Look at much of the popular culture from the last ten years and you can see we’re a culture stuck in the past, looking backwards; nostalgic for a version of the past as we imagined as children, repackaged and served back to us in a neatly marketed package. The most popular Hollywood Blockbusters depict costumed men fighting faceless CGI armies against a green screen, a source of adolescent joy for sure but lacking any thematic depth, societal value or commentary on the world we live in today. What was once solely the terrain of cult movies, transgressive genre fiction, cheap children's entertainment at the fringes of the popular culture is now front and centre; any sentimental value these things may have once had for a generation growing up disillusioned with the culture that surrounded them, stripped away as these ‘properties’ are co-opted by market forces and milked of all their consumerist potential. Removed from their cultural context, through endless reproduction, remaking and reshaping to serve the capitalist cultural mode of production, the culture of the past which audiences look back on fondly, which coloured much of their cultural literacy growing up, reduced to a shallow husk at the service of the bland, creatively bankrupt entertainment industry.
There’ only so many times you can remake Star Wars, with the same iconography, the same
thematic elements, the same story beats before audiences grow cynical and begin to see through
the cynicism of the marketing and merchandising. This stagnation is symptomatic of the broader
societal problem with Postmodernism in that it’s an ideological dead-end. By its very nature, the
concept of postmodernity has a sense of finality to it, this unspoken assumption that as a society
our best days are behind us; that the best we can imagine for the future is an infantilised and idealised
version of the past. As a result we begin rewriting the past to suit our modern liberal sensibilities;
glossing over our past mistakes by recontextualising some of our more regrettable actions with
the benefit of hindsight.
thematic elements, the same story beats before audiences grow cynical and begin to see through
the cynicism of the marketing and merchandising. This stagnation is symptomatic of the broader
societal problem with Postmodernism in that it’s an ideological dead-end. By its very nature, the
concept of postmodernity has a sense of finality to it, this unspoken assumption that as a society
our best days are behind us; that the best we can imagine for the future is an infantilised and idealised
version of the past. As a result we begin rewriting the past to suit our modern liberal sensibilities;
glossing over our past mistakes by recontextualising some of our more regrettable actions with
the benefit of hindsight.
No comments:
Post a Comment