Conclusion

Well, the course is over and I didn't get nearly as much of this done as I would have liked (largely due to laziness and the crapiness of the movies that I watch) but I don't think that I'm done with this. In fact, I feel like I've opened a bit of a Pandora's box. I love to spout off about the movies that I'm watching, but generally my friends aren't interested in analysing them beyond a certain level. Hopefully, I'll be able to continue working on this blog as I feel the need. Thanks for listening : )

Lady in the Water

When it comes to M. Night Shyamalan’s films, people tend to be divided into lovers and haters for whatever reason. I’m a lover. However, I saw a really clear example of Jameson’s theory of hegemony in this movie. The surface plot goes something like this: The manager of an apartment complex finds a mythical creature called a Narf living in the complex’s pool. The Narf is there in order to meet her “vessel” whom she will be able to inspire. The vessel will then go on to change the world. However, she is being threatened by a creature from her world called a Scrunt. The inhabitants of the complex must come together to fill the assigned roles from the myth.
Most of Shyamalan’s movies have a moral (or a few morals) of some kind and this one is no different. It’s not perfectly clear what all the morals are, but one of them seems to be that people can regain hope for the future through community/culture. Shyamalan is essentially trying to persuade people to gather together around shared stories, making these new communities powerful units of change (note that what sort of change is never mentioned although the end of warfare is a strong candidate). Shyamalan uses the promise of a peaceful world where everyone has a safe and defined role with a strong community (his utopia) to get the audience to buy into his agenda of gathering. It is interesting that in some ways, Shyamalan’s agenda is the reward, as is untrue of most other usages of this model. Commercial users would want you to buy this product in order to be rewarded.

Scream 2.0

In looking up information for Scream, I came across some information for the Scary Movie series, which I had 90% forgotten. How strange is it that someone would decide to parody a movie that is essentially blank parody? This sort of layering reminds me of our talk about Baudrillard's simulacra. There are probably many people watching Scary Movie who have no idea what the jokes are referencing. For that matter, how sure am I that I know where they originally came from? When I see unkillable serial killers, I think Michael Meyers/Jason Voorhies. But are they the originals? I have no idea. We seem to have slid along the orders of simulacra to the point where the fact that there was an original has ceased to matter. As long as you know that it's nearly impossible to actually kill a serial killer, what more do you need?

Scream

This movie highlighted several aspects of postmodernism that we have discussed in class. I actually watched this one during our pre-Halloween horror fest. The theme of this particular movie binge was to finally watch all the horror films that people constantly reference, but which we haven’t seen. In pursuit of this goal, we watched as many classics as we could think of (including the entire Halloween series, yikes!) and particularly famous contemporary movies (Scream was on this list). The reason I mention what led me to watch this movie is that it fits into the postmodern theme of pastiche that the movie exemplified for me. So many movies are simply part of everyday conversation that it’s impossible to function without at least knowing what they are about. For example, it can be difficult to follow a conversation about swimming in the ocean if you have never heard of Jaws.
Scream is ostensibly about a group of teenagers who are being threatened by a serial killer. Side plots do occasionally thrust themselves into the action: the reporter thing, the thing with Sidney’s mom… But, the movie isn’t really about any of those things, it’s about horror movies. The entire film is awash in film references. There is even a character who describes a survival strategy based on his study of a billion slasher flicks. That said, it is unclear whether this is meant to be a parody in the traditional sense of mockery. Clearly some of the action is ridiculously cheesy but there also seems to be a level of reverence for the films that wouldn’t exist in traditional parody. It seems to be a case of Jameson’s blank parody. Entire sequences and themes are lifted from other movies and placed in this one without any clear sense of mockery. For example, when Dewey survives against all expectations (a classic horror movie convention) the audience is meant to be amused and pleased by the film’s referencing. It is like one long inside joke, where the audience is both entertained and satisfied by their knowledge of other movies.
As Jameson hints, this sort of citation may destroy the individuality of authors (filmmakers) by simply requiring them to take pieces of already created material and throw it together into a cohesive whole (or not). Just another example of postmodern conglomeration.

The Fall 2.0

Another aspect of postmodernism that was present in The Fall occurred to me today. The film draws on characters from a multitude of cultures (another broken boundary). The cast is multiracial and multicultural, but there seems to be little or no communication problems within the fantasy. The only communication barriers visible are between Roy and Alexandria in the real world. I think this is part of the globalized culture that we discussed in class. The characters in the story seems to exist in a space where differences are only on the surface, inside they are all exactly the same. They are essentially a monoculture with the appearance of diversity.

The Fall

We had just been talking about postmodernism in class when I watched this movie from the director of The Cell. The storyline involves a little girl with a broken arm and a suicidal actor who seems to be paralyzed from the waist down. In order to trick her into getting more pills so that he can finally do the deed, he makes friends with her. He tells her an epic story with an eclectic cast of characters including himself as a masked bandit. Eventually the girl is added to the cast as well as one of the nurses from the hospital and the reality/unreality of everything is complete.
This movie really brought to mind the things we had been talking about in class concerning boundary confusion. The boundary between fantasy and reality are inextricably mixed. To Alexandria, the story is nearly as real or possibly more real than her normal life. For her, the existence of the people in the story is conflated with her view of real life. This wouldn’t be so unusual for a child whose grasp on reality is clearly not as firm as that of an adult, but the story seems to take on an unusual amount of power over Roy as well. There is one particular scene that seemed to be trying to give away the film’s secret. When Alexandria first goes to see Roy, she finds herself looking at a pinhole camera version of a horse and carriage through the keyhole in a door to the hallway. She gazes through the keyhole seeing the horse outside the door (in reality) then steps back only to find that an upside-down image of the horse has followed her inside and is being projected on the wall beside her. I think this scene is meant to prepare the audience for the boundary confusion that is to come by mixing inside and outside, image and actuality.

Jackie Brown

It’s easy to get caught up in Tarantino’s postmodernist quotations but I think, in this case, we should focus on his feminist leanings. If feminism is a questioning of what the world does to women, then you can’t get a better exemplar than this. Jackie is a woman marginalized by society. She’s a poor-ish black woman who has been trodden on by society’s expectations. She works a boring, low-paying job as a stewardess (essentially a servant) who shuttles drugs for that asshole Ordell. When she gets caught, she embarks on a complicated double cross (or maybe triple I don’t know) in order to save herself and manages to play just about everyone. This film seems to make the point that marginalized people don’t deserve to be so, without ever actually focusing on that. Tarantino made Jackie tough, driven, rule-breaking, powerful, and intelligent to the point that I could barely follow what she was doing. (This was one of those movies where everything is explained at the end and you’re supposed to have an Ah ha! Moment but I never really did.) However, Tarantino does seem to focus just a bit too much on the fact that she is a woman. If we were really being equal, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. The film could be read to mean that Jackie is just an exceptional woman (a woman like a man as Levy would say) and is in no way representative of her class. I also seemed to pick up overtones of sexual control in her relationship with Max, the bailbonds guy. I might have been imagining it but she does seem to use her body as a weapon of sorts. This obviously undermines the power of her intelligence, but at the same time shows her resourcefulness.