Postmodernism and The Cinema
Postmodernism and The Cinema
Postmodernism and The Cinema
THE CINEMA
vAL HILL AND PETER EVERY
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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.
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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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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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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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