Postmodernism and The Cinema

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POSTMODERNISM AND

THE CINEMA
vAL HILL AND PETER EVERY

P ostmodern cinema ironically has a history now. In 1984, Fredric


Jameson observed that contemporary culture seemed to be express-
ing a new form of 'depthlessness' - a concentration on style and
'surface'. For Jameson these features represented a retreat from the
need to supply a univocal narrative closure to the postmodern text,
predicated on the fragmentation of mass cuJture, the end of a rigidly
fixed signifying system, a loosening of binary differences and the
emergence of the individual consumer in relation to the reconfiguration
of multinational capital.
In the wake of this change, postmodern film criticism has celebrated
the vivid intensity of the surface and the multivocal readings 'against the
grain' that it allows. Recently, however, some critics (such as Steven
Connor and Linda Nicholson) have begun to question if this surface,
and its intertextual pleasures, is all there is to the postmodern cinematic
text. They are asking again what (under)pins the text and if the position
of the reader is as 'free' as has been claimed by the theorists of rela-
tivism. Implicit in these questions is an examination of the contradic-
tions brought about by absolute pluralism- an exploration of the limits
imposed by an absence of values.
In this essay, we wish to emphasize that the thematic concerns pro-
duced within postmodern cinema reveal a very particular set of values.
We argue that the scenarios found in many postmodern films express a
number of repetitions, particularly around the issues of gender, sexual-
ity and ethnicity, that make the notion of free-floating signification
problematic. We wish to question why, in the light of a reflexive critical
sophistication towards the strictures of the text, do audience, director,
and critic continue to collude, most often pleasurably, in the main-
tenance of narrative structures which repetitively replay the gains and
losses of 'difference', albeit in new and mutated forms.

MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM AND FILM CRITICISM

Film theory within the discursive space of critical modernism strove


to reveal the work of the text - especially its attempt to position the

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO POSTMODERNISM

spectator, to keep the world firmly within the parameters of capitalism


and patriarchy and heterosexuality. For directors such as Godard, and
critics such as Comoli and Narboni, the fantasy was to make a film that
clearly spoke to and for the proletariat, the colonized and women in a
way that did not partake of the bourgeois realist narrative structures
characteristic of Hollywood. This desire to contest the text, to make the
right film, to suggest that we are positioned in a way that is both collusive
and exclusive, yielded up a rich vein of theoretical work. Laura Mulvey,
for example, concentrates her earlier work on the cinematic narratives
of Hollywood movies of the 1940s and 1950s- a period when American
culture was very visibly engaged in negotiating and controlling the
'monsters' produced by the Second World War. The most obvious
'monster', within popular cinema, was the femme fatale of film noir who,
for the transgression of stepping 'out of her place', became a woman
punished and domesticated by death or marriage, mutating from Joan
Crawford to Marilyn Monroe in a relatively short period as the female
form was pulled back into the service of reproductive patriarchal
relations. Mulvey rightly sees the 1940s and 1950s as paradigmatic of
what Hollywood movies are and do.
At the same time, the political and cultural events of May 1968
produced in their wake the disillusion of the organized left, the defeat of
the trade union movement and the inexorable marginalization of the
working class in terms of a mass politics. These events, however, also
allowed for the emergence of single-issue politics and a sensitivity, at
least in theory, towards the particular circumstances of individual
identity.
In the 1970s, the Vietnam War became a sort of stand-in signifier
for discussions of all colonial struggles. In the fallout ensuing from
America's defeat, mainstream cinema audiences began to experience
'difficult' films such as Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now. The conspiracy
films which proliferated in the early 1970s such as All the President's
Men, The Conversation and The Parallax View attempted to negotiate
the contradictions and paranoias produced by a radical loss of political
and national certainty: 'You mean there's a CIA inside the CIA?' Each
attempt, however, to uncover 'the truth' or to recover some form of
normality by exorcizing the demons of a compromised state took the
cinema, audience and all, further from 'safe ground' -until the phrase
'there's no place like home', spoken once with such reassuring naivety in
The Wizard of Oz, began to signify the uncanny rather than apple pie.
The critique of dominant modes of representation, combined with
the normalization of 'the shock of the new', became a sort of Trojan

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POSTMODERNISM AND THE CINEMA

horse that opened the door of the city to the theoretical and practical
work that has had the 'p' word applied to it. The work of modern theory
requires a critical distance- a position from which it can 'speak' in order
to judge and value the text. In its critical reflexivity - a mode already
latent in critically modernist theory - postmodernism weakens the
authority of theory in that it is revealed as a position rather than the
position. The loosening of this critical distance has generated a large
volume of work around 'reading the text differently'.
However, in the sleep of reason marked by the eschewal of textual
authority, postmodernism still produces monsters. How does this
happen? In the following section, we will argue that postmodernism
'knows' the histories outlined above, knows the codes of representation
that have become our pleasure, even if it is a pleasure that knows how
compromised it is. Hollywood cinema has never been without contra-
diction, but postmodern cinema plays this contradiction within a frame
that works to allow its pleasures, to make visible the contradiction, but
still, somehow, manages to 'tidy it up' and put the world back in place.

THE NATURE OF POSTMODERN CINEMA

The endlessly circulating commodity of postmodern cinema contains


signifying systems that carry with them both the values of capitalism and
the contradictory signs of the struggle produced within it. This means
that the stories of postmodern cinema are particular stories that work
through very particular themes. Now obviously this can be said of any
period of history or culture, which is precisely why it must be said about
postmodern cinema. The postmodern cinematic market-place is domi-
nated by American products. This domination has consequences both
for the form of the American film, and for other national, local and
independent cinemas which tend to be absorbed, ignored or marginal-
ized. At the same time, the American film is required to reduce its own
cultural specificity in order to satisfy the demand to be 'global'. So, while
the forms, codes, conventions and narrative structure of postmodern
cinema possess a strong resemblance to that of the mass-produced
cinema of modernity, the need for globalization produces both an
intensification of its formal specificities and an allowed and necessary
address to difference. We are doubly stressing' difference' here, to refer
both to the organization of sexual and ethnic difference within the
structure of the text and to the visibility of those representations of
difference within the play of the text. Difference is allowed, celebrated
and commodified. The cultural politics of difference becomes the

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO POSTMODERNISM

cultural commodity of difference. Postmodern cinema celebrates, at


surface level, its own exchange and use value. We are told how it was
made, how much it cost and what it is about. This is especially true for
what, in a sense, is a paradigmatic instance of postmodern cinema, the
action film.
In the action film the history and conventions of many Hollywood
genres (the western, the thriller, the horror film, the war film, the
romance and the family drama) are distilled and intensified to produce
a commodity that contains all of the pleasure, all of the pain, and works
in as many markets as possible -while never quite eschewing American
values. We would argue that these 'intensifications' produce the sort of
observations made by Jameson andBaudrillard in terms ofthe intensity
of the surface of the postmodern film. They also produce the critical
emphasis on the reflexive nature of the postmodern text. The film and
its audience, one could say, 'know their own histories'. The pleasure of
the texts consciously spills over into an audience's knowledge of other
films, other performances, other musics. One only has to think of the
success of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction to see the power of these
commodities to reference not only social life but, more importantly, all
other forms of popular culture. The referent becomes part of the
treasure house of signifiers that constitute popular culture. Some
theorists, like Baudrillard, extend this line of argument to conclude that
the social world 'outside' of popular cultural terms has 'gone away',
cinema can now only refer to other signifiers of popular culture.
Postmodern theory speaks of the end of history, the loss of the refer-
ent, the impossibility of critical distance and the celebration of 'new-
found' difference. However, if you add the first three of these to the last
one, then you are forced to ask: 'What is difference?' Without history,
without reference to the social, without some sense of distance (what
one might call an ethics or politics) the notion of difference, itself, is
placed under question. It is this tension between the desire to celebrate
difference within the commodity form and, at the same time, the need to
construct a commodity world without history or social referent, that lets
loose the kinds of difference that emerge in postmodern cinema.

THE INTENSIFICATION OF DIFFERENCE

The weakening of the grand narratives (Lyotard) releases difference


from the tidy shackles of modernism- this does not, however, just mean
that previously subjugated others are released into a different, more
intense visibility (and one thinks, here, of the continued marginalization

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of 'third' cinema from Latin America) but also that the 'old' binaries
themselves mutate towards a more exaggerated, almost parodic, exist-
ence or are displaced through the production of new forms of otherness.
Gender attributes wander across the old binary divide; Linda Hamilton,
in Terminator 2, can have muscles and we can all derive voyeuristic
pleasure from Brad Pitt's butt in Thelma and Louise. Difference itself
becomes a crucial organizer and signifier within the texts of postmodern
cinema. In a sense, the transmutation and seeming erosion of 'modern'
difference allows the absolute of difference to emerge, uncannily, in the
gap - a gap within which, if we are 'allowed' the pleasure of Linda
Hamilton's muscles or Brad Pitt's butt, we can also begin to sense the
enormous cost of these signifiers.
The strong version of masculinity, as played out by Schwarzenegger
and Stallone in the action movie, embodies a desire for a fixed relation
to the symbolic, the world where the law still operates, made less poss-
ible by the weakening of the grand narratives that also kept difference in
place. Indeed. First Blood (1982) could be argued as a film in which the
weight of historical trauma is borne by the body of Stallone, a new and
shocking male body soon to be commodified and multiplied in the forms
of Schwarzenegger, VanDamme and others. The desire to win a war
that had already been lost signified in so many of the Vietnam films can
itself be seen as a form of nostalgia for a present that never was. What
is important for this essay is the observation that, although these bodies
are on one level superhuman, too much, hysterical, they are also
suffering, immolated bodies- almost to the point of death.. We have
become used to suffering male bodies in film genres dependent on
male-male relationships, but in the post-Rambo action movies, the
'buddy' is absent and it is not homosexuality that is defended against, but
psychosis.
This brings us back to Fredric Jameson. In 'Postmodernism, or, the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' Jameson uses Lacan's definition of
schizophrenia- a form of psychosis- as a metaphor to carry his descrip-
tion of the fragmentation of subjectivity and the emergence of an
'eternal present' at 'the end of history', which he sees at work in the
postmodern condition. It is significant, for this essay, that Jameson does
two other things. He dismisses the paternal signifier (the guarantee of
the law) from his use of the metaphor of schizophrenia, as does post-
modernism when it gives up on the Enlightenment project. He also, in
two places in his essay, invokes the image of Marilyn Monroe, once as
'Marilyn Herself, almost as something, someone, that stays in place
when all else is fragmented and lost. For Jameson the slide of the signifier

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO POSTMODERNISM

is halted by the image of a woman and the difference she represents. In


a sense, Jameson performs the same sleight of hand as postmodern
cinema, denying a fixing point that should not be there but is.

THE PRODUCTION OF OTHER OTHERS

The contradictions within postmodern cinema's celebration of


difference can be seen in the way that a transmuted otherness emerges
within particular narratives. In Predator 2 (1990) Danny Glover moves
from the place of 'black sidekick who usually dies first' to that of black
hero who survives. At the same time as Glover's textual liberation from
stereotype, however, the predator is constructed as an other that carries
signifiers of blackness - its 'hair' resembling dreadlocks, its figure that
of a hunter or warrior. Similarly, Sigourney Weaver in Aliens (1986)
plays the good mother to the alien bad mother - both protecting their
children. The latter, however, the hyperbolic feminine, is represented as
dripping and oozing and carrying signifiers representing the vagina
indentata. The film almost gives itself away when the child 'mothered' by
Ripley is given the name 'Newt' -a touch of the alien.
Blade Runner (1982) presents the transmutation of difference and
otherness in a more complex way, setting humans against cyborgs. One
can read the film as one in which the cyborg other reproduces humanity
at the point at which the human race has 'lost it'. However, the emer-
gence of the cyborg, the unhuman, can be read differently. Cinema and
other popular cultural forms of the 1980s and 1990s contain either the
fantasy of'leaving the meat' (body) or the possibility of a transformation
of the body into something more, something different (Lawnmower
Man, Nightbreed, Cocoon). The disappearance of the human race is on
the agenda in the 1990s- and maybe we should argue that this is nothing
more than a coding of the imagined disappearance of white dominance.
The union of Rachel and Deckard at the end of Blade Runner, however,
speaks of an escape from the misery of the human condition, into a
fantasy rural idyll. The twist in the tale - the possibility that the new
Adam and Eve are both cyborg, and the certainty that at least one is
(something not seen before as anything other than a threat), reveals,
perhaps, the depths of contemporary anxiety about the future.

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN: THE BODY IN THE TEXT

The female corpse is a very insistent signifier in postmodern cinema. In


the failure of the text satisfactorily to 'put things back together' in the

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POSTMODERNISM AND THE CINEMA

face of the commodification of difference she/it becomes the currency


through which to repay an impossible debt. For example, in Basic
Instinct (1992) we are 'allowed' to see a strong beautiful woman, Sharon
Stone, maybe get away with murder. She is bisexual; getting both the
men and the women that she wants. However, in order for her to achieve
her end, Michael Douglas and the ice-pick under the bed, the text
produces corpses- most notably those of her girlfriend Roxy, a strongly,
if conventionally represented, lipstick lesbian with a taste for voyeurism
and a female psychiatrist previously 'contaminated' by Stone's
seduction. (This also shows that the 'free-play' of difference is not that
free!)
Silence of the Lambs (1991) reproduces the same pattern. The
wonderful Jodie Foster, lesbian icon, wins out, but at the same time the
text produces a trail of flayed female corpses. Other films and cultural
texts may be called into evidence at this point: River's Edge (1987)- the
female corpse as a thing to be poked with a stick; Manhunter (1986) -
'something about the woman'; Blue Velvet (1986)- the abjected, less
than perfect body oflsabella Rossellini; Rising Sun (1993)- the digitally
encoded and replayed sexual murder of an unnamed woman; Twin
Peaks and Murder One - the twin female corpses wrapped in plastic.
The intensity of the gaze at the female corpse could be seen as another
aspect of the intensification, and loss of distance, in the postmodern
text. It is almost like pornography- what is it we are looking at and why?
In the films outlined above, a woman's corpse sutures the narrative
producing a double emptying of the female body, a double death; the
weight of sexual difference is removed from the body, it becomes a
thing, both a blockage and a suture - it makes sense of the narrative,
compensates for a femininity 'out of place', while making no sense itself.
It emerges in the real outside of signification.

AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION

At this point, it might also be useful to replay another postmodern


characteristic differently. The notion of the 'eternal present' has been
seen as concomitant with the end of history. However, what one
observes when one confronts, particularly, 'early' postmodern films is
that the present, the contemporary, has become a difficult category, a
category in crisis. Some of the most popular films of the early 1980s-
Terminator, Blade Runner, Alien - involve dystopic representation of a
near future, while others attempt a flight into the past of cinema itself
(Purple Rose of Cairo, Barton Fink).

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO POSTMODERNISM

By the mid to late 1980s another, more utopian, tendency could be


observed within mainstream cinema represented initially through the
Oedipal revisionism of Back to the Future (1985) and Peggy Sue got
Married (1986) in which the world and the American dream are put
firmly back into place. The tenderness of the incestuous 'time-loop
paradox' represented by the love scene in Terminator (1984) is replaced
by the horror on the face of MichaelJ. Fox when his mother makes a pass
at him. It is as if the narrative resolution becomes dependent on the
abolition of the limit of time. This abolition also involves a negotiation
with death.
Two of the most popular movies of the early 1990s, Field of Dreams
(1989) and Ghost (1990) are examples of a whole cluster of films in
which death itself is overcome. Ghost, which operates around a dead
man, is interesting in that it combines another favourite concern of the
1980s- Wall Street- with the idea of life after death. Justice is only
achieved through divine intervention and the spectral colonization of
the body of a black woman by a dead white man.
Field of Dreams is a Reaganite fantasy where the unheimlich
becomes heimlich (literally German for unhomely and homely - two
words used by Freud in his essay 'The Uncanny', to give a sense of
something we thought was safe, homely, turning into something
terrifying that we do not recognize, something uncanny). In a
devastating series of loops predicated on the near death of a small
girl, the film allows a man to 'have it all': the house, the wife, the child,
the dead father and the entrance fee of twenty dollars. Costner's
dream is resecured in the present, but only by bypassing the limit term
of death. It is also important that the central character is a man, a
father, a son and a husband- patriarchy is secured and the dead father
placated.
However, in postmodernist cinema, death is not an equalizer and its
limit-line becomes an organizer of gender. Thelma and Louise (1991)
suffer a very different fate to that of Kevin Costner's character in Field
of Dreams. What Thelma and Louise try to avoid is 'Texas', a place in
this film where women get raped; rape here being constructed as the
high point of heterosexual difference. In attempting to 'go around'
Texas they are caught by the law- in the end, to borrow a phrase from
the first series of Star Trek, 'they attempt to boldly go where no man has
gone before', beyond patriarchy, signification and difference, but they
can't. The image freezes, time goes into reverse. We celebrate their past,
not their broken bodies, in a frozen, almost sublime moment at the edge
of the collapse of difference.

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CoNCLUSION

We would like to suggest that there has been a shift in the formal and
aesthetic structuring within the films that may be called postmodern.
This shift may be marked historically, but as with modernism and
postmodernism, there is no pure break. Films such as Blade Runner,
Terminator, Alien and Brazil show an anxiety concerning both the
present and the future constructed out of the visual detritus of the past
and the signifiers of historical trauma. For example, the scenes of the
future catastrophe in Terminator could be argued to be drawing their
signification from the Holocaust, Hiroshima or Cambodia after Pol
Pot's Year Zero.
However, in more recent films the real relations of capital become
occluded, fetishized, from the total space of the film - only to return
in/on the body of an appropriate other, be it woman, alien or black.
Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Forrest Gump (1994) are films that strongly
represent this tendency. Reservoir Dogs is a film in which all others
(almost) are held at the level of speech. The 'Dogs' worry around the
signifiers of woman, black people, Jews and homosexuals. However, we
would like to suggest that there is a resonance here between the
hystericized bodies of men already commented on and the hystericized
speech of men in this film. This speech is predicated on anxiety. So
although we are presented with what is almost a cloning of a certain kind
of white heterosexual masculinity as a defence against the postmodern
condition, and the fetishistic pleasures of the visual and aural surfaces of
the film as it attempts to defend against any suggestion of crisis, the
particularities of the speech of the 'Dogs' says something else: 'What do
women want? Are they virgins or whores? Do they earn to much of too
little? In the case of black women, are they strong or subservient to their
men?' The sexuality of black men and women carries with it the intensity
we have spoken of earlier in this essay; but it is the sexuality of black men
that is the real problem for the 'Dogs', especially when combined with
the 'threat' of homosexuality. The difficulty of a film full of men - a
subject already well documented in modernist film theory- is displaced
and projected into the discourses of homophobia and racism. What it
finally produces is their deaths; the real conditions of existence return
revealing a white heterosexual masculinity in crisis.
Forrest Gump, on the other hand, rather than holding anxiety at the
level of speech gives two accounts of the period of US history from
Vietnam until the present day, accounts which are gendered, and where
the benefits and costs are placed on opposite sides of the gender divide.

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Once again, the trauma is absorbed by the body of the woman from her
abused childhood to her death from AIDS. Gump goes from success to
success, never stopping, never understanding. In the film Forrest Gump,
as Slavoj Zizek has said, 'ideology lays its cards on the table, reveals the
secret of its functioning, and still continues to function'. Gump, like
the 'Dogs', is a perfect representation of 'subjectless subjectivity', 'the
absolute proletarian' (Zizek after Marx). He understands nothing, does
everything he is told and becomes a hero and a billionaire. (In fact, the
'stupid' man as hero has become a new Hollywood sub-genre: Dumb and
Dumber, Beavis and Butthead, the characters played by Jim Carrey,
The Hudsucker Proxy, King Ralph and Homer Simpson.) This is very
different from the work of sexual difference in Ridley Scott's Alien
(1979) - a film we would see as representative of early postmodern
cinema. In Alien, we can witness the beginnings of the trauma con-
cerning the emergence of strong women- but we also see capital, in the
form of the Company, represented very negatively. The alien itself could
be read as the embodiment of the desire of the Company, not a
representation of the 'absolute proletarian', but rather of the absolute
of capital itself. Conversely, in Reservoir Dogs and Forrest Gump there
is an attempt to protect masculinity from the demands of the new
postmodern market-place where the play of difference is permitted so
long as it is commodifiable.
So, we are suggesting that later postmodern cinema attempts to deal
with the conditions of late capitalism but gets caught in the meshes of
the logic of difference. It might be useful here to look at Barton Fink
(1991), a Coen Brothers film which, like Gump and Dogs, demonstrates
the formal and aesthetic signifiers of a thoroughlypostmodern text (it is
one of Jameson's nostalgia movies). However, unlike the former films,
it can be read thematically and politically as an allegory of the post-
modern condition. Set in 'the golden age of Hollywood' (on the verge of
the USA's entry into the Second World War), the film shows the
pathetic impossibility of Barton Fink's position as a left-wing Jewish
writer 'bought' by, appropriately, Capital Pictures, and set to work
producing hack scripts about 'big men in tights'. He finds that he can no
longer write. All he can do is look at the pin-up someone has left on the
sweating wall of his hotel bedroom. His neighbour, Charlie Meadows,
who sweats as much as the hotel walls, is a travelling insurance salesman
who 'eases the pain' of his clients/victims by shooting and decapitating
them. Fink sleeps with the abused partner of his former idol, a drunken
writer reminiscent of William Faulkner. Not only is she the true creator
of the writer's scripts (again a woman structures the narrative!), but she

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POSTMODERNISM AND THE CINEMA

is also the serial killer's next victim while she and Fink sleep after sex (a
woman's corpse sutures the narrative). Mter her death Fink is able to
reproduce his own stories about working-class fishmongers. In this, he
neither satisfies the demands of Hollywood nor hears the other tales of
the human condition continually offered to him by the one represen-
tative of the working class in the film- the killer. The final sequence tells
the story in terms of a destroyed masculinity, a destroyed left politics
and a femininity split into its extreme corporeal components. Fink sits
on a beach, his ideal woman, the pin-up from his hotel bedroom, appears
'in the flesh' (indeed the whole mise-en-scene is that of the pin-up
photograph). Next to him is a box that we all know contains the head of
the woman murdered in his bed. His destruction produces a thoroughly
imaginary fetish, and a little piece of the real, at the point of the greatest
military conflict the world has ever seen. The dream and the horror
are brought together on this beach, with Fink unable to grasp either of
them fully.
The discourse of the Enlightenment can be accused of hiding its
history of slavery and oppression- part of the very conditions that made
it possible. Postmodernism raises those conditions to the level of the
signifier, making them part of the pleasure of the text, whether we are
talking about the space of drugs, crime and deprivation inhabited, at the
level of signification, by most of black Hollywood at the moment, or the
female corpses that litter the postmodern movie scene. As auciences we
view, and yet do not see, that the blood, torture, death and horror that
visually enframes the postmodern narrative, that provides the very
meat of its drama, are psychic compensations for the vivid yet blank
perfection of its commodity form.

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