer of the Coens’ films should detect something more than a bugs-against-a-windshield approach to storytelling. A subterranean stream of sadness, dread and outrage runs beneath every one of their movies, even the outwardly “light” ones. So does a sense of social and often spiritual striving. The Coens’ characters may be dumb, greedy or outright wicked, but nearly all are, in their eccentric, sometimes dumb-ass ways, groping after self-betterment and happiness — and the Coens acknowledge their desperate boldness through humor and sweetness even as they enumerate their moral lapses and show how their weakness and stupidity snowballs into catastrophe.

The Homeric heroes of “O Brother,” traversing a mythical South and reinventing themselves as popular singers en route to reunite with their families; Ed Crain in “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” balancing a noir hero’s coldblooded blackmail scheme against his helpless (and faintly redemptive) urge to help the naive teenage pianist Birdy Abundas, whose musicianship is nearly as fine as she is; the cantankerous widow Marva Munson in “The Ladykillers” doing her late husband proud by continuing to serve as a pillar of her community and demanding that the ruffian sinners (and secret thieves) in her basement act like gentlemen; Llewelyn Moss in “No Country” recklessly and impulsively staking his future (and his and his wife’s lives) on a once-in-a-lifetime windfall; Hardbodies employees Linda Litzke and Chad Feldheimer in “Burn After Reading” trying to vault out of their glorified wage-slave status and become (figuratively or literally) beautiful people by blackmailing recently fired intelligence agent Osbourne Cox (who is himself attempting a life-improvement Hail Mary pass in the form of a muckraking memoir). And let’s not forget the title character of this year’s “A Serious Man”: Larry Gopnik, a professor, husband, father and suburban homeowner. The poor schnook struggles to hold on to his job and his marriage and the respect of his children and the few shreds of dignity he mistakenly thinks he still possesses while enduring a relentless assault by historical and sociological forces too amorphous to define yet too powerful to resist: consumerism, secular humanism, potent weed, free love, rock ‘n’ roll.

The filmmakers encourage us to laugh at these poor saps. But they also make the laughs catch in a viewer’s throat by building a detailed social and moral context for all the shenanigans — a context so vast and oppressive, so simultaneously familiar and unnervingly mysterious, that we can (and should) recognize it as a dramatic mirror of our world, however circumscribed or seemingly limitless we consider that world to be. Joel and Ethan Coen have a more precise (and prominent) moral compass — a truly Manichaean sense of right versus wrong — than any comparably prominent mainstream American filmmakers except Steven Spielberg. But unlike Spielberg, the Coens aren’t addicted to happy endings, maybe because they’re more inclined to show life as it is rather than life as they think it should be. They’re fascinated by the shadow that falls between the ideal and the reality, the process by which life as it should be becomes life as it is.

When you watch a Coens’ film, you’re not seeing reality but its exaggerated and distilled representation, an actual landscape reconfigured as a moral one — a characteristic driven home by such tells as regular cinematographer Roger Deakins’ high-contrast images — gloomy interiors cut by shafts of sunlight, evoking Joseph Conrad’s descriptions of light and shadow as moral signifiers — and Carter Burwell’s mournful and reflective scores, which push against the absurdly stylized violence and slapstick, and contaminate comedy with tragedy.

Maybe cinematic illiteracy accounts for the “cynics and misanthropes and nihilists, oh my” refrain. If you pay attention only to the Coens’ plots, characters and snappy dialogue, you be justified in writing them off as shallow, hateful bastards. But that’s a book-report approach to moviegoing that ignores picture and sound. The literary qualities in the Coens’ films are text; the filmmaking is subtext.

If it didn’t reduce the Coens’ multifaceted brilliance to a self-help title, one could summarize their 25-year output as, “When Bad Things Happen to Good (and Bad) People.” Although they were raised Jewish in more or less the circumstances and period depicted in “A Serious Man,” the Coens are rumored to make movies from an agnostic or atheistic perspective. It’s hard to say where they’re coming from on the theological spectrum, considering they hold their personal cards so close and get a kick out of misleading reporters and fans. (Their 1990 compilation of screenplays is introduced by a fictional character, an incarnation of their editing pseudonym Roderick Jaynes — an aged, cranky Brit that despises the Coens’ “mucking about with the camera” and considers “Miller’s Crossing” a step up from their first two films because “the actors were finally issued proper suits.”) But whether the Coens believe in an according-to-Hoyle supreme being is beside the point, because for all intents and purposes, their movies are suffused with the Kubrickian sense of humankind as apes who think they’re much further removed from the prehistoric bone pit than they actually are — and a similarly Kubrickian sense of a higher power that could be scientifically explained if we were evolved enough to understand the math, which we are not. The Coens’ most desperate and brutalized characters are closer to contentment than they realize, and their most complacent or settled characters are closer to disaster. The flood in “O Brother,” the flying saucer in “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” the drawling satanic thief in “The Ladykillers,” the ownerless drug stash and the implacable assassin Anton Chigurh in “No Country,” the misplaced CD and the improbable but inevitable shooting of the man in the closet in “Burn After Reading,” and the elderly revenant and the gathering storm clouds and the mantralike and faintly sinister repetition of Jefferson Airplane lyrics are all different versions of the same thing: the unanticipated life-changing force; the angel/devil, the miracle/curse; the tectonic shift that occurs beneath apparently solid ground; in other words, the Test.

In the Coens’ universe, it doesn’t matter whether a character survives or otherwise “passes” the Test; that’s not the point of the Test. The point is to see what the characters are really made of, and see if the characters, by enduring the Test, realize who they truly are or could be, as opposed to who they thought they were or fantasized they were — and discern (perhaps for the first time in their lives) the difference between life as they thought it was and life as it is. If Ed in “The Man Who Wasn’t There” or Llewelyn in “No Country” or Linda or Chad or Osbourne or Harry Pfarrer in “Burn After Reading” were able to step outside themselves for a half-second and stay there — and experience a moment of true clarity rather than flattering themselves into thinking they’ve experienced a moment of clarity — they would not have met such ignominious ends. But the odds against them are steep.

The Coens’ characters look in mirrors but don’t really look at themselves — they’re people who talk at other people but not with them. Roughly 80 percent of the dialogue in “Burn After Reading” is stepped on by another character, and almost none of the implied or actual social contracts (employment, matrimonial, legal) are honored. And the Coens’ most decent characters — Marge Gunderson in “Fargo,” Norville in “The Hudsucker Proxy,” Carla Jean Moss in “No Country,” Ted Treffon in “Burn After Reading,” Larry Gopnik in “A Serious Man” — are essentially powerless against the immense and/or terrifying forces allied against them. They tend to succumb to that brute force or triumph over it through a combination of coincidence, surprise and the innately chaotic nature of evil. The best they can hope for is to survive bad fortune with their integrity intact, or go down swinging. In the Coens’ universe, such an outcome counts as a victory. This isn’t nihilism, cynicism or misanthropy. It’s just demanding and true, and a lot tougher than what audiences are used to.

“You can’t stop what’s coming,” says Ellis in “No Country for Old Men,” a film that’s not just about a drug war or the hunt for a serial killer, but the cataclysmic displacement of one way of life, one society, one philosophy by another, and the necessity of admitting one’s vulnerability, fallibility and smallness in the greater scheme. “It ain’t all waiting on you,” Ellis says. “That’s vanity.” That’s as close as the Coens get to straightforward, unironic words of wisdom. That so few of their characters experience the epiphany that Ellis demands is the wellspring of all that’s comic, and tragic, in their work.

The Dardennes exemplify a type of filmmaking that’s sometimes called naturalism, with all the patience and detached (but never cold) scrutiny that phrase implies. They study human beings in their natural habitat, hoping to understand and show why we are what we are. This kind of filmmaking is quite different from the kind practiced by the filmmakers I call the sensualists, because where sensualists revel in poetic subjectivity — compiling entire features composed of little besides what the filmmaker Caveh Zahedi calls “the holy moment” — the Dardennes’ style of filmmaking goes the other way.

It’s also different from the Dogme 95 movement spearheaded 14 years ago by Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and other Danish directors; that mini-school, which was based around a “vow of chastity” manifesto that even its creators didn’t really follow, was mistakenly labeled naturalistic by some reviewers. It wasn’t — at least not in the deep sense in which the Dardennes’ films are naturalistic. Dogme filmmakers did embrace small stories, available locations and simple shooting, the better to rescue cinema from the tyranny of scale and reconnect it with reality. But they also broke their own rules left and right and pretty much abandoned the movement a few years ago — and their films tended to be grotesque, surreal and otherwise exaggerated, more connected to avant-garde drama than to everyday living. The reality of their movies was that of the bottom line: How exciting can we be if we don’t have any money?

If the sensualists are poets and the Dogme filmmakers are shock-theater pranksters, the Dardennes are prose writers — which isn’t to say that they’re unimaginative (quite the contrary) but they work in a radically different mode than the sensualists — more like grubbily realistic yet subtly lyrical fiction. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott made this connection in his 2002 review of “The Son,” an unsentimental but moving drama about a man named Olivier who teaches carpentry to juvenile delinquents, and who gradually realizes that his latest apprentice, a teen named Francis, was responsible for the death of Olivier’s own boy and the subsequent grief that destroyed Olivier’s marriage. The film, Scott wrote, “has the balked, minimalist force (as well as the working-class setting) of one of Raymond Carver’s better stories. It is hardly surprising that the Dardennes put together their naturalist fable with such a fanatical, self-effacing sense of craft. They are obsessed with work in the way that some of their European counterparts are obsessed with sex: the textures and rhythms of manual labor are, for them, at once irreducibly physical and saturated with an almost spiritual significance.”

These last two points are crucial to appreciating the Dardennes. In film criticism, “naturalism” is often treated as a catchall phrase meaning messy or unpolished, and applied to films whose only connection to life in the here-and-now is that the characters stumble through their sentences and are shown in depressing circumstances. The Dardennes’ films do both. But they’re not only naturalistic in that sense (the superficial sense). They’re naturalistic in the 13th-century sense articulated by the natural philosophers who sought rational understanding of life not merely for its own sake, but to understand the spiritual world that they believed existed beyond the veil of this one.

Their films are marvels of documentary-like immediacy, the camera often following directly behind the head and shoulders of a character moving through a significant space — a factory floor in “The Son,” for instance, or the streets of the city in “L’Enfant,” about a narcissistic petty criminal who seems emotionally incapable of taking responsibility for his newborn son. This type of shot — so strongly associated with the Dardennes that director Darren Aronofsky was widely assumed to be aping the Dardennes in his rough-hewn “Wrestler” — is both a visual and moral statement. It respects the singularity of a character by putting him at the center of the frame while simultaneously insisting that what matters most in the story isn’t that one person, but the world he inhabits — an overwhelming, perhaps oppressive world that bustles around him or looms over him as he ambles through it. Such a shot says, “This character is not the center of the universe, he just thinks he is — and the same goes for you, the viewer.” And it epitomizes the type of drama practiced by the Dardennes.

Most movie characters are pictured as free agents, existing apart from whatever living space they inhabit and whatever job they hold (if indeed they are ever pictured working). In the Dardennes’ films, the drama’s foreground (the characters) can never be separated from their background. Indeed, the “background” in a Dardennes film is both figurative and literal — the characters’ upbringing and social conditioning play as big a part in the story as their living conditions and jobs.

“Lorna’s Silence,” about a woman embroiled in a marriage-for-citizenship scam that requires her to be a party to the killing of her junkie husband, is the only one of their three films this decade that departs from their usual workaday mode. It’s the weakest of the three, because the mobsters in the story introduce conventional elements of suspense and jeopardy that the Dardennes aren’t used to dealing with — and because, while international gangsters do of course exist, their reality is so far removed from that of most moviegoers that their mere presence in a film introduces an element of vicarious fantasy that’s otherwise anathema to the Dardennes. But the two other 2000s films — and their breakthrough 1990s films “The Promise” (1996) and “Rosetta” (1999) — are great enough that the misstep of their last effort doesn’t damage their claim on greatness. They’ve made two films this decade so perfect, and so significant for so many reasons, that they make more prolific filmmakers seem lazy.

The Dardennes are not the only filmmakers working in a naturalist vein. China’s Jia Zhangke (“The World,” “Still Life”) is as significant a naturalist as the Dardennes and was far more productive in the last 10 years, dedicating himself to a portrait of China in a state of flux, its citizens’ sense of themselves challenged by a rapidly evolving national economy and the seismic impact of globalization. In America, Richard Linklater (“Fast Food Nation”) sometimes works in this tradition. On the documentary side, the greatest living naturalist is Frederick Wiseman, who’s almost 80 years old and still making his signature epic-length, fly-on-the-wall documentaries, which show regular citizens interacting with the representatives of institutions and governments in minute detail, often in real time.

Wiseman’s work this decade includes “State Legislature,” about the day-to-day operations of the Idaho Legislature, and “Domestic Violence” and “Domestic Violence 2,” which explore the society-wide impact of spousal abuse by showing its victims and perpetrators dealing with counselors, judges and cops empowered to handle the problem. These Wiseman films and others are rewarding if admittedly difficult viewing, requiring a level of concentration that few films ask, and that few viewers are willing to summon.

I’m letting the Dardennes stand for all of this decade’s notable naturalist directors, fiction and nonfiction, because the clarity and precision of their work set them apart — and because their approach to drama is unique in its quest to discover something beyond (or inside) the observable world.

I wouldn’t call them explicitly Christian filmmakers; the characters rarely invoke the Bible and spend little time in church, and if the films have aspects of the parable, it’s more due to the directors’ stripped-down style than any overtly literary signposts. But such a distinction might be moot in light of the Dardennes’ fascination with guilt, sin and redemption, which is not expressed through hallucinatory imagery or intense scenes of physical and emotional brutality, but through a somewhat dry but never unfeeling quality of detachment. Olivier in “The Son” struggles to answer life’s vicious unfairness with kindness, incidentally fathering the boy that was responsible for his own son’s death. Bruno, the bottom-dwelling hero of “L’Enfant,” travels an even longer road toward grace, selling his son on the black market and then concocting a desperate scheme to buy him back, all the while clumsily groping after a sensitivity that neither he nor anyone he knows ever thought he possessed. Bruno is such a twit, and so seemingly irredeemable, that the film tests one’s patience right up until the end — and even Bruno’s burst of righteousness is depicted with a certain opacity. You can’t be sure if he’s done the right thing because he’s discovered the father in himself or because he can’t deal with having his girlfriend hate him.

But while there’s never a sense that the Dardennes have it in for the characters — that we’re watching a highbrow version of misery porn, a fashionable indie mode during the last couple of decades. We never sense we’re being strong-armed into sympathy, either. The Dardennes’ films express a very different notion of the director as God than the one exemplified by the likes of Robert Zemeckis and Wes Anderson. They’re like Spinoza’s God — creators as noninterventionists, setting their creatures loose in the world and trailing them with the camera, watching what they do and hoping they do right.