Explain Postmodernism using examples from film and television.

Shamma Sispal

Identity, Culture and Difference

This essay aims to further the understanding of the meaning and significance of the concept of postmodernism and the culture surrounding it, by exploring the distinctive role which television and films play in modern societies. It highlights the ways in which movies and programmes have altered and continue to alter our everyday experiences.

Since the early 1980’s the debate on postmodern culture and the issues of cultural change, and other relations between time and space has been immense. For a long period of time now it has been taught that we are moving from the period known as the 'modern' era into a time of uncertainty, known as the 'postmodern' era or 'postmodernity'.

The ‘modern’ context refers to the self confident, highly secular, humanistic worldview, whereas the ‘postmodern’ reflects the collapse of the Enlightenment paradigm, and abandonment of the search for objective truth and meaning. It represents not a complete rupture from modernism, but where elements that could be found in modernism appear in postmodernism with added emphasis and intensity.

It has been said that one of Postmodernism’s absolutes is choice. We have the right to refuse to passively absorb the postmodern ideology reflected through television and films. It is our own free will that enables us to do this, if we desire. It may be thought that postmodernity is the preserve of the academic world, and therefore has no bearing on culture and the individual. However, I believe that it affects the majority of people and is not just seen in extreme cases, but is expressed through popular culture by pop bands (U2 and Madonna are good examples), magazines, books and films and television.

Hutcheon (1989) argues that even as postmodernism makes representations, it also challenges the reality of representations. He argues that postmodernism ‘takes the form of a self-conscious, self-contradicting, self-undermining statement: it is rather like saying something with inverted commas around it’ (1989:1).

In other words, postmodernism is a form of ironic knowingness. It is ironic because it understands the very limitations and conditions of its own knowing.

There are two paradigms of postmodern thinking. On the one hand are those who condemn the postmodern. According to this dystopian model, by imploding the opposition of high and mass culture, past and present, outside and inside, postmodern culture prohibits the possibility of analytical awareness and historical consciousness. Television combines multiple narratives within an omnipresent flow, so might consequently be seen as a form which neutralises any position for the viewer to take time and consider meaning.

Before the audience has time to consider meaning, another position is offered in turn, disrupting the possibility of critical reflection. The contrasting Utopian model on the other hand, claims postmodernisms self-reflexive strategies allow liberation. According to this theory, TV’s multiplicity may construct an open text. The viewer is allowed to wonder freely producing whatever meanings best correlate with the cultural competencies brought upon them.

From such contrasting concepts, evaluations of television have polarised around the question of postmodernism and ideology, claiming we are either in a realm of complete pacification due to an endless disposal of meanings or in an affective democracy where the power of ideology is null and void.

As mentioned before, we live in a time which offers us, as an audience, multiple realities. Television is a good example of this. As Glenn Ward writes:

“Moving into different realities can be done at the push of a button. Everywhere you look different, perhaps contradictory messages, images and ideas jostle for attention. In this new media domain, anything can go with anything; like a game with no rules”.

As there are no charges for broadcast reception, the free availability of television entangles its viewers in a continual cycle of consumption, implicating us further into capitalism. The popularity of melodramas has historically been linked to times of intense social crisis. This is not to say our crises are more meaningful or meaningless than those of other eras, but that postmodern life has been represented, leading to a particular cultural and televisual landscape.

Television programme, Miami Vice is seen as postmodern in two ways. Kellner (1992) argues that the identities of the two main detectives- Crocket and Tubbs ...

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Television programme, Miami Vice is seen as postmodern in two ways. Kellner (1992) argues that the identities of the two main detectives- Crocket and Tubbs are ‘unstable, fluid, fragmentary, disconnected, multiple, open and subject to dramatic transformation’. This is indicated through their constantly changing appearances and style, together with their exchanging of identities as cops with undercover roles. In adopting these roles, Crocket and Tubbs slip in and out of a variety of identities suggesting that identity is not prearranged but a construction based on style and choice. Hence, this preoccupation with surface appearance is closely linked with consumerism as people are encouraged to buy an image rather than content.

The Simpsons is also seen as postmodern in that it has made a ‘dysfunctional’ American family the ironic stars of a series which is on the one hand not only a cartoon, but on the other hand also reflects American life and culture. It is not a surprise that the centre of the Simpsons’ life is the television set and that the programme makes a series of references to other TV programmes and genres. ‘The Itchy and Scratchy show’ is a cartoon watched by the Simpson children. It both imitates Tom and Jerry and ridicules the double standard by which we condemn TV violence even as we absorb it. Furthermore, The Simpsons requires us to have a self-conscious awareness of TV and film so that the ending of one episode is a full remaking of the final sequence in the film The Graduate.

South Park, also a cartoon, resembles The Simpsons in its use of irony and intertextuality. In particular it presents us with a range of racially prejudiced, sexist and opinionated characters, and comprises of distorted stereotypes. As we laugh at these cartoon characters we arguably insinuate the need for anti-racism and anti-sexism. The issue here is are we to express disapproval of the representation of the African-American chef as the ‘Barry White’ figure or does it lead us to critically assess the stereotyping of African-Americans as sexy macho singers? As with The Simpsons, it must be debated as to whether audiences interpret postmodern television in ‘critical’ terms or simply as ‘playfulness’, or indeed whether ‘playfulness’ is ‘critical’ (Barker, 2000)

Postmodern television does not follow the conventions of realism and narrative; rather it plays with these conventions, like in Twin Peaks. In the early days of television, producers made every attempt to hide the cameras and equipment; now a series of Moonlighting can finish with the crew coming on set and dismantling the equipment around the actors. It was argued that the domination of the television screen by realism poses particular problems for the cultural politics of representation. On the one hand realism can be seen to maintain the status quo through its illusion of representing the world ‘as it is’ rather than exploring its own conditions of production, an achievement which both modernism and postmodernism strive towards. On the other hand, realism may be the language with which television can best communicate with its audience.

TV narrative provides a method of consuming the past. Melodramas in particular play on this hollow sense of time, in its frequent replaying of yesterdays shows, and as old plots are regularly recycled. TV fosters a sense of living tradition, a continuously available history that appeals to the nostalgic mode of postmodern culture. With no values to be achieved, melodramas offer no final closure- its narratives therefore repetitive and irresolvable. This is clear in the weekly episodes of Doctor and detective drama Columbo, in which characters are doomed endlessly to re-enact the dilemmas propelling their shows.

Soap operas on the other hand provide continuous stories that seem to demand a historical sense of time. In a genre whose form has been described as having an “indefinitely expandable middle” lacking beginning and end, viewers and characters are trapped in a conflictual present (Porter, 1999).

Television programmes disrupt traditional notions of coherent time, position and identity, manipulating the past to encourage continued consumption. The returning of dead figures in Dallas and Eastenders are good examples of this.

Much of the narrative on postmodern film and cinema refers to Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade runner, seeing its dystopia as both expectations for the future and an analysis of the present. The style of the film is postmodern in that it is eclectic and varied, as it incorporates Japanese design, American consumerism and robotic technology. Eclecticism is seen as a virtue not a flaw. As Lyotard puts it: “eclecticism is the zero degree of contemporary general culture: one which listens to reggae, watches a Western, eats McDonalds’ food and wears Retro clothes in Hong Kong: knowledge is a matter for TV games”. Postmodern films are claimed to be based more on style and appearance rather than content, and suggests that the audiences now consume films based on design.

Characteristics of postmodern horror films, such as Bram Stoker’s film Dracula, show a violent disruption to everyday life for audiences, leading them to question the validity of rationality. This film genre produces a bounded experience of fear and creates a paranoid world view under attack from inexplicable internal threats.

The science fiction films The Matrix, Terminator and Back to the Future show history as fluid, fragile and unpredictable. The ‘reality’ time travellers often find the past does not match their expectations. Time traveller characters in these films interact with history, often creating paradoxes and inconsistencies. They attempt to use the past for their own purposes and experience time as compressed. Vivian Sobchack says:

"The new postmodern science fiction films tend to conflate past, present, and future…Back to the Future is perhaps the most explicit representation of Sci-Fi's new conservative nostalgia and its conflation and homogenization of temporal distinction”.

In Back to the Future, Hill Valley is the stage for past, alternate present, and future scenes. In Marty's experience all these times get collapsed together.

Cited in The Condition of Postmodernity David Harvey claims, "in the last two decades, we have been experiencing an intense phase of time-space compression that has had a disorienting and disruptive impact upon political-economic practices, the balance of class power, as well as upon cultural and social life”.

The Terminator films are chilling warnings against technology that has been taken too far. The search for more powerful and smart weapons leads to annihilation. In the end, however, humanity gets a second chance, and a new hope exists that if a Terminator can be reprogrammed not to kill, perhaps even humans can too.

Time travel films have indeed become a money making scheme. Reasons for their success are complex, but part of it is that these films touch the public's psyche by reflecting our culture's emerging postmodern experience of time and history-and yet still have happy endings. If these popular postmodern movies have a common moral, it is that the moral decisions of our past create or change our future.

In conclusion, defining ‘postmodernism’, a notoriously slippery word, has led to many arguments. As a concept, postmodernism began in architecture and rippled out to other disciplines, and it can be broadly characterized as a reaction to modernism. Postmodernism is a mixture of multiple perspectives, irony, ambiguity, eclecticism and compressed concepts of space and time. In other words, Postmodernity has been seen as a discursive regime in which numerous textual fragments are combined into a flow that lacks stable history. The last decade has seen an increasing number of titles emerging on the subject of postmodernism. It seems most of the work based on postmodern cinema and television is concerned with similar texts, for example, Blade Runner, The Terminator and The Simpsons are recurring examples.

Television parallels film and cinema both in form and content as it centres on familiar space and location in the home. It is ideally suited to reveal the strains of bourgeois culture with all of the contradictions it involves. Melodrama is an ideal form for postmodern culture and for television. A form which arises from a fragmented network of space and time yet still seems to offer a sense of wholeness, reality and living history. It provides a world into which we can fully immerse ourselves and evoke emotions which we can immediately identify with. According to Baudrillard, events are already inscribed by the media in advance as TV and film is diffracted into reality and reality is diffracted into our TV. Signifying we find more signs and images but without order or direction. Of course this description of postmodern culture may not in fact be true, though it does seem to be ‘real’. The fear that meaningful identity and rational expression have somehow escaped us-that we have lost all grounding in our culture and lives-has led us to a situation that politicians and commercial investors have been happy to exploit.

If anything can be learned form postmodernity - apart from being engaged in its game played with a reader or a spectator, that is - its message will be not to trust what can be seen, to question everything - a message that, apart from informing, still plays a dirty trick on its recipient.

This is exactly the message of The Matrix. The whole idea of the film is an assault not only on spectators' senses, but on their common sense as well. Leaving the cinema, one may think about being so fortunate and living in the reality of the 1990s, and not in the monstrous future depicted on the big screen. Yet, after a moment, one realizes that the characters in the film also think that they live in the relatively peaceful 1990s. According to a French philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard, the condition of postmodernism is 'scepticism towards all metanarratives' (Appignanesi, 1995: 103). The postmodern ambience of the film makes spectators question yet another metanarrative - this of the time they live in - and of what they perceive as reality.

In the film itself this reality is nothing more than Jean Baudrillard's postmodern simulacrum: an image that originated from a reflection of the reality (here, the world at the end of the 20th century) only to become, through masking the absence of the reality, an independently existing simulacrum that has no relation to any reality (Appignanesi, 1995: 130-132). Appignanesi denotes that the people of today 'are living what has already been lived and reproduced with no reality anymore but that of the cannibalized image' (1995: 49). In The Matrix the future people live something even worse: a simulation of that cannibalized image. The reference to Baudrillard's ideas is not a coincidence, as the protagonist of the story, Neo, is shown hiding illegal software in Baudrillard's book Simulacra & Simulation, just as gunfighters in classic western films used to hide their weapons in the Bible. Moreover, the French philosopher is quoted throughout the film.

The above mentioned borrowing from westerns is not the only one. The Matrix, as a good postmodern work, plays with conventions and motifs and, therefore, quotes all the time. The directors play with viewers, making them guess the original sources - and those are numerous. From the Kafkaesque scene of Neo's interrogation to the shooting scene that resembles of Arnold Schwarzenegger entering the police station in the first Terminator. From antagonists in a form of mysterious agents, resembling of a modern myth of Men In Black, to Neo playing Superman in the final scene. Or from the Alien-like scene of debugging Neo to the reversed version of the Snow White. Not to mention quoting Through the looking Glass and The Wizard of Oz. But probably the most important citations are those from the Bible. The anagram of the main character's name is One and he is often, though not directly, referred to as the Messiah. Other biblical images, as the one of Zion, continuously reappear throughout the film. And all of that is served in the sauce of mixed and blended conventions: of science fiction film, of action movie, even of romance and horror - and all of that with ever-present touch of humor.

The general concept of The Matrix - of the virtual replacing the real - enables one to treat the 'not-really-real' reality presented in the film as text and, therefore, allows textualization of the whole story - and of the character's lives - to a degree not possible in any conventional setting. What we used to consider real is said to be nothing more than simulation. What we used to consider fantasy is now a frightening reality - that of machines taking over the world. But the future people mostly live within the text, within the fantasy created by the machines - within the matrix. Most of them are only readers, taking this simulated reality 'as is'. But the initiates can shape it to their will, just as creative readers can reinterpret the text. The most vicious antagonists, sinister agents, are neither people not even real beings, but merely computer programs. The agents exist only within the text, yet they can harm, even kill. Here, a play with conventions is also a play on words: those agents look like government officials working for a secret bureau, but an agent is also a computer program that automatically performs complex tasks.

Additionally, not only Neo, but many other names of characters have symbolic meaning as well. The man who wakes the human beings up from their seemingly endless sleep is Morpheus. The woman who completes the team of Neo and Morpheus is called Trinity. And, finally, the traitor's name is Cypher, bearing a suspicious resemblance to Lucypher.

Among the people who have seen The Matrix, there are those who may have liked its spectacular moments at first, but little by little grew disappointed with the film and, finally, started to disregard it, seeing it as nothing more but a series of kung-fu fights in science fiction setting. Many reviewers think that way. But people who like the film can watch it innumerous times, and every time they see it, they spot new elements and layers in this postmodern riddle.

References
Appignanesi, Richard. 1995. Postmodernism for Beginners. Cambridge: Icon.
The Matrix . Dir. Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. Warner Bros. 1999.

Bibliography.

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McRobbie, A (1994). Postmodernism and Popular Culture. Routledge:London.
Cahoone, L (1996). From Modernism to Postmodernism. Blackwell Publishers: London.