2       NIHILISTIC POSTMODERNISMS

This chapter will explore the work of key theorists who offer nihilistic constructions of postmodernity and postmodern aesthetics: Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson.* This will involve outlining their overall position before focusing on their respective constructions of postmodern aesthetics and their relation to Hollywood cinema. I will demonstrate that Jameson’s work has been the most influential in the conception of post-modern Hollywood, which will involve analysing the book-length adaptation of his position by M. Keith Booker. My overall argument will show that the take up of Jameson’s conception of postmodern aesthetics in relation to Hollywood cinema seriously circumscribes the aesthetic possibilities of postmodern Hollywood film.

I want to begin this chapter by introducing the work of Friedrich Nietzsche because he holds an undisputed place as a key predecessor to postmodern theory. The first section of Lawrence Cahoone’s anthology, From Modernism to Postmodernism (1996), offers single extracts from Descartes, Hegel and Kant while including four extracts from Nietzsche’s works. Following the temporal structures of Lyotard’s model, Nietzsche’s work can be reappraised as an eruption of postmodern theorising within the modern. While Lyotard finds elements of the postmodern sublime in both Kant and Burke, he does not locate it in Nietzsche. However, reviewing Nietzsche’s work as that of a philosopher in search of rules that come into being as he writes is helpful for thinking about the ways in which his writing and writing style encapsulate many of the key tenets of postmodern theorising. Moreover, Nietzsche sets up a distinction between nihilistic and affirmative models of theorising that will be utilised across chapters two and three.

Friedrich Nietzsche

As can be seen from its title, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a parody of the Bible in which Nietzsche’s prophet protagonist, Zarathustra, announces the death of God and the birth of the overman. Zarathustra is characterised as a teacher; like John the Baptist he comes to pave the way, rather than constituting a new Messiah. ‘Behold I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes’ (Nietzsche 1982: 125). In this quote, the declamatory rhetoric of the prophet is used to undermine the Christian hope of an afterlife or Paradise. Indeed such hopes are denounced as poisonous for they teach people to devalue and neglect earthly life, the material world and their bodily presence within it.

In contrast to the blueprint of the good life and good soul set out in the New Testament, Zarathustra repeatedly characterises the overman as a process and not a final state: ‘What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under’ (1982: 127). The process of going under is the opposite of the movement of reaching Heavenwards typical of Christianity. Moreover the rhythmic balance of the over – the overture as new beginning – and the going under is typical of Nietzsche’s prose style, undermining any sense of attaining a fixed state. The imagery of the bridge is later expanded to form ‘the rainbow and bridges of the overman’ (1982: 163). Here the image of the rainbow reworks the bridge to form an arcing structure whose endpoint, according to folk-lore, can never be found.

The journey of becoming that constitutes the overman is fundamentally linked to the question of value, requiring man to break away from all imposed, external values – particularly those of Christianity – and to begin generating his own values. It should be noted that only a male subject can pursue the project of becoming an overman (1982: 178–9). Zarathustra offers the narrative of a three-stage metamorphosis that man must undergo in order to become the creator of his own values: becoming a camel, a lion, and finally a child (1982: 137–40). The camel speeds into the desert, the biblical setting for trials of spiritual endurance. Once in the depths of the desert, the camel becomes a lion and ‘seeks out his last master … and his last god’, the great dragon ‘“Thou shalt”’ (1982: 138). The name of the dragon clearly recalls the famous formulation of the Ten Commandments in Exodus, thus ‘values, thousands of years old, shine on [its] scales’ (1982: 139). Becoming a lion is crucial to summoning up the strength to prey on the dragon, which involves disillusion and destruction: ‘He once loved “thou shalt” as most sacred: now he must find illusion and caprice even in the most sacred, that freedom from his love may become his prey: the lion is needed for such prey’ (ibid.). Preying on the dragon requires ‘a sacred “No” even to duty’ (ibid.). Importantly, the strength of the lion is not enough to create new values. The transition from the second to the third stage constitutes a crucial shift from negation to affirmation. Thus the destructive nihilism of the lion gives way to the creative, positive power of the child, who is characterised as: ‘a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred “Yes”’ (ibid.).

In the fourth part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra the titular protagonist meets a multiplicity of diverse characters, including two Kings, the last Pope, the Ugliest Man, the Shadow and the Magician. Each is caught within their own crisis of values caused by the death of God and each, in turn, has a different understanding of Zarathustra’s project: the heralding of the overman. The two Kings take up Zarathustra’s metaphorical search for ‘the higher man’, another variant of the one who goes over. However, they look for a man ‘who is higher than we, though we are kings … For the highest man shall also be the highest lord on earth’ (1982: 358). The Kings’ interpretation of Zarathustra’s project echoes the misrepresentation of Christ’s mission presented by the second temptation. The Devil takes Christ up to the top of a high mountain, showing him ‘all the kingdoms of the world’ and offers him the chance to rule over them (Luke 4: 5–8). In the same way, the Kings interpret the higher man as a leader of nations, and thus fail to recognise that the overman is something they should aspire to become. The last Pope, now retired, offers a different reading. Describing himself as ‘a festival of pious memories and divine services’ he seeks out Zarathustra, ‘the most pious of all those who do not believe in God’, in the hope of finding a new saint to venerate (1982: 371–2).

Both the Pope and the Ugliest Man (so-called because he is the murderer of God) offer stories of the death of God that focus on pity. The Pope argues that God was ‘harsh and vengeful’ in his youth but eventually became ‘a shaky old grandmother … weary of the world … and one day he choked on his all-too-great pity’ (1982: 373). The Ugliest Man argues that he had to kill God because ‘his eyes … saw everything; he saw man’s depths … This most curious, overobtrusive, overpitying one had to die’ (1982: 378). The predicament of the Ugliest Man tempts Zarathustra to display an emotion that he preaches against, namely pity for others, which briefly overwhelms the prophet during the initial stages of their encounter. Importantly, the proliferation of different stories of the death of God foregrounds inconsistencies in His characterisation across the Bible. Thus Nietzsche’s imitation of the Bible’s multiple story form draws attention to the impossibility of finding one true meaning – the true character of God – thereby fundamentally undermining the status of the Bible as the Truth.

The two characters who embody key aspects of postmodern theorising are the Shadow and the Magician. Both characters accept and closely follow aspects of Zarathustra’s teachings, constituting its most dangerous subversion. The Magician offers this reaction to the loss of Truth in the last stanza of his song of melancholy:

 

Burned by one truth,

And thirsty:

Do you remember still, remember, hot heart,

How you thirsted?

That I be banished

From all truth,

Only fool!

Only poet!

(1982: 412)

 

Having once thirsted for the salvation proffered by the one Truth, one Way and one Life, the Magician now seeks banishment from all truth. The Shadow also constructs the death of God as the end of all truth but additionally addresses the issue of value. The Shadow takes on the role of Zarathustra’s darker double, caught at the second stage of the three metamorphoses, utterly disillusioned and destructive. ‘With you I broke whatever my heart revered; I overthrew all boundary stones and images … over every crime I have passed once’ (1982: 386). The loss of truth underpins the Shadow’s new freedom to be immoral/criminal: ‘Nothing is true, all is permitted’ (ibid.). Both characters are trapped within a nihilistic logic of negation, unable to move beyond what they have lost and create alternative value systems of their own.

The Magician’s song of melancholy utilises key tropes from Zarathustra’s preaching. The second stanza reworks the image of the predatory lion from the second metamorphosis to present Zarathustra himself as a predator:

 

An animal, cunning, preying, prowling,

That must lie,

That must knowingly, willingly lie:

Lusting for prey,

Colorfully masked,

A mask for itself,

Prey for itself—

(1982: 410)

 

Having brought about the demise of the Truth, the predator is elided with lies. The imagery of the colourful mask suggests theatricality and illusion; however, as there is no truth to be found lurking behind the mask, the predator becomes ‘mask for itself’ (ibid.). As the division between face and mask collapses, so too does the binary of predator/prey and thus the predator becomes: ‘Prey for itself’ (ibid.).

The last part of the second stanza compares the colourful mask of the predator with the poet’s use of figurative language:

 

That, the one who is free from truth?†

No! Only fool! Only poet!

Only speaking colorfully,

Only screaming colorfully out of fools’ masks,

Climbing around on mendacious word bridges,

On colorful rainbows,

Between false heavens

And false earths,

Roaming, hovering—

Only fool! Only poet!

(Ibid.)

 

Like the predator that has become the mask, language itself becomes mere rhetoric – colourful lies. The references to ‘mendacious word bridges’ and ‘colorful rainbows’ rework Zarathustra’s descriptions of the overman, fore-grounding their status as metaphors while simultaneously equating figurative language and lies. Thus the images no longer function as a description of the overman, they are merely words. At a reflexive level the poem itself screams colourfully using invective and repetition: ‘Only fool! Only poet!’

The Shadow also presents the loss of God as fundamentally changing the nature of language. The loss of faith in words empties out their significance, thereby depriving them of depth. For the Magician all language becomes colourful rhetoric, while for the Shadow language becomes exteriorised, material surfaces. Speaking to Zarathustra, the Shadow notes: ‘With you I unlearned faith in words and values and great names. When the devil sheds his skin, does not his name fall off too? For that too is skin. The devil himself is perhaps – skin’ (1982: 386). Importantly, the Shadow equates the loss of depth of meaning with the loss of all objectively rooted values – specifically the fundamental distinction between good and evil. The Shadow himself is wasting away: ‘I have already sat on every surface; like weary dust, I have gone to sleep on mirrors and windowpanes: everything takes away from me’ (1982: 384). For both characters there is nothing left but surfaces: masks, skin and dust.

The many characters that encounter Zarathustra, offering variant versions of his teaching, actively demonstrate one of Nietzsche’s most famous theoretical moves: the rejection of objective truth in favour of perspectivalism. Thus the end of objective truth, played out by the narratives of the death of God, opens up the possibility of a variety of different perspectives that are embodied by different characters. Each perspective can be seen as a lens that sets up a particular field of vision, in this case the different views of Zarathustra’s preaching. Each is intrinsically linked to the values of the viewer and thus clashes of perspectives are also clashes between incommensurate value systems. Perspectives are constantly constructed by individual subjects; however, it is also possible for a perspective to be shared. Indeed, significant congruence between perspectives is indicative of shared values – such as the nihilism espoused by both the Magician and the Shadow. Importantly, the perspectival is not synonymous with the subjective. Being subjective is typically understood as the opposite of being objective and a subjective viewpoint is that of a single individual. The end of objective truth thus marks the end of the category of the subjective as well.

The end of objectivity also means that the many versions of Zarathustra’s teachings cannot be judged to be straightforwardly true or false. Importantly, the criteria for judging between perspectives are pragmatic – they are to be judged by their effects. For Zarathustra, perspectives can be more or less healthy – they affect the bodily subjects that articulate them. Harmful perspectives reject the material, often in favour of the transcendental, while those that are healthy celebrate materiality and the body. Thus the Shadow’s self-annihilating nihilism constitutes a degenerate perspective. His dilemma leads to the following response from Zarathustra: ‘You have lost your goal; alas, how will you digest and jest over this loss?’ (1982: 387). The linking of the body and laughter – the enjoyment and exuberance of the child’s ‘Yes’ – is a key feature of affirmative perspectives. The move towards digesting and jesting over the loss of God is played out by many of the key characters in the celebratory ass festival at the end of the book.

In Zarathustra’s absence, all his followers who have congregated at his cave conjoin to hold a service, ‘kneeling like children and little old women and adoring [an] ass’ (1982: 424). The Ugliest Man offers up ‘a pious, strange litany’ to glorify the animal (ibid.). On returning to the cave, Zarathustra’s immediate reaction is to admonish his guests for falling back into their old ways. His first interpretation of the bizarre scene is supported by the comments of the last Pope: ‘Better to adore God in this form than in no form at all’ (1982: 426). However, the Ugliest Man presents the entire scene in a different light, underscoring the ridiculousness of his own litany by commenting: ‘Whoever would kill most thoroughly, laughs’ (1982: 427). The ass festival offers an extreme parody of the worship of an inappropriate object, recalling the golden calf that Aaron made from the earrings of women and children (Exodus 32: 2–4). The golden calf is itself an example of the perversion of ‘proper’ worship. Aaron creates the idol before constructing ‘an altar before it’ in accordance with detailed instructions set out earlier in Exodus. The ass festival is thus a parody of a distortion of a ritual, its extreme form suggesting that all ritual might be nothing other than distortion and nothing more than laughable.

Significantly, Zarathustra’s response to the ‘roguish answers’ offered by the Ugliest Man is to change his interpretation of the scene (1982: 428). In this way, one of the final sections of the book shows its prophet-protagonist shifting his perspective, making it impossible to simply equate all his speeches with the truth. Having regarded the ass festival as an unfortunate symptom of relapse, Zarathustra shifts to viewing it as comic and thus indispensable to recovery. ‘Do not forget this night and this ass festival, you higher men. This you invented when you were with me and I take that for a good sign: such things are invented only by convalescents’ (1982: 428–9). His followers’ enjoyment and expression of ‘a little brave nonsense’ displays a childish ‘prankishness’, which can be seen as a momentary instantiation of the third stage of metamorphosis, and thus part of the process of becoming that constitutes the overman (1982: 428).

At a reflexive level the comments made by the Ugliest Man: ‘Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter’ (1982: 427), draw attention to a key strategy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The book itself is a biblical parody that is designed to bring about the death of God and the undermining of Christian values. At the same time the book offers its own mode of theorising as fiction, setting up new concepts and narratives – such as the overman – while reflexively drawing attention to the fictional and rhetorical nature of these constructs. The use of key aesthetic strategies of reflexivity and parody, and the presentation of theory as fiction, ensure Thus Spoke Zarathustra can be viewed as a paradigm of postmodern theorising. Zarathustra’s distinction between degenerate and affirmative perspectives can also be applied to theory. Those trapped within the degenerate logic of negation are simply the antithesis of the systems and values that they reject; while theories that affirm life create and express new fictional concepts that are linked to diverse systems of value. Both of these categories are useful for thinking through different modalities of postmodern theorising.

Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard’s famous essay ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ begins with a quote attributed to Ecclesiastes: ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true’ (1983: 1). The quote itself cannot be found in the book of Ecclesiastes, leading some commentators to argue that it is an example of simulation, albeit an unconvincing one: ‘no one even remotely familiar with Ecclesiastes would be taken in by it’ (Hanley 2003: 48). The falsely attributed quotation parodies the declamatory tone typically associated with Old Testament prophets, while also offering a perfectly balanced epigram, both key stylistic features of Nietzsche’s writing. The epigram undoes two sets of oppositions: the simulacrum as false copy is typically opposed to the true original; while the truth is typically opposed to concealing lies. In Baudrillard’s formulation it is the very concept of the truth that acts as a mode of concealment, covering over its own absence or impossibility. The declamatory opening of this essay is important, because Baudrillard is repeatedly characterised as the ‘high priest’ of the postmodern rather than a philosopher or cultural theorist (see Gane 1993: 21). Thus the pronouncement: ‘The simulacrum is true’ marks the moment at which Baudrillard reinvents himself as Zarathustra, becoming the prophet-protagonist of his own postmodern writings.

Baudrillard sets up his own narratives of the death of God in Simulations, presenting the collapse of Christianity as concomitant with the rise of the image. In its first form the image ‘is the reflection of a basic reality’ (1983: 11). This is the premise of representation in which an image is a copy of the real. It is also the model for the creation of mankind who is made in the image of God (Genesis 1: 27). In the second stage the image ‘masks and perverts a basic reality’ (1983: 11). This conception of the destructive power of the image can be traced back to the Ten Commandments with the explicit prohibition against ‘any graven image’ (Exodus 20: 4). Baudrillard provides another parody of a biblical quotation: ‘“I forbad any simulacrum in the temples because the divinity that breathes life into nature cannot be represented”’ (1983: 7). In this second stage the image is an ‘evil appearance’ opposed to the truth and reality presented by God.

The crucial shift is introduced at the third stage when the image ‘masks the absence of a basic reality’ (1983: 11). Here iconolaters, worshippers of idols/images, are celebrated for having ‘the most modern and adventurous minds, since underneath the idea of the apparition of God in the mirror of images, they already enacted his death and his disappearance’ (1983: 9). However, the worship of God in the form of images also enables the iconolaters to avoid having to face up to his absence, thereby showing their knowledge that ‘it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them’ (ibid.). In this quote the image as mask suggests concealment, the mask implies a face; however, its unmasking would reveal that it conceals nothing. Baudrillard links this third stage to magic: the image ‘plays at being an appearance – it is of the order of sorcery’ (1983: 12).

In the fourth stage the image ‘bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum’ (1983: 11). This stage is represented by the iconoclasts whose desire to destroy all images arises not from the image’s distortion of reality – as in the second stage – but rather from ‘despair [at] the idea that the images concealed nothing at all’ (1983: 8). This, in turn, affects their status as God’s creation: ‘in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination’ (1983: 8–9). In the fourth stage, the absence of truth and reality underpinning the third stage is explicitly acknowledged. Importantly, the final stage constitutes ‘the order of … simulation’, marking the beginning of the postmodern, an era in which there is no longer any reality – only the hyperreal (1983: 12).

Baudrillard argues that there is a crucial shift from stages one and two, which are both characterised by ‘a theology of truth and secrecy’, to stages three and four, in which there can be no distinctions between true/false, reality/artifice. His characterisation of stage three as the order of sorcery recalls Nietzsche’s Magician, whose song of Melancholy utilises the figure of the masked predator, becoming ‘mask for itself’, in order to demonstrate the collapse of the distinction between the face and the mask and the impossibility of finding the face (1982: 410). For Baudrillard, the iconography of the mask retains the potential to suggest the face beneath, even where that face/truth has disappeared. He thus utilises the terminology of simulation in order to set up a contemporary figure for an artificiality/fakeness that has no relation to an original/truth.

Stages one to four of the image are frequently presented as successive, a series of phases leading up to a postmodernity located in Western culture in the late twentieth century. However, the introduction of the concept of the simulacrum via (admittedly fake) biblical quotations does also suggest that the phases constitute different ways of theorising the role of the image, which have been available for two millennia. Baudrillard repeatedly combines biblical language with contemporary examples thereby confusing linear temporality. For example, stage three of the image is exemplified by the iconolaters and Disneyland. The latter constitutes an overly fake, childish world thereby presenting its surrounding environs as a real, adult world; ‘when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation’ (1983: 25). While Baudrillard’s apocalyptic characterisation of postmodernity as the end of truth and reality fuels its status as a new era; his denunciation of the ‘new’ degenerate epoch is part of a familiar cycle – the prophet returns to denounce the state of the world once again.

Like Nietzsche, Baudrillard links the existence of God with depth of meaning, rewriting Blaise Pascal’s famous wager. Pascal argued that it was better to wager that God did exist and live one’s life accordingly because the potential reward of eternal life in Paradise outweighed all the other, less positive, alternatives. Baudrillard’s version links God to the issue of representation and meaning: ‘All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange – God, of course’ (1983: 10). As Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, God is the point where multiple interpretations settle into the recognition of the one Truth, thereby underpinning the whole system of meaning.

Thus, for Baudrillard, the absence of any divine anchoring point of language is the moment at which interpretations of any given text or event proliferate uncontrollably. A bombing in Italy can be equally viably regarded as ‘the work of leftist extremists, or of extreme right-wing provocation, or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute [or] a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to public security’ (1983: 31). ‘All of this is equally true’ for postmodernity is characterised by a dizzying ‘vertigo of interpretation’ that cannot be stopped (ibid.). This constitutes a move beyond Nietzsche’s perspectivalism, which sets up the possibility of a plurality of diverse and shared perspectives that are rooted in willed value systems. For Baudrillard, the infinite proliferation of interpretation ‘results in an improvisation of meaning, of nonsense, or of several simultaneous senses which cancel each other out’ (1983: 75, fn. 4).

The multiple interpretations of the bombing in Italy utilise a series of oppositions: right versus left, terrorists versus the state police, in order to render them all equivalent. Thus Baudrillard’s analysis of language is also an attack on structuralist linguistics in which binary opposition is regarded as one of the primary building blocks for creating meaning. For example, understanding the meaning of the sign ‘happy’ requires an understanding of its opposite, ‘sad’. Structuralist readings involve the elucidation of the fundamental oppositions that underpin any given text. In such readings, oppositions act as foundational structures wherein meaning is stabilised. By contrast, Baudrillard’s interpretations of the bombing show the ‘conjunction of the system and its extreme alternative’ in which oppositional terms such as: right/left, terrorists/state police, become ‘circularised’; this is extended into a metaphor for language itself: ‘All the [oppositional] referentials intermingle their discourses in a circular, Moebian [sic] compulsion’ (1983: 35). The movement of the circle and the Mobius strip is a folding over that overflows the stroke separating oppositions, undoing the difference between the terms. In this way, Baudrillard’s metaphors of flowing circularity and circulation undermine the structuralist attempt to stabilise meaning around key oppositions.

Baudrillard replays these two key moves: undoing opposition and introducing ceaseless circulation, in his analysis of the rise of capital. Recalling the third phase of the image, capital is defined as ‘a sorcery of the social relation’ (1983: 29, emphasis added) that undermines the very concept of society. Capital, like the image, practices sorcery insofar as it undermines key oppositions: ‘it was capital which … shattered every ideal distinction between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange’ (1983: 43). The shift to an economy of exchange is related to the demise of use value. Marx argues that a commodity’s utility is determined by its physical properties; for example, wool is a material that keeps us warm. In contrast, exchange value is ‘characterised by total abstraction from use value’ (1867). Commodities are no longer considered as material objects with specific qualities, but purely in terms of the quantities of other commodities for which they can be exchanged: ‘a quarter of wheat is exchanged for x blacking, y silk or z gold’ (ibid.). Thus exchange value is built on a sense of the interchangability of all goods thereby setting up an economic model of circulation.

Baudrillard expands upon Marx, arguing that the overproduction of goods in the late twentieth century leads to a further level of divorcement from the materiality of the commodity. Goods are purchased because consumers wish to buy into specific lifestyles established through advertising. Thus the advertising image marks the final obliteration of the commodity’s use value, and the reality/materiality of the object itself. Indeed, this is the moment whereby the rise of capitalism ushers in the hyperreal. Just as the loss of divine anchorage in language leads to the proliferation of interpretation, the loss of the anchorage of use value results in the unchecked proliferation of goods and advertisements. For Baudrillard, the excessive nature of late twentieth century capitalism produces an extreme form of the economics of exchange, reworking it as continual, relentless circulation.

Importantly, Baudrillard abandons the Marxist polemic concerning the exploitation of the workers within capitalism. Firstly, the Marxist concept of ideology that covers over ‘the “objective” process of exploitation’ (1983: 48) belongs to the second stage of the image and we are in the fourth stage, the order of simulacra and the hyperreal, where there are no truths hiding beneath the image. Secondly, the key motif of circulation is further utilised to map the breakdown of the distinction between exploiter and exploited. Thus, for Baudrillard, ‘power is something that circulates and whose source can no longer be located, a cycle in which the positions of dominator and the dominated interchange in an endless reversion which is also the end of power in its classical definition’ (1983: 77, fn. 7). In this analysis of the circulation of power and capital, both are dehumanised, divorced from any conceptions of ownership or responsibility. The motifs of circulation and floatation sustain a sense of a system generating itself and operating within its own terms: ‘Power floats, like money, like language, like theory’ (Baudrillard 1994: 24).

Baudrillard’s analysis of the excessive nature of postmodern capitalism reaches its zenith in his travelogue America. The country is said to offer a vision of liberation as an ‘orgy of indifference, disconnection, exhibition and circulation’ (1988: 96). The motif of circulation is conjoined with spectacle, advertising and fashion to sustain a sense of a voiding of depth: ‘Politics frees itself in the spectacle, in the all-out advertising effect … mores, customs, the body and language free themselves in the ever-quickening round of fashion’ (ibid.). The end of the classical conception of power is, of course, the end of party politics and of viable political intervention. These aspects of Baudrillard’s nihilistic conception of postmodernity are challenged by all the theorists in the next chapter. Baudrillard’s move to the surface echoes Nietzsche. While the Shadow and the Magician conceptualise language as a pure surface, as skin, dust and masks, Baudrillard views postmodernity and postmodern aesthetics as an ‘extravaganza of undifferentiated surfaces’ (1988: 125).

For Baudrillard, the subject itself has also been reconstructed as pure surface. The postmodern subject is compared to technological innovations, such as the hologram and the clone, and contrasted with older, psychoanalytic formulations that draw on the figure of the double. The double ‘like the soul, the shadow, the mirror image, haunts the subject’ (1994: 95). Nietzsche’s character of the Shadow acts as the darker double of Zarathustra, reworking his teachings in negative and destructive ways. The double is both the antithesis of the subject and a figure of its unconscious mind – the hidden depths within the rational, conscious, well-behaved exterior. Baudrillard sets up a complex metaphor, comparing the hologram to a double extracted from the body by ‘luminous surgery’ (1994: 106). ‘The double that hid in the depths of you (of your body, or your unconscious?) and whose secret form fed precisely your imaginary, on the condition of remaining secret, is extracted by laser, is … materialized before you, just as it is possible for you to pass through and beyond it’ (1994: 107). The materialisation of the double in three-dimensional laser form – as the hologram – marks the end of unknown inner depths and thus the very structure of the unconscious mind. The postmodern subject like the hologram is pure visual surface. In the final, most exuberant image of the chapter, the hologram ‘literally jumps over its shadow, and plunges into transparency to lose itself there’ (1994: 109).

Baudrillard’s writing on cinema draws on many of the images associated with the postmodern subject. Cinema is paradoxically presented as exemplary of both the pre-modern and the postmodern (see Constable 2009b). The first characterisation of cinema is the most positive. ‘The cinema is an image. That is to say not only a screen and a visual form, but a myth [retaining] something of the double, of the phantasm, of the dream, etc’ (1994: 51). Here the cinema keeps the tropes associated with inner depths of the subject in play. It is also strongly linked to the imagination and the imaginary: ‘pure fascination, the magic appeal of the image. There is still a strong make-believe quality about the cinema’ (Charbonnier 1993: 30). The ‘quality of myth’ that characterises cinema is not the same as Greek mythology (1993: 31). The mythic is associated with particular forms of narrative presented by both history and the novel: ‘the possibility of an “objective” enchainment of events and causes and the possibility of a narrative enchainment of discourse’ (Baudrillard 1994: 47). Importantly, the shift from pre-modern to postmodern cinema is characterised as a destruction of the mythic, the fantasmatic and the magical. ‘It is this fabulous character, the mythical energy of an event or of a narrative, that today seems increasingly lost’ (ibid.).

The shift from the pre-modern to the postmodern is thus presented as a narrative of the decline and fall of cinema: ‘its trajectory from the most fantastic or mythical to the realistic and the hyperrealistic’ (1994: 46). For Baudrillard, postmodern cinema is epitomised by ‘remakes’ a term that encompasses films such as The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) and Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974). Both display an ‘implacable fidelity … to the restitution of an absolute simulacrum of the past’ (1994: 47) insofar as they offer perfect reconstructions of a past that is already constructed through photographic and cinematic images. The remake thus constitutes a move into the hyperreal because it actually builds image upon image. In attempting to achieve ‘an absolute correspondence with the real, cinema also approaches an absolute correspondence with itself – and this is not contradictory: it is the very definition of the hyperreal’ (ibid.). All endeavours to achieve perfect reconstructions of the past or of the real simply result in the recycling of images that are said to constitute true history/reality. Thus the search for the real results in a further proliferation of images, thereby ushering in the hyperreal. Locked into an utterly circular process, cinema ‘plagiarizes and copies itself, recopies itself, remakes its classics, retroactives its original myths, remakes the silent film more perfectly than the original, etc’ (ibid.).

Baudrillard’s analysis of the decline and fall of cinema focuses on its effects – the many ways in which the remake unwittingly serves to usher in the hyperreal. At the same time postmodern remakes are seen to possess distinctive and familiar aesthetic qualities. While couched in the damning terms of plagiarism, such films are characterised as resolutely intertextual, referencing the history of cinema from the silent era onwards. The remake offers a perfected, flawless version of the past images that it references. Thus, for Baudrillard, The Last Picture Show is ‘perfect retro, purged, pure, the hyperrealist restitution of 1950s cinema’, because it has removed ‘the psychological, moral and sentimental blotches of films of that era’ (1994: 45). The alliterative overemphasis on ‘purged, pure’ perfection draws attention to the depths the surface lacks – psychology, ethics and emotion. In place of the depths provided by characterisation, audience engagement or even meaning, cinema displays ‘technical perfection’ (1994: 46). In a later interview, Baudrillard links the absence of depth (in the forms of magic and myth) to postmodern reflexivity: ‘cinema has become a spectacular demonstration of what one can do with the cinema, with pictures, etc’ (Gane 1993: 23). Baudrillard’s focus on the intertextual and the interlinking of the spectacular and the reflexive overlaps with elements of the definition of postmodern film aesthetics set out in chapter one. However, the characterisation of such aesthetic strategies as plagiaristic, utterly superficial and void of meaning is clearly problematic.

Baudrillard connects the remake’s project of perfecting the image and the reflexivity of postmodern films to the rise of new cinematic technologies. Postmodern films are seen as mechanical/mathematical demonstrations of the capabilities of the new technologies. Thus, Chinatown, a remake of 1940s film noir, is described as ‘the detective movie renamed by laser’ (1994: 46). The pursuit of technical perfection is problematic. Becoming ‘hyper-realist, technically sophisticated, effective’ postmodern cinema fails ‘to incorporate any element of make-believe’ or imagination (Charbonnier 1993: 30). In a typical rhetorical move, Baudrillard reverses the linear model of technological development as progress: ‘as if the cinema were basically regressing towards infinity, towards … a formal, empty perfection’ (ibid.; emphasis added).

Baudrillard’s somewhat abstract conception of the remake as a process of perfecting the image requires further illustration. It is best exemplified by so-called shot-for-shot remakes in which the hypertext acknowledges its reliance on the anterior hypotext. Indeed, Universal’s publicity campaign for Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998) asserted that the director had ‘followed Joseph Stefano’s dialogue line by line, and John Russell’s camera work shot by shot’ (see Constable 2009c: 23). The opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) begins with ‘a dissolve from the vertical lines of the credit design to the high-rise buildings of an urban skyline credited as “Phoenix, Arizona”’ (2009c: 27). This is followed by three long shots of the bright, white cityscape, also linked by dissolves, which culminate in a long shot of a hotel, taken at a high angle, and the camera zooms in on an open window. The subsequent medium shot positions the camera almost directly in front of the window and it tracks forward, the sliding movement into the darkened room suggesting an intrusion into a private space. Indeed the hotel room is the secret rendezvous for a pair of illicit lovers, Marion and Sam. The opening utilises lighting – brightness versus darkness and two different camera movements – zoom and track – to set up key oppositions between public and private, external façade and inner depth. These oppositions play a crucial role in the presentation of the film’s monster, Norman Bates.

Van Sant’s Psycho opens with a circling shot of the city taken from a helicopter. Interestingly, this can be seen as an attempt to be more authentic than Hitchcock’s film – the helicopter shot was part of the original shooting script but proved to be too costly to make (see Constable 2009c: 24). The airborne camera travels across the cityscape towards the hotel and the aerial shot is digitally edited to create the effect of a seamless camera movement through the open window, across the sunny bedroom towards the lovers on their bed. It is easy to read the use of digital editing techniques as an attempt to ‘perfect’ the image, the apparently seamless shot acting as a spectacular demonstration of the new technologies available in the 1990s. Thematically the opening shot obliterates the oppositions set up by Hitchcock. Thus, in this example, the process of perfecting the image is also the annihilation of the concepts of private space and inner depth. For Baudrillard, such a voiding of depth is also a voiding of meaning, affect and imagination, leaving the film solely capable of demonstrating its own technical virtuosity. However, the opening shot need not be read as devoid of meaning, its destruction of oppositions sets up a key theme of the remake, which, as I have argued elsewhere, ‘explicitly plays out and plays with the loss of the secret and the impossibility of hidden depths’ (2009c: 26).

The application of Baudrillard’s model of postmodern film aesthetics to a specific remake such as Van Sant’s Psycho foregrounds the limitations of this model for Film Studies. It sets up a frame through which such films can only be seen as nihilistic demonstrations of the end of aesthetics. It is therefore unsurprising that Baudrillard’s writing on film has not been taken up extensively in Film Studies. Indeed, the brief flurry of writing on Baudrillard and The Matrix Trilogy (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999, 2003) does not address the ways the trilogy might exemplify a Baudrillardian aesthetic. One of the few exceptions is William Merrin’s analysis of the trilogy’s use of CGI, which he reads as an example of the ‘hyperclean, hyperliteral perfection of the digital image’ (2005: 122) that destroys the imaginary, imaginative, magical qualities of the cinematic image. Overall, most of the writing focuses on the trilogy’s presentation of Baudrillard’s postmodern philosophical position – particularly his work on the hyperreal and simulation (see Constable 2009a).

Any consideration of Baudrillard’s contribution to postmodern aesthetics has to assess the impact of his distinctive writing style. His narratives of destruction are charged with a gleeful energy that belies their overt nihilism, creating disjunctions between tone and content, and rendering them profoundly ambiguous. While Nietzsche’s parody of the Bible in Thus Spoke Zarathustra functions as a clear rejection of Christianity, Baudrillard’s use of fake quotation evokes Ecclesiastes by offering a parody of a parody of the declamatory style associated with the Old Testament, a series of moves away from any ‘original’. Jason de Boer argues this is characteristic of Baudrillard’s theory-fiction, in which the theory functions ‘as fiction or literature that repeatedly draws attention to its own lack of grounding’ (2005: 4). The loss of grounding is also demonstrated by the quantity of incompatible narratives of decline across Simulacra and Simulation, the unstoppable movement of proliferation characteristic of postmodernity is thus played out reflexively across the text as a whole. The personification of an array of theoretical concepts, including the hologram, shadow and clone, constructs them as fictional characters thereby drawing attention to their status as theory-fiction. The foregrounding of the fictional through the use of textual strategies such as disjunctive tonality, parody and reflexivity make Baudrillard’s writing a paradigm of postmodern theorising.

Frederic Jameson

Baudrillard and Jameson have very different ways of writing theory: the former is a postmodern theorist; while the latter is a theorist of the post-modern. While Jameson’s introduction to Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) utilises elements of the fictional in his presentation of the postmodern as a radical break away from the modern, he does not present his theorising as a mode of fiction. Thus the acknowledgment that he has ‘pretended to believe that the postmodern is as unusual as it thinks it is’, is not an admission of the groundlessness of such theorising, but rather constitutes ‘an inaugural narrative act that grounds the perception and interpretation of events to be narrated’ (1991: xiii). In this way, the references to fiction and pretence are used to establish a singular moment of grounding that anchors the writing to follow, conferring on it the status of a theoretical hypothesis rather than fiction.

As a Marxist theorist, Jameson’s conception of postmodernity is anchored in the economic, specifically the development of late capitalism. Following Ernest Mandel, he distinguishes ‘three fundamental moments in capitalism’ (1991: 35) The first is market capitalism where goods are created for national markets, the second, monopoly capitalism, which is characterised by world markets organised around nation states, and the third is multinational or late capitalism where national boundaries are undermined by the creation of global markets (see Jameson 1983: 112–15). For Jameson, late capitalism constitutes ‘the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas’ (1991: 36). Importantly, Mandel’s tripartite economic model is the basis for Jameson’s own ‘cultural periodization’, which interlinks the economic, the social and the cultural (ibid.). The three phases of market, monopoly and multinational capitalism are thus said to constitute three eras, each dominated by a different cultural/aesthetic form: ‘realism, modernism, and postmodernism’, respectively (ibid.).

While Jameson argues that late capitalism underpins postmodernism, he briefly notes that his strict paralleling of the economic and the cultural appears to collapse the two terms into each other in an ‘eclipse of the distinction between base and superstructure’ (1991: xxi). The collapse of base into superstructure is too extreme for Jameson who immediately counters, restoring the distinction by arguing that ‘the third stage of capitalism … generates its superstructures with a new kind of dynamic’ (1991: xxi). Importantly, the threatened collapse is an example of the undermining of the spatial logic of depth and surface, which Jameson presents as characteristic of postmodern theory. Postmodern theory is said to follow poststructuralism in attacking ‘the depth model’ of truth and meaning set up by traditional hermeneutics (1991: 12). Jameson traces the annihilation of traditionally oppositional terms that rely on the distinction between depth and surface such as: inside/outside, essence/appearance and latent/manifest. Like Baudrillard, he notes that the loss of the construction of truth as depth entirely undermines traditional Marxist conceptions of the false surface, specifically ideology and false consciousness. While both theorists characterise the postmodern in terms of the pure surface, Jameson’s assertion that ‘depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces’ (1991: 12) lacks the playful exuberance of Baudrillard’s ‘extravaganza of undifferentiated surfaces’ (1988: 125).

Both Baudrillard and Jameson argue that the postmodern shift to the surface has a significant impact on the construction of the subject. For Jameson, traditional philosophical and psychological models set up a ‘conception of the subject as a monadlike [sic] container’ (1991: 15). This description of the subject has two key aspects: as a monad it acts as an entirely discrete, individual unit, and as a container it is a vessel for forces operating from within. Jameson uses Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream, as an example of the terrible price of individualistic self-sufficiency – a scream of ‘atrocious solitude and anxiety’ – representative of the psychic states of ‘radical isolation’ (1991: 14) and alienation to be found in the era of high modernism. Freud’s concepts of hysteria and neurosis utilise the model of the subject as a vessel, a container of unconscious desires, memories and traumas, which constitute the hidden, inner depths of the self. It is this conception of the subject that Baudrillard undermines utilising the figure of the hologram to offer a narrative in which the inner depths of the self are made manifest and visible, marking the end of the unconscious mind and a celebration of transparency. By contrast, Jameson offers a historical analysis whereby changes to the construction of the subject, such as the shift away from the model of the monad/container, are said to be reflected by a ‘shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology’ (ibid.) in which the alienation of modernism gives way to the fragmentation of the postmodern.

If Baudrillard characterises the postmodern subject in terms of transparency and visibility, Jameson focuses on fragmentation and temporal breakdown, drawing on the psychopathology of schizophrenia. While he utilises Jacques Lacan’s clinical definition of schizophrenia, Jameson is careful to present his deployment of the term ‘as description rather than diagnosis [and] a suggestive aesthetic model’ (1991: 26). Lacan defines ‘schizophrenia as a breakdown in the signifying chain’ (ibid.). His account draws on Ferdinand de Saussure’s definitions of the signifier, the form or sound of a word, and the signified, its content or meaning. Importantly, there is no direct, ‘one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified’, instead, meaning – the signified – is created through ‘the movement from signifier to signifier’ (ibid.), which forms the signifying chain. The movement is conducted according to organised patterns of relations between signifiers (such as binary opposition) which construct and create the ‘meaning effect’. Schizophrenia occurs where there is a breakdown of the patterns of movement between signifiers thereby snapping the links of the signifying chain and resulting in ‘a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers’ (ibid.).

The link between language and subject construction lies in temporality. The signifying chain is created through temporal sequencing, ‘the past, present, and future of the sentence’ (1991: 27), just as ‘personal identity is … the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with one’s present’ (1991: 26). Thus, as the signifying chain is broken into disconnected links, so ‘the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time’ (1991: 27). Outside of linear temporal sequencing, the ‘present suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable [sic] vividness’ (ibid.). The description emphasises the powerlessness of the postmodern subject, its inability to sequence, organise and thereby control information. This is an extreme vision of fragmentation in which the subject becomes nothing more than an aggregate of discontinuous signifiers.

Jameson’s conception of schizophrenia as an aesthetic strategy is less disjunctive. The ‘isolated signifier is no longer … an incomprehensible yet mesmerizing fragment of language but rather something closer to a sentence in free-standing isolation’ (1991: 28). In functioning as a sentence, there is a sense of meaning being created amid the fragments. Rather than focusing on temporal disjunction, Jameson views the aesthetics of fragmentation as offering new modes of syntagmatic relations – the juxtaposition of signifiers creating unexpected connections between them – summed up by the slogan ‘difference relates’ (1991: 31). The postmodern viewer is thus compared to David Bowie’s character in The Man Who Fell To Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976) ‘who watches fifty-seven television screens simultaneously’ (ibid.). Jameson suggests that such a viewer must ‘rise somehow to a level at which the vivid perception of radical difference is in and of itself a new mode of grasping what used to be called a relationship: something for which the word collage is still only a very feeble name’ (ibid.). However, this brief, positive analysis of the ways in which the surface structures of syntagmatic relations might constitute new forms of ‘textual play’ is couched in highly tentative terms, forming an unstable counterpoint to Jameson’s typically negative depictions of postmodern aesthetics (1991: 12).

Many of Jameson’s accounts of postmodern aesthetics trace the trajectory from modernism to the postmodern, constructing it as a narrative of decline. He famously traces the shifting constructions of both art object and artist by comparing and contrasting Vincent van Gogh’s painting A Pair of Boots with Andy Warhol’s picture Diamond Dust Shoes. The van Gogh painting takes the viewer to an ‘initial situation’ comprising ‘the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and … backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state’ (1991: 7). Thus the painting is grounded in a material reality. Deploying a Nietzschean model of the artist as overman, Jameson reads the act of painting as a ‘willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world into the most glorious materialization of pure color in oil paint’ (1991: 7). The painter thus acts as a subject who wills change in the object, the sheer force of his personal vision presented by the extent to which the art work transforms its initial material grounding. The transformation wrought by van Gogh is a ‘Utopian gesture [that produces] a whole new Utopian realm … of that supreme sense — sight … which it now reconstitutes for us as a semi-autonomous space in its own right, a part of some new division of labour in the body of capital’ (ibid.). Importantly, the utopian gesture is conceptualised as opening up a new ‘semi-autonomous’ space, a space outside the regime of monopoly capitalism, which creates the possibility of the delineation of new forms of socio-economic organisation.

In contrast, Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes has no relation to an initial situation. The photograph of the shoes takes the viewer to other images – specifically advertisements – thereby circumventing any reference to an external reality and thus presenting a ‘fundamental mutation in … the object world … now become a set of texts or simulacra’ (1991: 9). Warhol’s work is both intertextual and reflexive, the photograph of the shoes stripping away ‘the external and colored surface of things … to reveal the deathly black and white substratum of the photographic negative [which] subtends them’ (ibid.). This empty, reflexive gesture is ‘an inversion of Van Gogh’s Utopian gesture’ stripping away colour rather than adding it, turning inwards rather than reaching outwards; there is no moment of transformation, the waning of colour reveals the photographic underpinnings of the ‘glossy advertising images’ (ibid.) that the picture references. Thus the picture does not open up any new spaces; it simply demonstrates the workings of late capitalism.

Warhol’s inability to construct a transformative moment is not an individual failure to embody the figure of the artist as overman, but rather the result of his being positioned at the locus of a shift between different forms of capitalism. At one level Warhol cannot embody the individualistic agonised figure of the high modernist artist because the shift into the postmodern means the monad/container model of subjectivity is no longer viable. For Jameson, Warhol’s images of Campbell soup cans, ‘which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements’ (ibid.). Their failure to be either of these things means they demonstrate the pervasiveness of late capitalism in which ‘aesthetic production … has become integrated into commodity production’ (1991: 4).

Jameson’s depiction of late capitalism as an all-pervasive system strongly resembles Baudrillard’s analysis of capital as a closed circuit. However, the key difference between them is that Baudrillard uses the imagery of relentless circulation to mark the end of power and politics, while Jameson resolutely refuses to give up both concepts. The difference highlights Jameson’s paradoxical position as a Marxist theorist of the post-modern, analysing an economic and cultural development that vaporises the theoretical terms of his own analysis. As a political theorist, Jameson analyses the postmodern in order ‘to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today’ (1991: 6). However, he acknowledges that the traditional placement of cultural politics and theory as ‘cultural acts outside the massive Being of capital’ is no longer possible (1991: 48). All such theorising, ‘from slogans of negativity, opposition, and subversion to critique and reflexivity’, shares ‘a single, fundamentally spatial, presupposition, which may be resumed in the … time-honoured formula of “critical distance”’ (1991: 48). For Jameson, the pervasive nature of global capitalism destroys all forms of distance – the very basis of critique and the conceptualisation of political/social alternatives. His tentative solution is new modes of ‘global cognitive mapping’, enabling us to locate our bearings while living under late capitalism, and thereby ‘regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion’ (1991: 54).

While Jameson is critical of ‘moralizing condemnations of the postmodern and of its essential triviality when juxtaposed against the Utopian “high seriousness” of the great modernisms’ (1991: 46), his narratives of the shift from modernist to postmodern aesthetics frequently take this form. The analysis of Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes is used to define the key characteristics of postmodern art, namely: ‘flatness or depthlessness [sic], a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense’ (1991: 9). Attention is drawn to the surface of Warhol’s picture by its seal, which contains sparkling pieces of glitter, inciting feelings of ‘decorative exhilaration’ in the viewer. The ‘gratuitous frivolity of this final decorative overlay’ is contrasted with the ethical effect and emotional affect of modernist sculpture: ‘the august premonitory eye flashes of Rainer Maria Rilke’s archaic Greek torso which warn the bourgeois subject to change his life’ (1991: 10). The condemnatory conceptualisation of the sparkling surface is evident from the logic of negation underpinning the key moves: it marks the waning of affect, the end of ethics, it fails to challenge the viewer, and fails to set up the necessary critical distance through which the viewer might review his/her life. It is the sense of the tremendous value of what is being lost that sets up the depiction of such frivolity as ‘gratuitous’ – an unjustified and unjustifiable superficiality.

On Jameson’s model postmodern aesthetics is continually defined by loss. The end of modernism marks the decline of the individual subject and concomitant death of art as a form of personal vision. The artist can no longer be an overman who wills and transforms the material object world, becoming instead a postmodern bricoleur who recycles images drawn from a world become text. Importantly, this marks the end of the possibility of originality in aesthetic production. Jameson links personal vision to the highly individualistic styles of modernist artists such as William Faulkner and D. H. Lawrence, who ‘ostentatiously deviate from a norm [displaying] their wilful eccentricities’ (1991: 16). The stylistic extravagances of modernist art were once the target of parody, which drew attention to the comical aspects of their extreme divergence from linguistic norms. However, the personal vision of such modernist artists has now been reduced to style, their work offering a series of diverse stylistic options all of which are available simultaneously: ‘advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm’ (1991: 17).

The loss of any sense of stylistic/linguistic norms means postmodern art forms are characterised by juxtapositions that break down traditional boundaries, moving seamlessly between different genres and incorporating both high and low art forms. Importantly, the loss of the norm marks the end of parody, thereby ushering in the key form of postmodern intertextuality, pastiche. Jameson defines both parody and pastiche as forms of imitation; however, the latter takes a particularly debased form. While parodic mimesis locates its comedy in divergence from the norm, pastiche ‘is a neutral practice of such mimicry … amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists’ (ibid.). The language of amputation and abnormality make the negative logic underpinning this definition absolutely clear. Famously, pastiche is defined as ‘blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs’ (ibid.). The metaphor evokes ‘the august premonitory eye flashes’ of Rilke’s statue, presenting pastiche as both maimed and inert, a form of intertextuality that cannot be creative for it marks the end of originality and personal vision, as well as the closure of spaces of challenge and critique.

Jameson’s analysis of film as a medium focuses on nostalgia films, drawing on his conception of pastiche and relating it to the wider issue of the loss of history. Like Baudrillard, he is concerned with the remake, examining the ways in which such films offer a reconstruction of images of the past, thereby displacing and effacing the real historical past. Jameson moves beyond a one-to-one relation between the original and the remake, noting the ways in which Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981) evokes numerous different versions of Double Indemnity: from James M. Cain’s novel to Billy Wilder’s film (1944). For Jameson, the multiple references of Body Heat reconstruct pastiche or ‘“intertextuality” as a deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic effect and the operator of a new … pseudohistorical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles replaces “real” history’ (1991: 20).

Unlike Baudrillard, for whom the remake demonstrates a process of perfecting the image, emphasising its flawlessness, Jameson constructs the remake as a transition into fashion and style, emphasising its superficiality. Thus the nostalgia film reconstructs the past ‘through stylistic connotation, conveying “pastness” by the glossy qualities of the image, and … “1950s-ness” by the attributes of fashion’ (1991: 19). Such films are symptoms of a wider cultural crisis, namely, the loss of history and our subsequent inability to construct a sense of the present as a historical epoch. Approaching ‘the present by way of … the pastiche of the stereotypical past, endows … present history with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage’ (1991: 21). In reconstructing the past, the nostalgia film effectively erases the time line of past, present and future.

Jameson does attempt to delineate a more positive category of ‘post-nostalgia’ films, which are said to open up the possibility of ‘some properly allegorical processing of the past’ (1991: 287). He reads Something Wild (Jonathan Demme, 1986) as ‘an essentially allegorical narrative in which the 1980s meet the 1950s’ (1991: 290). The film begins with Lulu (Melanie Griffith) abducting Charlie (Jeff Daniels), a married, yuppie type, whom she inveigles into adultery and small-time criminality. They journey to her maternal home, where ‘Lulu’ is revealed to be Audrey, and the couple attend her class reunion. However, Audrey’s attempt to pass off herself and Charlie as an ideal married couple is disrupted by the arrival of Ray (Ray Liotta), her estranged, abusive, ex-convict husband. Ray reveals Charlie has lied about being married; he is in fact divorced, and persuades Audrey to return to him. Charlie then rescues Audrey from Ray and the pair travel to his home, where Ray finds them, subjecting both to violent assault before being killed by Charlie.

Jameson’s allegorical reading positions the three key characters as emblematic of particular decades. Thus Ray is read as ‘a simulation of the fifties’, his costume and hairstyle evoking ‘romantic representations of … rebellion, in the films of Brando and James Dean’ (1991: 291) He is also a simulation of a gothic villain offering ‘a representation of someone playing at being evil … his malevolence … as false as his smile’ (1991: 290). The language of simulation situates Ray’s ‘1950s-ness’ at a distance from the reality of the historical era, which would be properly configured as a series of historical events or counter cultural movements. The confrontation between the 1950s and the 1980s is that of Ray versus the corporate yuppie Charlie and is staged via the figure of Lulu/Audrey who is read as a symbol of a reconfigured 1960s – ‘seen [through] alcohol rather than drugs’ (1991: 292).

Jameson’s analysis of Lulu/Audrey overlooks the references to the 1920s indicated by the character’s initial choice of hairstyle and alias. Thus Audrey is first seen sporting a black jaw-length bob with a straight eyebrow-skimming fringe, referencing Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box (Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1929); indeed, she adopts the name of the star’s character in that film, Lulu. Her black clothing draws on the styles of the mid-1980s, the top featuring the ubiquitous shoulder-pads, while her accoutrements reference the ethnic styles of Zandra Rhodes. Audrey’s appearance changes dramatically across the film: from an initial appearance as Louise Brooks, to the adoption of a figure-skimming, Monroesque, white prom dress for the class reunion, to a final vision of Princess Diana-inspired respectability in a demure polka-dot dress complete with white cocktail hat and gloves. For Jameson, Audrey’s erratic behaviour – from kidnapping to conformity – is ‘organized around sheer caprice’; ‘the costume changes lend this … purely formal unpredictability a certain visual content; they translate it into the language of image culture and afford a purely specular pleasure in Lulu’s metamorphoses (which are not really psychic)’ (1991: 292).

Jameson’s reading of Lulu thus constructs her as a pure surface devoid of any psychic depth. It is therefore surprising that she is presented as the key term in his semiotic square of the film’s narrative structures. Moreover, Jameson’s deployment of a mode of textual analysis that aims to ‘identify “the elementary structures of signification” … underlying culturally meaningful narratives’ (Elsaesser & Buckland 2002: 33) also constitutes a reversion to depth hermeneutics that seems oddly out of place. Jameson’s semiotic square of the narrative logic of Something Wild positions the unpredictability represented by Lulu as the primary, positive term. This is pivoted against its opposite, crime, and its contrary, predictability, forming a square comprising four key terms: unpredictability, crime, predictability, non-crime. Lulu represents the matrix of unpredictability through which Charlie must pass in order to ‘differentiate [him] from his fellow yuppies by making him over into a hero or protagonist of a different generic type than Ray’ (1991: 293). Charlie’s increasingly informal costuming – from executive suit to t-shirt and shorts – is read as indicative of his character’s metamorphosis. However, given Jameson’s general equation of fashion and glossy superficiality, it is unsurprising that the changes wrought in Charlie are ultimately insufficient to create a new type of hero. Indeed, Jameson acknowledges Charlie also fails to gesture towards new forms of socio-economic organisation – while he does abandon his corporate job at the end of the film ‘it would probably be asking too much to wonder what he does or can become in its stead’ (ibid.).

Jameson concludes that both Something Wild and Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) ‘show a collective unconscious in the process of trying to identify its own present at the same time that they illuminate the failure of this attempt, which seems to reduce itself to the recombination of various stereotypes of the past’ (1991: 296). Thus the sole distinction between the post-nostalgia film and the nostalgia film is that the former overtly fail to delineate the present, while the latter unwittingly obliterate it. Importantly, Jameson’s analysis of Something Wild constructs it as pure postmodern pastiche. The film’s characterisation is presented as the perpetuation or simulation of stereotypes and its underlying semiotic structures are constructed as a play of depthless surfaces. This shift to the surface constitutes a voiding of signification, which, in turn, serves to underpin the film’s inability to create new forms of characterisation or gesture towards new socio-economic structures.

Jameson’s reading of Something Wild demonstrates the problems that arise when the foregrounding of the surface so prevalent in postmodern aesthetics is simply conceptualised as an obliteration of depth. The logic of negation that structures Jameson’s overarching aesthetic model prevents him from capitalising on his own positive insights – for example, the previously mentioned fragmentation as ‘collage’ (1991: 31). He notes the contradictory characterisation of Lulu/Audrey but fails to consider the ways in which Melanie Griffith’s ‘wild child’ star persona offers intertextual reinforcement of her initial appearance as Lulu. Indeed, the kidnapping of Charlie can be seen as a star moment that works against the overarching logic of containment played out by the character’s transition from law-less Lulu to domesticated Audrey. Such small, fragmentary moments of disruption resulting from complex relations between images simply cannot be mapped using Jameson’s aesthetic model. The postmodern text as image is predefined as empty and superficial.

Given the obvious limitations of viewing Hollywood cinema through such a negative frame, the dominance of Jameson’s work within the small field of postmodern Film Studies requires explanation. It is partly due to the apparent congruence of Jameson’s position and Nöel Carroll’s writing, indeed the two are occasionally combined to create the history of Hollywood style discussed in chapter one (see Garrett 2007; Constable 2014). Jameson is also one of the few major postmodern theorists who provides an extensive definition of postmodern aesthetics and repeatedly applies it to film, thereby offering a more readily accessible model for film theorists and cultural critics. While numerous individual articles draw on Jameson’s theory, currently the only book-length study is M. Keith Booker’s Postmodern Hollywood. My analysis will examine Booker’s adaptation of Jameson’s position and will focus on his readings of mainstream Hollywood films. I will show how Booker’s popularised version of Jameson exhibits and exaggerates many of the major problems of this nihilistic conception of postmodern aesthetics.

Popularising Jameson

Booker explicitly presents his work as a popularisation and simplification of Jameson’s position (2007: xviii). The postmodern is defined as ‘the “cultural logic” of late capitalism, directly expressing its characteristics in aesthetic form’ (ibid.; emphasis added). The quotation fuses the economic and the aesthetic, straightforwardly collapsing the relations between base and superstructure, and thereby taking Jameson’s argument to its logical conclusion. The two major aesthetic features of postmodern film are pastiche and fragmentation. Booker shifts aspects of Jameson’s analysis of postmodern aesthetics, attributing key characteristics, such as the waning of affect, to the condition of late capitalism. He follows Jameson in presenting contemporary global capitalism as increasingly all-pervasive, defining postmodernism as ‘the cumulative effect of a number of continuous historical processes associated with the gradual globalisation of capital and the increasing penetration of consumerist practices into every aspect of daily life’ (2007: 50). Thus, like Jameson, he wrestles with the issue of spaces outside capitalism in which to locate the possibility of critique as well as the major issue of what is to constitute proper critique.

Booker reworks Jameson’s distinction between van Gogh’s A Pair of Boots and Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes, offering a film-based comparison between Frederico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) and Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990). However, unlike van Gogh’s painting, Booker does not position Fellini’s film as emblematic of high modernism, instead placing 8½ on the cusp between modernism and the postmodern (2007: 33, 138). The two contrasting films are used to demonstrate the waning of affect within the postmodern. The semi-autobiographical nature of Fellini’s film is said to enable the viewer ‘to feel a heart behind’ the images (2007: 32). The sense of emotional substance, initially provided by the director, is then shifted to the film’s main protagonist: ‘Fellini’s Anselmi may be unable to love, but he seems to feel genuine emotions (and is a genuinely tormented human artist)’ (2007: 33). In contrast to Anselmi, Burton’s titular protagonist Edward Scissorhands ‘is almost entirely lacking in emotional depth, is all surface’ (ibid.). Thus the waning of affect, here understood as a loss of ‘genuine’ emotion, is intrinsically linked to the process of becoming surface. For Booker, the tortured depths displayed by Fellini’s protagonist conform to the distinctive cultural pathology of modernism: ‘Anselmi’s predicament … is alienation’ (ibid.). In contrast, the sheer superficiality of Johnny Depp’s performance as Edward Scissorhands means that alienation is no longer a possibility.

For Booker, Depp’s role as Willy Wonka in Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) equals the superficiality of his performance in Edward Scissorhands (2007: 33, xiii). In a departure from Roald Dahl’s book from 1964, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory briefly charts Wonka’s relationship with his father – a controlling, chocolate-hating, dentist. Booker argues that this childhood trauma is not evident in Depp’s performance of the adult Wonka; there are no lapses suggesting unconscious depths. Instead, Wonka’s overtly eccentric mannerisms foreground his oddness, reducing him to his economic role: ‘all surface and no depth, his entire life consisting of his economic function as a designer and producer of sweets’ (2007: xiii). In addition, the ‘stunning array of images that constitute the interior of [Wonka’s] factory’ (ibid.) means that the film simply acts as a display cabinet for global capitalism.

Booker argues that the spectacular images presented by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory overwhelm and erase its moral messages. Key themes such as the value of family, the evils of gluttony, and the dangers of spoiling children appear ‘half-hearted and obligatory’ (ibid.). He connects this to the poststructuralist erasure of long-standing binary oppositions, such as good and evil, and the concomitant rise of moral relativism ‘in which no point of view can be maintained as absolutely superior to any other’ (2007: xvi). It is worth noting that in this account perspectivalism is simply equated with the destruction of all moral values. The equation of becoming surface with the loss of all value plays out a similar move to Nietzsche’s figure of the Shadow for whom the loss of depth of meaning also marked the end of all objective values. While both Jameson and Baudrillard equate the move to the surface with the end of ethics, Booker’s account of the dangers of moral relativism is closer to a general consensus within sociological criticism in which the waning of ethics is seen as a defining feature of the era of postmodernity (Boggs & Pollard 2003; Denzin 1991).

Following Jameson, Booker argues that the two key features of post-modern film are pastiche and fragmentation. The rise of pastiche in Hollywood is attributed to the ‘increasing tendency in the second half of the twentieth century for films to base themselves on other films’ (2007: 90). Filmmakers such as Brian De Palma and Quentin Tarantino are positioned as exemplary purveyors of postmodern pastiche, which is defined as ‘rummaging through the styles of the past for usable images’ (ibid.). While Jameson deploys the terminology of bricolage and collage, Booker prefers the homelier image of stew (see, for example, 2007: 28, 48, 63). Tracing the many intertextual references structuring De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Booker describes the film as ‘a complex postmodern intertextual and intergeneric stew’ (2007: 63). Importantly, in repeatedly referencing films and other cultural forms, postmodern art shifts away from the representation of reality.

Booker links pastiche to another key feature of postmodern aesthetics in that films about films, or more specifically filmmaking, demonstrate high levels of reflexivity. Fellini’s 8½ is presented as a key precursor of this reflexive aspect of postmodern style (2007: 137–8). De Palma’s films are examined for offering both pastiches of Hitchcock and reflexive presentations of filmmaking. Body Double (1984) begins with an opening scene from Vampire’s Kiss; however, the moment of the vampire’s awakening is ruined by the actor’s claustrophobia. As Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) reacts badly to the enclosed confines of the coffin, so the scene within Vampire’s Kiss is revealed to be a film within a film. Booker notes that this reflexive structure is utilised at the beginning of a number of De Palma’s films: ‘Thus, when Scully later, Peeping Tom-like, observes a murder, the obvious Hitchcockian referent is Rear Window [1954], but the scene also derives from Blow Out [Brian De Palma, 1981] and … Sisters [Brian De Palma, 1973]’ (2007: 131). In this instance, self-pastiche adds to the spiral of reflexivity, presenting the spectacle of ‘De Palma … doing De Palma doing Hitchcock’ and resulting in a tone of parodic ‘near-campiness’ (ibid.).

Interestingly, the development of De Palma’s oeuvre is rarely read positively. For Carroll the trajectory of De Palma’s work offers a paradigmatic demonstration of the demise of expressive allusion and the rise of empty stylisation within new Hollywood (1982: 73–4). Booker’s readings set up a contrast between the complex satire of the music industry orchestrated through the network of references in Phantom of the Paradise and the ‘entirely superficial and even gratuitous’ plethora of references within Body Double (2007: 131). The way in which allusion works in the latter – as a series of distractions rather than a means of exploring a broader theme – is taken to be typical of intertextuality within postmodern film. Booker’s analysis of postmodern intertextuality can therefore be seen to parallel Garrett’s three-stage model of allusion explored in chapter one. Both present the allusive postmodern film text as the end point of an overarching narrative of decline.

Booker’s characterisation of postmodern pastiche as a failure to engage in meaningful quotation is most obvious when he considers the deployment of high cultural references in Hollywood films. He contrasts James Joyce’s Ulysses with the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000), focusing on their use of references to Homer’s Odyssey. The former offers an ironic, ‘incongruous juxtaposition [of] the epic world of ancient Greece and the prosaic world of colonial Dublin’ (2007: 145) thereby subverting the epic form and challenging traditional literary hierarchies; the latter’s attempts to parallel ancient Greece and the Depression South do not constitute ‘a genuine dialogic engagement’ (ibid.) but offer mere allusion ‘pointing toward Homer while engaging him only in an entirely superficial way’ (2007: 146). Booker’s account of postmodern quotation as insubstantial gesture rather than genuine dialogue follows the logic of Jameson’s earlier analysis of the deployment of popular sources in modernist and postmodern texts (1983: 112). In both cases, the postmodern text is deemed to fail to quote properly. Moreover, the terms through which it is judged to fail are set by key works of high modernism that demonstrate the proper use of quotation, namely its deployment in the formulation of dialogue and/or critique.

Booker’s analyses of the deployment of high cultural references in Hollywood films link pastiche and fragmentation. His reading of the biblical references in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992) focuses on two features of the villain Penguin, who, ‘monstrously deformed at … birth, is placed in his basket, Moses-like, in a small “river” … Then 33 years later, à la Christ, he emerges from obscurity to pursue his mission’ (2007: 115). These allusions do not cohere to create a sustained level of symbolism; instead they operate ‘like the images of the film to create isolated and fragmentary effects’; this means that tracing the references simply provides ‘pleasure to audiences who can congratulate themselves on catching the allusion’ (ibid.).

Booker’s version of the entirely fragmented postmodern text takes up Jameson’s analysis of the centrality of schizophrenia within the postmodern. However, the textual presentation of the fragmentation that characterises postmodernity, exemplified by Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001), is superficial and empty: ‘fragmented and frenetic MTV-style editing contributes to the production of a self-consciously dazzling postmodern spectacle [that is] all flash’ (2007: 6–7). Booker condemns the narrative for being ‘utterly banal’ and the main protagonists, star-crossed lovers Satine and Christian, are ‘even more clichéd than the plot’ (2007: 7, 59). Interestingly, Booker’s equation of fragmentation with the destruction of narrative and characterisation resembles Schatz’s account of post-classical aesthetics discussed in the previous chapter. It marks a point at which a Jamesonian version of the postmodern overlaps with the formative model of the post-classical.

Booker repeatedly distinguishes between modernist and postmodern forms of textual fragmentation, resulting in an extreme definition of post-modern texts as those that necessarily fail to cohere. ‘Modernist formal fragmentation is centripetal … in its orientation, challenging audiences to reassemble the pieces into a coherent whole, while postmodernist fragmentation is centrifugal, denying the very possibility of wholeness’ (2007: 5). In this quote unity operates as a metaphor for the construction of meaning and thus fragmentation is linked to non-meaning. Unlike Jameson who sets up brief moments whereby individual fragments might convey meaning (1991: 28, 31), Booker’s image of fragmentation as an explosive spiralling movement must be seen as an emptying out of meaning. This sense of the emptiness of the postmodern text combined with its essential superficiality forms a theoretical model through which the mainstream products of Hollywood cinema can only be seen as dazzlingly vacuous.

Like Jameson, Booker presents nostalgia as a key feature of postmodern texts; however, his analysis of nostalgia in film draws on a number of sources, including the historian E. P. Thompson (see 2007: 49–51). For Jameson, the nostalgia film offers a reconstruction of the past through cultural fashions and stereotypes that erases the true historical past, ultimately resulting in the destruction of the timeline of past, present and future. While Booker also emphasises the role of postmodern nostalgia in the erasure of history, he repeatedly presents it as the opposite of other ‘genuine’ forms of nostalgia. Booker distinguishes between ‘progressive nostalgia [that has] at least some basis in authentic experiences, so [forming] part of an effort to recover a usable past’ and postmodern nostalgia, which has ‘no such basis in historical truth’ (2007: 50, 51). The inauthenticity of postmodern nostalgia is the result of the role of culture in the formation of memories, exemplified by ‘nostalgic memories of the 1950s [that] tend to focus not on the historical reality of the decade … but on the culture of the decade’ (2007: 51). Expanding Jameson, the cultural obliterates the historical and thus ‘postmodern representations of the past tend to be doubly mediated because they are representations of remembered representations’ (ibid.). Postmodern nostalgia becomes a copy of a copy devoid of any relation to real history.

For Booker, the postmodern is characterised by the commodification of nostalgia itself, ensuring that it becomes part of the logic of late capitalism: ‘as the market system renders culture obsolete more and more rapidly, it also attempts to maximize profits by recycling earlier culture styles as nostalgia products’ (2007: 51). The recreation of nostalgia as a product marks its complete severing from any historical moment and its equation with the sale of lies, offering ‘memories of something that never was’ (ibid.). In treating nostalgia as a commodity, Booker goes further than Jameson, completely collapsing the aesthetic into the economic. This is important because it feeds into a more general equation of commercial success with aesthetic deficiency that is evident in Booker’s work.

Booker’s readings of nostalgia films focus on their utilisation of music, often providing an intricate mapping of their multiple, intertextual, musical references. His analysis of O Brother, Where Art Thou demonstrates the ways in which the film plays out the key moves constitutive of postmodern nostalgia. The film is said largely to evoke the past through music, drawing on the authentic cultural forms of traditional gospel and bluegrass (2007: 78–9). Unfortunately the evocation of the past fuses different eras: the main theme song ‘I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow’ dates from 1913 while other bluegrass recordings come from the 1940s and 1950s, thereby collapsing several different historical decades into ‘one simulated version of the 1930s’ (2007: 80). Moreover, ‘the commercial success of the soundtrack CD’ affects the authentic status of gospel and bluegrass music, the film effecting ‘the commodification of the very music that it sought to celebrate as untainted’ (2007: 81). In this way, the film demonstrates that countercultural elements are simply swept up into late capitalism’s ‘all-consuming maw’ (ibid.).

The personification of late capitalism as an all-devouring monster is important because it clearly demonstrates the way it can become a closed system. Booker follows Jameson in arguing that postmodern art cannot instantiate the diverse modalities of utopianism offered by modernist critique. Postmodern artists are said to work within an environment ‘in which the ability to imagine genuine alternatives to capitalism has been seriously curtailed’ (2007: 188; emphasis added). Curtailment is not obliteration, and Booker suggests critique remains possible in films made outside capitalist Western culture. Utilising a highly problematic argument from Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1991), Booker contends that the third world is less affected by capitalist consumer culture and thus constitutes one of the last places in which alternative social forms can be found (2007: 18). In this way, the Mexican film Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) is positioned as relatively untouched by late capitalism, enabling it to retain ‘a lingering humanism and utopianism’ (ibid.). In addition, Booker sets up a category of art films that aspire to modernist techniques thereby offering the vestiges of critique. This is instantiated by European art films, such as Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000) which offers a proper ‘dialogic encounter’ with its Hollywood source material, The Sound of Music (2000: 86–7); as well as overtly experimental American independent films, such as Timecode (Mike Figgis & Annie Stewart, 2000).

Importantly, in the vast majority of the films that he examines, Booker follows his Jamesonian framework through to its logical conclusion. The serious curtailment of critique within the postmodern is demonstrated by a series of readings of mainstream Hollywood films, of which Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) is an exemplary instance. Booker concedes that Fight Club is critical of capitalism (2007: 37); however, he contends that it fails as critique because it does not set out any viable social alternatives: ‘the bloody violence of the fight clubs hardly seems feasible as a means of transcending the antagonistic social relations of capitalism’ (2007: 39). The oppositional mode of living presented by the film’s guerrilla force has ‘no ideological agenda other than pure destruction’ (2007: 40). The reduction of opposition to criminality and violence in Fight Club is read as symptomatic: ‘almost all utopian images in postmodern film are of a similarly debased … variety, their collective impact being to suggest the impossibility and unavailability of alternatives to … late capitalism’ (ibid.).

Elsewhere Booker addresses the ways in which postmodern critique undermines itself. While The Player (Robert Altman, 1992) ‘is relentless in its almost Flaubertian dissection of Hollywood corruption, decadence and anti-aesthetic commercialism’ (2007: 148); its reflexive narrative means that it simply becomes ‘identical to the commodified films it ostensibly criticizes’ (2007: 149). Booker argues that the film’s genial presentation of corruption means ‘there is little chance … such critique might actually lead to genuine reform’ (2007: 149–50). Booker repeatedly traces the ways in which mainstream Hollywood films fail to provide a template for practical political action, in the form of changes to the industry or the day-to-day lives of spectators, thereby signalling the end of critique. Moreover, failing in this particular respect cancels out the films’ other achievements, thus structuring the film readings as mini-narratives of decline.

Importantly, Booker’s analysis of critique takes the form of holding postmodern films to modernist standards and criticising them for failing to conform. The parallel between The Player and Flaubert, as well as O Brother, Where Art Thou and Joyce’s Ulysses, draws attention to the crucial role played by the products of high modernism, thereby making the logic of the argument absolutely clear. Thus, paradoxically, the take up of a nihilistic model of postmodern aesthetics, which is defined as utterly destructive of modernist aesthetics, results in the rejuvenation of high modernism, now utilised as a positively omnipresent set of aesthetic standards. The logic of negation underpinning the definition of the postmodern sustains Booker’s creation of ever more negative aesthetic categories, including the ‘spoof’, which, like pastiche, is a failed form of parody (2007: 167). In the final chapter, films are criticised for being ‘silly’ rather than providing proper analyses of social problems (see, for example, 2007: 153, 167, 169, 170). The assimilation of the surface with superficiality and the humorous with the merely silly consolidates a theoretical framework in which post-modern Hollywood films are condemned to play out the demise of modernist aesthetics and necessarily seen as gratuitously frivolous.

 

* Baudrillard is positioned before Jameson in this chapter because Simulacra and Simulation was first published in French in 1981, and Simulations followed in 1983.

† I am very grateful to Rachel Jones for providing the new translation of this line of the poem. Kaufmann’s version reads ‘This, the suitor of Truth?’