Postmodern Cinema and the Demise of the Family

No discussion of American cinema, postmodern or otherwise, would be complete without an attempt to engage the realm of the family, gender relations, and sexuality, perhaps the most emotionally charged of all spheres of contemporary social life. The vast majority of film plots relate in some fashion to this sphere, even where (as in combat and sci-fi movies) it would seem to be rather peripheral within the larger narrative structure. If modernist filmmaking-rational, goal-oriented, successful hero narratives-has not always romanticized the conventional nuclear family, to one degree or another it has upheld this basic social unit of American society as the standard repository of established values, loving personal relationships, and effective childhood socialization. Hollywood studio heads typically venerated patriarchal family values even where reality is shown as radically departing from the ideal, as in the familiar noir cycle where children were nowhere to be seen and treachery was frequently the norm between husbands and wives. "Family values," in one guise or another, has long been a cherished myth of American culture passed through the educational, legal, and political systems and, more recently, bastions of popular culture such as TV, advertising, and the omnipresent talk shows. Postmodern cinema, on the other hand, offers a far more jaundiced view of the family as an institution wracked by conflict, deceit, disillusionment, and mayhem in a rapidly changing Hobbesian labyrinth. The term "postmodern," first employed in connection with architecture, is now routinely applied to other realms of social and aesthetic life, including film. What we refer to as postmodern films are essentially popular works containing abundant elements of parody and pastiche (from "pasticcio," which means "any work of art consisting of motifs borrowed from one or more masters or works of art") and increasingly reveal a fragmented, chaotic, dystopic universe. What might be loosely understood as postmodern cinema first made its appearance during the late 1970s and has since followed multiple trajectories (see Jamison; Ashley; Best and Kellner). Films labeled postmodern by academic and media critics frequently embrace strong undercurrents of mayhem, satire, irreverence, and irony, revealing at the same time a milieu in which social and personal relationships often enter into a process of breakdown and collapse. Although enormously diverse, such films tend to borrow stylistically and thematically from earlier works and genres as part of the modality of pastiche. Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987), for example, has been labeled postmodern owing to its randomly violent narrative structure, its flawed hero, and its representation of social chaos. At one point, the film introduces a scene at a railroad station that deliberately evokes the famous "Odessa Steps sequence" of Sergei Eisenstein's classic Battleship Potemkin (1925). Unlike Eisenstein's original version, however, which emphasized citizen solidarity against Czarist atrocities, De Palma's film focuses on a garden-variety shootout between federal agents and criminals. But an audience knowledgeable about film history will note the quotation and associate De Palma's work with the great classic. This sort of quotation is an important hallmark of postmodern films, adding a stylistic element that calls attention to itself at the very moment it breaks down the illusion of seeing "reality." Through such techniques, the audience is reminded that it is viewing an artifice rather than a slice of real life. Postmodern films depend upon such devices as jump cuts, flashbacks, flashforwards, split screens, and other formalist conventions that refocus attention to particular film discourses as artistic constructs, in the process approaching Bertolt Brecht's theatrical dictum that audiences must never be lulled, even momentarily, into believing that they are viewing real-life representations. …