Postmodernist Quietism in Polanski's Chinatown and Lynch's Mulholland Drive

Abstract

F ONE ISSUE VEXES ADVOCATES OF POSTMODERNIST THOUGHT MORE THAN any other today, it may be the increasingly apparent susceptibility of that thought to co-optation by the rationalized corporate forces it was largely intended to oppose. Deleuze and Guattari once championed a schizophrenic ‘‘body without organs’’ to unleash institutionally quashed, potentially revolutionary desires, but the type of subjectivity they imagined seems most readily available to us today when channel or Web surfing. Jean Baudrillard once celebrated simulacra for their ability to undermine the ‘‘Real,’’ on which all rational authority is founded, but our total immersion in simulations has clearly only abetted the eminently rational corporations that shovel them out to us. And Jean-Francois Lyotard once advocated a respect for ‘‘differends,’’ or irreconcilable clashes between various cultural/ personal/political perspectives, but the fact that ‘‘agreeing to disagree’’ is now de rigeur on countless talk shows and news panels has hardly impeded the concentration of the world’s wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Those of us who felt, in recent decades, the allure of postmodernist thought as a progressive political tool—who sensed in it a successor for a deeply indicted Marxism—must ask ourselves how what we thought was so inviolably ours seems to be turning more and more each year into something of theirs. We must ask ourselves what happened that such recent commentators as David Hawkes can claim, without sounding particularly hysterical, that postmodernist thought is actually ‘‘nothing more than the ideology of consumer capitalism’’ (12).