Postmodernism - A way of grouping and describing the styles of thought and culture attracting most critical attention during the final few decades of the twentieth century. 'Postmodernist thought' has caused a revolution across all academic disciplines, from Physics to English via Geography. Postmodernism offers a different way of both constructing and deconstructing ideas.
Postmodern media rejects the idea that any media product or text is of any greater value than another. All judgements of value are merely taste.
All ideas of "the truth" are just competing claims - or discourses and what we believe to be the truth at any point is merely the "winning" discourse.
'Postmodernism' refers to several, now familiar, aspects of contemporary media:
1. Hybridity- (the mixing and sampling of different kinds and levels - of hip hop music, of material intelevision ads, films, etc.). Hybrid forms are said to level hierarchies of taste. It is said that all distinctions between high culture and popular culture, have gone,or become blurred. Postmodern texts 'raid the image bank' which is so richly available through video andcomputer technologies, recycle some old movies and shows on television, the Internet etc. Music, film andTV provide excellent examples of these processes.This is similar to bricolage…
2. Bricolage– (a French word meaning 'jumble') this is used to refer to the process of adaptation or improvisation where aspects of one style are given quite different meanings when compared with stylistic features from another. For Dick Hebdige (1979) youth subcultural groups such as punks, with their bondage gear and use of swastikas were eclectic as they took clothes associated with different class positions or work 17
functions and converted them into fashion statements 'empty' of their original meanings. A more recent, feminised example would be the combination of Doc Martens and summer dresses worn by young women and girls and the central figure of Amelie (2001) or GhostWorld (2001).Bricolage is quite a useful way of looking at certain media forms such as music videos andadvertising that increasingly seem to mix together a wide range of different images that donot appear to have any connection, except that they are somehow 'modern'. Another film that is often called postmodern is Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), which alsomixes pieces from various different types of genre: gangster films, sporting films, comedy,etc. Part of the 'pleasure' in watching this film is its 'intertextuality' (see later) identifying the references to other types of film. An example of bricolage might be the scene at a restaurant, 'Jack Rabbit Slim's'. In this scene John Travolta is dressed like a cowboy and'copies' his Saturday Night Fever dance routine surrounded by images of dead film starsfrom the 1950s and 1960s. Later he does 'the twist', a dance from the 1960s. The people working in the restaurant are dressed like Disney cartoon characters.
3. Simulation- the blurring of real and ‘simulated’, especially in film and reality TV or celebrity magazines. Simulation or hyperreality refers to not only theincreasing use of CGI in films like TheLord of the Rings films (2001-2004)and Avatar (2009), but also in the use of documentary style in fiction such as Michael Winterbottom’s In ThisWorld (2002) or in the narrative enigmas of science fiction such as TheMatrix (1999) or Blade Runner (1982):'Is it human or artificial’?
4. Intertextuality – from referencing the structure of the slasher horror film in Scream(1996) to the Italian American gangsters watching The Godfather films in The Sopranos television series (2001—9), intertextuality is now a familiar postmodern flourish across most moving image media and Jameson specifies pastiche and parodyas belonging to a similar idea. This self-reflexive awareness of itself as a text is also termed hyperconsciousness.
5. Disjointed narrative structures -These are said to mimic the uncertainties and relativism of postmodernity in films like Pulp Fiction(1994) as contemporary narratives oftenwon’t guarantee identifications with characters, or the 'happy ending' or metanarratives like the Defeat of the Enemy, which have traditionally beenachieved at the end of films. They oftenmanage only a play with multiple, or heavily ironic, perhaps 'unfinished' or even parodic endings - see Memento
6. The erosion of history -in non-fiction forms such as television news; in the deliberate blurring of time in films such as Cock and Bull Story (2005) or the extravagant play with historical fact in, say, Elizabeth (1998) or Saving Private Ryan (1998) or Pearl Harbor (2001) historical facts and characters are telescoped, merged or discarded entirely. Historycan be viewed nostalgically or with suspicion.
7. The active audience– postmodern theories suggest that there is a decoding process going on among audiences who no longer use the passively media for gratification.Postmodern audiences read texts actively because they recognise the importance of the analysis of various clues or signs, particularly visual signs, that shape so much of modern media output by the audience. At its simplest level, the audience accept or agree with the encoded meanings sent out by a text, they accept and refine parts of the text's meanings or they are aware of the dominant meaning of the text but reject it for cultural, political or personal reasons.
8. Blurring of boundaries- It's easy to spot how boundaries between 'high' and'low' culture have been eroded. This idea is alluring because of the democratic implications - there's no such thing as bad taste; you can enjoy, consume, shopfor what you like - all class hierarchies have disappeared. However, paradoxically, for there to be any thrillin transgressing boundaries, like those between 'high' and 'low' forms in Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet (1997) or Shakespeare in Love (1998), those boundaries need still to have some meaning — and indeed they do, if you think of the huge industry still associated with the status and name of Shakespeare and his continuing cultural importance.
9. A society of spectacle – Postmodern media texts share a delight in surface style and superficiality, a delight in trivial rather than dominant forms fromconversations about burgers inPulp Fiction (1994) to LindsayLohan or Victoria Beckham appearing in Ugly Betty (2008) – and an alternative, excited, ironictone involving scepticism aboutserious values. Andy Medhurst (1997) points outthat this approach containselements of ‘camp’ – atraditionally male homosexual personality trait - no ‘camp’ man can claim the pompous authority of many white males, sohe may as well laugh at things that are taken seriously. He continues:Camp, eludes a single, crisp definition ... It is a configuration of tastecodes and a declaration of effeminate interest... It revels in exaggeration,theatricality, parody and bitching…postmodern aesthetics can easily be confused with camp, but while camp grows from a specific cultural identity, postmodern discourses peddle the arrogant fiction that specific cultural identities have ceased to exist.(Medhurst 1997).
10.This delight in superficiality is countered by a different postmodern approach thatinvolves anatmosphere of decay and alienation– 'structures of feeling'that find echoesin the music of Radiohead or Aphex Twin , the films Blade Runner and Fight Club, the music videos and advertising of Chris Cunningham.One problem with the postmodern approach tomedia is that many postmodern media texts seem uninterested in the extent to which spectacle,simulation and special effects, hybridity andremakes, intertextuality and generic mixing, havealwaysbeen a part of Hollywood (the first KingKong (see right) was released in 1933) and popular genres, and have always been understoodas such by audiences. It is assumed instead thataudiences and the popular forms they enjoy arealways to be distrusted and bemoaned. The extent to which special effects and spectacle are part of contemporary media may indeed beunprecedented. But do these changes render anykind of realist media work impossible or unattractive to audiences?
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