Postmodern Literature, Postmodern Film

Last week, I promised a piece about Drive, the recent critical darling and postmodern genre piece starring Ryan Gosling. That’s still coming. Thanks to a late-night viewing of Japanese “workman” director Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, I was inspired to write a piece on postmodernity in cinema and genre filmmaking in general. My piece on Drive will follow this personal discussion of the Postmodern.

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There are works of art that I’ve come across over the years that have honestly changed my life. I’m not sure if this kind of thing happens to “normal people,” if such people exist, but ever since I was young I’ve been aware of the possibility of using art – whether it’s a movie, a novel, an album, a photograph – to push one’s own identity in a different direction. There are works out there that I connected to in a way that inspired me to change my personal style, my philosophies in life, and my career goals.

One of those works of art was White Noise, a postmodern novel by Don DeLillo that I read in English class when I was 17. Up until that point, I had almost always immersed myself in “classic” American films and modernist literature. That eerie tone, the sharp social commentary, the surreal imagery, the consumption-obsessed, death-fearing characters all contributed to kind of stylistic revolution in my mind. The thing that struck me hardest, what really knocked me on my ass, was DeLillo’s mixture of high and low art, that defining characteristic of postmodernism that I didn’t quite grasp yet.  For example, in the novel, two eloquent professors discuss cereal boxes as the modern American avant-garde before moving onto a dialogue about the fear of death.  You know, that type of thing.  It destroyed everything I knew about style.

It was all a big surprise, then, when I came to film school only to hear words of scorn for postmodernity in general. In USC’s legendary introductory film class, Cinema 190, Professor Casper has become known for his (general but not total) disdain for what he deemed “postmodern” films, which he categorized (again, generally) as anything released after 1977, the year of the first Star Wars and beginning of the Blockbuster Era.

For me, postmodernity was a literary term and as far as I was concerned, postmodern film hadn’t even been seen yet. “What we’re going through in post-1977 American cinema can’t be postmodernity, because it isn’t anything like postmodern literature,” I thought. Surely the depressing onslaught of cinematic formula (from identical action films to identical spectacle disaster movies to identical romantic comedies) can’t have anything to do with the postmodern literature that flattened me.

But apparently it does.

In a weirdly positive review of the film Earth Girls Are Easy, legendary critic Jonathan Rosenbaum says that

postmodernist artists as disparate as Thomas Pynchon, the Beatles, Philip Glass, and the makers of music videos (Temple included) think nothing of making Cuisinart blends without any sense of pathos or regret. The negative side of this can be seen in the average rock video, where the entire history of cinema — modernist and nonmodernist alike — is represented, but with all of its meaning and effect stripped away. Through a process of equalizing and synthesizing all sorts of contradictory materials, what tends to emerge is a kind of nerveless mush, easy to consume and often impossible to remember.

Basically, postmodern films tend to draw so heavily on such a wide variety of “high” and “low” sources (namely the structuring conventions of classic drama and the dressing of 21st century popular consumer culture) that the final results become an unintelligible mess of styles and reference points missing their context.

13 Assassins

However, Rosenbaum finds a bright side:

But the positive side of this kind of mix, which the work of Temple [the filmmaker in question] illustrates, is the elimination of all the snobbery and condescension about culture and class that modernism often entails–and the implication, more pragmatic than pathetic, that if we have to eat mush, it might as well be tasty.

In truth, if this project of mine is all modern American film culture, it’s really about postmodern cinema, which encompasses everything from playful throwback genre movies (Drive being an American example and 13 Assassins a Japanese one) to those CGI spectacle disaster films (the oeuvre of Roland Emmerich) to nihilistic and satirical absurdity (Crank, Crank 2: High Voltage). A valid discussion of modern American film culture couldn’t be complete without a discussion of the various categories which make up the scene, but it’s worth noting that these films all have something in common: they draw heavily from past styles or modes of communication. There is no avoiding the conspicuous absence of the Genuine Original, as nearly every commercially successful film is in some respect heavily indebted to the past.

“Mush” is bad. There’s no way I can get around that idea. When the merger of disparate styles reaches its logical conclusion, all you’re left with is a kind of paint-by-numbers genre piece, with the signifiers of genre formula grounding us in the “story.” But to label all postmodern film as “mush,” a million styles without a trace of meaning, is to dismiss an era of American creative work that contains not a few gems. Just because some postmodern filmmakers fail doesn’t mean they all do.

In a culture obsessed with image and fiction, what could be better subjects than our own cultural products, the popular films that serve as our secular scriptures? Is culture itself the true subject of postmodern film? If a culture’s artistic output reflects or represents its obsessions, then ours – stuffed with sequels and remakes and superheroes – indicates a preoccupation with our own escapes. These films aren’t based on real-life experiences; they’re based on popular art. I suspect the true subject of postmodern film is fictional cinema itself.