Postmodernism in the Winning Films of the Sundance and Venice Film Festivals
“Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.” – American Splendor
Postmodernism is not, nor has it ever been, an outright rejection of the ideologies and cultural patterns which preceded it (Best and Kellner 76). As such, postmodern narratives from the dystopian literature of William Gibson to the disorienting films of Darren Aronofsky seek not to supplant the stories of modernity, but to highlight the individuals and relationships marginalized during previous epochs. For this reason, the two emotional undercurrents which are the mainstay of postmodern art are the sensations of vertigo or confusion and alienation or marginalization itself (Best and Kellner 77). The top corporate movie studios, with their armies of creative consultants and focus groups might moor themselves against the postmodern waves with Hollywood clich�©s and recycled Julia Roberts plots. However, one would expect such themes to dominate independent film, which is by definition the marginalized, avante guarde of the cinematic world.
The writers and directors who achieve notoriety through success at independent film festivals like Sundance and The Venice Film Festival are themselves postmodern adaptations of the Horatio Alger metanarrative, so prevalent in modern prose. Instead of Alger’s trademark paperboy who through grit and industriousness eventually comes to owe the very publication he once delivered, successful independent filmmakers express their emotions outside of the traditional media and sometimes vault straight from obscurity to stardom. For traces of postmodernism in the films themselves, one would do well to examine Sundance Grand Jury winners WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (1995) by Todd Solonz, THE BELIEVER (2001) by Henry Bean, AMERICAN SPLENDOR (2003) by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini and VFF winner WAKING LIFE (2001) by Richard Linklater.
WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE
Like the more mainstream and highly acclaimed AMERICAN BEAUTY which it preceded, this film takes a thrust at the heart subject of modern discourse in the United States, the white, suburban family. Heather Maratazzo plays Dawn Weiner, a junior high school student and second of three children, who unintentionally begins to unravel the suburban fantasy her parents’ desire by being equally awkward at school and defiant of them at home. Solonz wastes no time establishing the alienation for her peers experienced by Dawn. The first scene of the film is the school lunch room where Dawn cannot find a place to sit (Welcome To The Doll house).
This is further developed through many shots during the film where Dawn is the only person in view while voice over clues in the audience to events around her. When Dawn exits a shot like that, such as in the third scene when her mother calls her from the family room into the kitchen, the shot is held empty until a new scene begins or another character enters into the shot (Welcome To The Doll House).
When Dawn interacts with her love interest, her older brother’s friend Troy, the director make extensive use of shot versus shot technique, alternating between frames of Dawn and Troy alone even when they are in the same area. When both a present in a single shot, they do not make eye contact and Troy sounds only half aware that Dawn is speaking to him. All of those techniques are present in the 31st scene when Troy is sitting in the Wiener family living room, awaiting the return of Dawn’s brother. When Dawn and her mother are in the same shot, hours after they have a showdown at dinner, both have their backs toward the camera and neither of their faces are visible. This contrasts a later scene when the audience is encouraged to empathize with one of Dawn’s friends as he overhears Dawn insulting him by zooming in tight on his face (Welcome To The Doll House).
In a scene strikingly reminiscent of Rousseau’s notion of forcing others to be free, a well known indictment of Enlightenment thinking, Dawn’s teacher Mrs. Grissom compels her to read her punitive essay on dignity to the class while constantly interrupting her with prompts to speak up. The principle echoes this diminutive request when asking Dawn to confess to her parents that she has accidentally hit a teacher with a spit ball in the auditorium. In postmodernism, especially among gender theorists, the voice is representative of resistance, the alternative to marginalization. In Dawn’s case, so complete is the domination confronting her that even her voice is becomes its instrument (Welcome To The Doll House).
The kidnapping of little Missy unleashes on Dawn’s mother and her father what seems like almost metaphysical vertigo. Uncertainty regarding the fate of Missy, who appears that much sweeter in contrast to her rude older sister, practically interferes with their father telling up from down. He does not get out of bed and their mother speculates that he is having a nervous breakdown from the stress of loosing her (Welcome To The Doll House).
Finally, the film’s cutting depiction of suburbia reorients the contemporary divide between the order of the city and the openness of the frontier. Postmodern theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari posit a dichotomy between the settled, city dweller ideology and the nomadic lifestyle of those who lived beyond it (Deleuze and Guattari, 8). Though they exist at the limit if the city itself, the suburbs offer all of it’s normative cosmopolitan confines and few of the it’s cultural opportunities. In the case of this film, the city in question is New York, a place where the anonymity and diversity provided by such a large population make a neofrontier. The fact is not lost on Troy or Brandon, both of whom leave Dawn to pursue opportunities there. 1985 New York, prior to Guliani’s major campaign to revitalize Manhattan and cut the crime rate, was in particular a wild location. This explains Dawn’s mother’s reaction when the police thought they had located Missy’s beloved tutu (she spends half her screen time dancing around the house in it) in Times Square (Welcome To The Doll House). The wildness of New York City will also be presented in The Believer.
THE BELIEVER
In a film about someone who was raised Jewish and becomes a Nazi, the role of alienation is anything but subtle. Daniel Balient, played by Ryan Gosling, knows too much about his supposed enemy and is too articulate about his reasons for choosing anti-semitism to ever be accepted among the Fascists. Another Nazi catches him wearing t’filin, a traditional prayer shawl beneath his shirt while they are attempting to murder people outside a synagogue. Both his actions and his detest for Jewish culture preclude any connection to his Jewish roots (The Believer).
Constant flashbacks to a dispute he had with a teacher in Sunday school illustrate that. He interprets god’s demand that Abraham sacrifice his beloved sun Isaac not as a test of Abraham’s loyalty to god or any such normative purpose. He argues effectively that the point is more Foucauldian, a demonstration of power utterly devoid of morality and requiring none (Ingram, 215). Early on in the film he speaks in fact of “deracinating” judaism from society rather than combatting it’s many manifestations just as he believes he purged it from himself (The Believer). This suggests that his model for the growth of judaism is similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the rhizome, the decentralized root which always grows back if only the top is removed. Another analogy for this decentralized model is the subway, on which at the beginning of the film Danny encounters and harasses a jewish student (Deleuze and Guattari, 3).
Danny’s hatred for the jews is also his struggle to accept the postmodern. When interviewed by a report he lists three jews who he feels are particularly guilty of perverting society, Marx, Freud and Einstein. To them he correctly attributes “communism, infantile sexuality and the atom bomb” respectively. He therefore pins the popularity of moral relativism on Marx, the undermining of the rational subject on Freud and the death of simple Newtonian physics on Einstein, each of which made for a less certain world (The Believer). That uncertainty and those intellectuals are all of critical to understanding postmodernism (Best and Kellner, 72). Danny’s desire instead for a begone era is demonstrated when he says to his friends in the holding cell, “didn’t you ever read Mein Kamph? Hitler wrote some of had some of his best ideas in jail” (The Believer).
His flashbacks, some memories, some imaginary, create discontinuity and suggest that his identity is in flux. These are additional signs of his alienation and the ironic postmodernism of his condition. His old friend who now works for the District Attorney’s Office is already a completely postmodern character as she cares more for him than for the truth (The Believer). The sense of vertigo in the film stems from his unexpected impulses to respect his jewish heritage, like when he fixes the torah damaged when they broke into the syangoug or when he agrees to teach his girlfriend Hebrew and when in the film flashback he went up the staircase in repeated sequence of clips (The Believer).
AMERICAN SPLENDOR
This film creates a sense of vertigo for the view by jumping from documentary, in which the real individuals play themselves, to biographical drama with different actors, to projected graphic novels and back, all while jumping back and forth in time, testing the very limits of the new genre of comic book movies. At times the various layers interact with one another from across the stage picture. In other scenes, cartoon captions narrate an actor’s thoughts or display their imagination for the audience. There is even a play about the characters within the movie that the characters travel to California to watch. The scenes are generally kept short, like frames in a comic. As artists depicting the real life events around them, both central characters experience a degree of alienation. When Harvey got cancer, Joyce used hise sense of seperation to help him endure the treatments psychologically (American Splendor).
Harvey does not even draw his own comics. He sends rough story boards to other arts, each of whom draws the characters differently. He loses his voice when his first wife leaves him. The humor of the film comes from the botched interactions that contribute to the alienation established above. When Harvey and Joyce are eating out, Joyce says of her future ill health, “…not yet but I expect to be [a very sick woman]. Everyone in my family has some sort of generative illness.” At that second the waitress appears and says, “Good evening” (American Splendor).
Joyce’s hypochondria is a playful take on the power of medicine to reduce people to conditions, what Foucault refers to as the Gaze in The Birth of The Clinic (Ingram, 162). Speaking with each of Harvey’s friends she says, “Borderline Autism,” “Paranoid Personality Disorder,” “Polymorphic Perversion,” and of Harvey, “Delusions of Grandeur”. Not to be left out she diagnoses herself with clinic depression and spent at least a quarter of the film in bed (American Splendor).
Their disinterest in pop culture, as exemplified by their lack of fondness for David Letterman, Harvey’s dead end job and incessant junk collecting, represent the alienation and often resentment created by consumer society which panders to the most common denominator. The title American Splendor is an ironic statement of this. Of his lonely condition Harvey says, “Sometimes in my sleep I’d feel a body next to me like an amputee feels an phantom limb” (American Splendor).
WAKING LIFE
This paper could easily have been restricted to winners of Sundance alone. However, to overlook this film on this topic would be a gross oversight. This film is of as high a caliber and has much to offer in both it’s structure and content. Waking Life was made by shooting a live action drama, from title to ending credit and then turning all of the film over to a group of animators to recreate with their own hands. Richard Linklater, who both wrote and directed the film, was able to keep the end goal of it’s animation in mind through the production process. The effect is at once beautiful and disturbing. It enables a degree of realism seldom seen in even feature length animation while still permitting a train station wall to dance or an subatomic particle to appear in tennis shoes once in a while.
For a film about dreams and ideas, this is the ultimate medium. The tries to capture both feelings of alienation and connection. The old man at the bar who speaks of laziness and stupidity as universal truths and the scen of the bitter prisoner plotting his revenge are deliberately contrasted to a young couple sitting in bed on what is probably a Sunday morning discussing the afterlife or the scene of two women in their forties sitting in a coffee shop, pleased that they have retained the curiousity of their youth. A radical evolutionary biologist interviewed in the film suggests that alienation, while systemic in the past, will simply be evolved out of by a new, kinder breed of humanity. The quiet protagonist has a conversation with a musician who reminds him of the capacity for language to overcome alienation, even if only for a fleeting moment. Such moments, she maintains, “are what we live for” (Waking Life).
A poet on the Brooklyn Bridge says, “On particularly romantic nights of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion.” The plot of Waking Life is driven by the vertigo, both figurative and literal, experience by the protagonist who is trapped in a dream and continuously experiences false awakenings, some serious salsa dancing (Waking Life). This hardens back to the Platonic notion that life is dream, as expressed through the allegory of the prisoners in the cave. Shunned by modern thinkers who preferred the solid metaphysical foundation of Aristotle, Plato has found an new audience since the postmodern turn. There is no more alienated figure in western thought that the unlucky figure who escapes the cave, witnesses the wonders of the world with his or her own eyes and returns to the cave to explain this to the others, only to be assumed a liar or a lunatic and killed.
The final impact of the film, as explained by a well-read man playing pinball is that our alienation from humanity is of secondary importance. Borrowing from gnostic christian teachings, apparently passed onto him in a dream from Lady Gregory, the famous patron of Yeats, he explains that all of life is the narrative of our alienation from the divine and the continuous extension of an offer to rejoin that spirit. Our task is to learn how to say an unreserved, unwavering yes to that offer.
It would be a shame in the estimation of this author, if this paper were the final word on postmodern themes in contemporary independent film. Exciting new films are released every month. Sundance next year will be replete films fit for study. A much more substantive might include the past fifteen years of Sundance, so as to include Primer, Personal Velocity, Girlfight, You Can Count on Me, Three Seasons, Slam, Sunday, The McMullen Brothers, What Happened Was, Public Access, Ruby in Paradise, In the Soup, Poison and Chameleon Street. Another worthy inquiry might address the films which mix animation with live action. Besides American Splendor and Waking Life, Kill Bill, Space Jam, the Roger Rabbit films and many more could be included. They would likely have something different to suggest about the ontology of film than the highly realistic looking films which have long dominated the industry. Along similar lines, a study might be done of comic book films, American Splendor, Spiderman, X-Men, Dare Devil, Chasing Amy, Tank Girl and Hellboy. Other aspects of postmodernism which one would likely encounter in film would be multiplicity, irony, cyborgs or sexuality.
While postmodernism rightfully attempts to shy aware from the universal, it is clear from these films that stories of alienation and confusion may not transcend the human experience but are intersubjective at the very least. The experience of Dawn Weiner is certainly distinct from that of Harvey Pekar and neither, in the informed estimation of this author has a better claim to the true experience of alienation, however it seems likely that they would have some things to talk about and that from that talk would likely come a mutual understanding. If it is remotely possible to boil all of postmodernism down to a single lesson (admittedly, an such attempt is to be highly suspect) it would be to encourage and participate in that kind of discourse. So long as the conversation remains honest and inclusive, the marginalized voices of yesterday may yet find their way in and grant to those who listen the precious wisdom of a new perspective.
Toward the end of Waking Life, without much ceremony an older woman says, “Life was raging all around me and every moment was magical. I loved all the people, dealing with all the contradictory impulses – that’s what I loved the most, connecting with the people. Looking back, that’s all that really mattered” (Waking Life).
Works Cited:
1. American Splendor. Dir. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. 2003
2. Best and Kellner, Postmodern Politics and the Battle for the Future from Illuminations. University of Texas, 1997
3. Deleuze and Guattari, Introduction: Rhizome from A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota, 1987 4. Ingram, David. Foucault On Reason from The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Ed. Gary Gutting, Cambridge University Press 1994
5. The Believer. Dir. Henry Bean. 2001
6. Welcome To The Doll House. Dir. Todd Solonz. 1995
7. Waking Life. Dir. Richard Linklater. 2001
