Word: postmodernity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...screenplay's fundamental fault is its lack of cohesiveness. The movie fluctuates between drama, mystery and unclassifiable postmodern meditation on the evils of our society. Some dark comedy is occasionally juggled in as well. All this prohibits any real character development, and the frequently ambiguous, double-edged dialogue doesn't help form personalities...
...wind down our awards presentation, we'd like to offer some advice for our hep-cat profs. Ditch buzz phrases such as "politics of identity" or "in postmodern thought." Don't use more than one set of quotation marks per blurb. Take a lesson in candor from Professor Willie...
...collar workers. Not only does it offer the usual American pastimes--fast cars, parades, costume balls, picnics and all-night music--but it also provides the more contemporary attractions of survival camping, neon lights, nudity, performance art and staged extravaganzas. It's got the sun-dried culture of postmodern road warriors: deep ritual without religion, community without commitment, art without history, technology without boundaries. As essayist Bruce Sterling writes in the only book about the event, Burning Man (HardWired; 1997), which I and others at Wired magazine had a hand in producing, "It's just big happy crowds of harmless...
Audiences today still get the irony of the Graduate line, although the aesthetic context has been altered now that, thanks to the rise of the postmodern sort of irony, cheesiness has hip cachet and plastic is no longer anathema. Indeed, the movie's mise-en-scene now has unintended resonances. While the filmmakers' intent was to fashion "a scarifying picture of the raw vulgarity of the swimming-pool rich," as Bosley Crowther wrote 30 years ago in the New York Times (this was an era when commentators were concerned with the social pathologies of the rich rather than the poor...
...them and will not, in turn, be affected by their particular personalities. And just as clearly, this is not a phenomenon confined to these hallowed Harvardian halls--the warring intellectual stereotypes of the acne-ridden, bespectacled, socially inept math-science geek and the gaunt, black-clad, pseudo-European postmodern drama student are universal in American society, and are probably older than any of us (except, perhaps, for the postmodern part). "Revenge of the Nerds" and "Sprockets" are but the two most obvious examples of these recurring images. However, in the intellectually diverse atmosphere of a large university, one might hope...