Postmodernism the Movie

Abstract

Postmodern cinema, in its various expressions over the past three decades, represents a form of popular culture characteristic of the post-Fordist, globalized phase of capitalist development most visible in the United States. As a crucial dimension of media culture with its strong emphasis on new modes of technology, commodification, consumerism, and the society of the spectacle, filmmaking today celebrates increasingly diverse, experimental, and in some cases subversive types of aesthetic representation. It often questions established social hierarchies and discourses while at the same time depicting a society in the midst of turmoil, chaos, fragmentation, and violence - a social order that gives rise to and sustains a popular mood of anxiety, cynicism, and powerlessness. Postmodern cinema reflects and helps reproduce this milieu through its embrace of disjointed narratives, dystopic images, technological wizardry, and motifs dwelling upon mayhem, ambiguity, death of the classical hero, and breakdown of dominant values or social relations. While such film culture calls into question certain dimensions of the class and power structures, it simultaneously negates prospects for collective identity and subjectivity required for effective social change; its cultural radicalism is never translated into anything resembling political radicalism. On the contrary, postmodern cinema more than anything encourages a flight from politics - a cynical, detached, disempowering attitude toward the entire public sphere - typical of an increasingly depoliticized society.