The Politics of Postmodernism by Hutcheon Linda

Author:Hutcheon, Linda [LINDA HUTCHEON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published: 2011-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

POSTMODERN FILM?

In his article, ‘Metacinema: a modern necessity,’ William Siska characterizes ‘modernist’ cinema in terms of a new kind of self-reflexivity, one that challenges the traditional Hollywood variety of movies about movie-making that retain the orthodox realist notion of the transparency of narrative structures and representations: Sunset Boulevard, Day for Night, Singin’ in the Rain (Siska 1979: 285). The ‘modernist’ contesting of this, he argues, takes the form of an insistence on formal intransitivity by such techniques as the rupturing of the chain of causation upon which character and plot motivation depend, spatial or temporal fragmentation, or the introduction of ‘alien forms and information’ (286). Examples would include W.R., Persona, and 8½. But what happens when the ‘alien’ form introduced is parody? And what if it is that very self-conscious introduction of the ‘alien’ that is itself being parodied? What happens when we get Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories parodying and challenging, however respectfully, Fellini’s modernist 8½?

What happens, perhaps, is something we should label as postmodern, something that has the same relation to its modernist past as can be seen in postmodern architecture today: both a respectful – if problematized – awareness of cultural continuity and a need to adapt to changing formal demands and social conditions through an ironic contesting of the authority of that same continuity. The postmodernist is in this sense less radical than the modernist; it is more willfully compromised, more ideologically ambivalent or contradictory. It at once exploits and subverts that which went before, that is, both the modernist and the traditionally realist.

Parody, of course, is omnipresent in contemporary film and it is not always challenging in mode. Parody can work to signal continuity with (though today it is usually with some ironic difference from) a tradition of film-making: Witness rewrites High Noon’s characterization structure (law officer male/pacifist woman) and even echoes individual shots (villains on the high road), but adds the distancing irony of the increased (not, as might be expected, decreased) ruralization of the modern world, at least in terms of the Amish community. Similarly, Crossroads reworks Leadbelly’s thematic and formal structure in fictionalized terms, with differences that foreground the relation of race to the blues. While both music films operate within the same historical framework (Allan Lomax and Folkway recordings figure prominently in both plots), the new climactic contest scene has significant ironic differences: it pits the electric guitar versus the acoustic (in the original it was six- versus twelve-string) and adds a heavy dose of Faustian challenge.

Another way of talking about the political paradoxes of parody would be to see it as self-consciously intransitive representation (film recalls film) which also milks the power of transitivity to create the spectator’s identification. In other words, it simultaneously destabilizes and inscribes the dominant ideology through its (almost overly obvious) interpellation of the spectator as subject in and of ideology (Althusser 1971; Belsey 1980: 56–84). In other chapters, too, I have argued that the question of ideology’s relation to subjectivity is central to postmodernism. The challenges

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