Presented to the Panel "Terror and the Cinematic Sublime"
organized by Dr. Todd Comer
organized by Dr. Todd Comer
Midwest Modern Language Association, Nov 4, 2010
In a world where theory and market consciousness have exerted a double strangle hold on naïve poetries it is important to develop a discourse that works to re-identify where and how lucid encounters with meaning can occur, within popular culture rather than in opposition to it. Lyotard’s proclamation that Grand Narratives are no longer adequate or relevant has prompted this inquiry into three particularly post-modern films that subvert narrative, investigating where these modes come from in culture and what they have the capacity to signify. Specifically, the documentary film Babies (2009) is organized by image without plot, The Coen’s Burn After Reading (2008) is ‘realism’ as inseparable from ‘the fake,’ and Charlie Kauffman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008) is an imaginary that envelops the issue of lost referentials as part of its structure. The distinct methods of these films are opportunities to investigate what is meant or what could be meant by Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, using Baudrillard’s text as a picture of what logically comes after Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition. While Baudrillard offers a method for thinking of film as a facet of self-referential culture, Gilles Deleuze offers a method for thinking of film as enactments of philosophical thought. It is hoped that by positioning the dystopian tone of simulacra against the expansive language Deleuzian philosophy that the fright of post-modern culture can be relocated to find the use of a consciousness that is adjusted to it; specifically, that the same themes historically conceptualized through myth— such as birth, death and God— are not lost or closed by the disruption of narrative simplicity but simply exist ‘realistically’ within the fabric of construction.
