From Calm to Chaos (pt. 2)

TV is not the only medium through which postmodern themes are popularized. The Cinema has become increasingly filled with postmodern chaos. The definitive work within the Cinematic genre which carries postmodern suggestions is "Pulp Fiction." As the title implies, "Pulp Fiction" is a film which celebrated its status as "soft" (pulpy) fiction. In this film moral relativism is clearly displayed, the sequence of events is so manipulated that all sense of linear time is blurred, and the boundary between truth and fiction is obliterated (becoming puply). Gene Veith observes that "postmodernist films set up different worlds, all occupying the same space. Characters must try to discover what world they are in." This shifting of realities includes both time frame and geographical location. Filmmakers constantly shift from one generation to another and from on locale to another.

Veith cites as examples of postmodernist cinematic chaos David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," in which a small-town of the 1950s coexists with "an underworld of nightmarish perversion," "Roger Rabbit," "with it's interplay between the cartoon world and the real world," "Blade Runner," which sets up a world where "humans act like machines and machines act like humans," and "Last Action Hero," where "a boy watches a movie and enters the screen to share the adventure." In these and other postmodern films, the reality/truth distinction is blurred and reality is considered nothing more than an "imaginative construction." Veith writes, "what they all have in common is playing with the conventionality of movie making and movie watching." In setting up fictionalized worlds and then confusing the boundaries between them, these films call into question the barriers we set up between what we think is real and what we think is made up; what is real and what is fiction? That's the question! There is not real reality, no true truth, no linear time, and no dimensional boundaries. Everything is confused and chaotic. Can you think of other movies that would fit into the postmodern genre?