In postmodern cinema, evil becomes an image drained of genuine menace

Evidence

For this gothic subverts itself fully as much as Something Wild, but in a rather different way. There, it was the simulated nature of Ray’s evil that was underscored for us even while he remained a real threat: revolt, statutory illegality, physical violence, and ex-convicts are all genuine and serious matters. What Blue Velvet gives us to understand about the sixties, in contrast, is that despite the grotesque and horrendous tableaux of maimed bodies, this kind of evil is more distasteful than it is fearful, more disgusting than threatening: here evil has finally become an image, and the simulated replay of the fifties has generalized itself into a whole simulacrum in its own right. … The lesson implied by all this — which is rather different from the lesson it transmits — is that it is better to fight drugs by portraying them as vicious and silly, than by awakening the full tonal range of ethical judgments and indignations and thereby endowing them with the otherwise glamorous prestige of genuine Evil, of the Transgressive in its most august religious majesty. Indeed, this particular parable of the end of the sixties is also, on another metacritical level, a parable of the end of theories of transgression as well, which so fascinated that whole period and its intellectuals. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 645

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is a concrete working instance of the ‘waning of affect’ thesis: evil detached from emotional gravitas, reduced to image rather than genuine transgression.
• XREF: Connects to Baudrillard’s simulacrum and the reader’s broader aim of periodizing style — evil as image is the aesthetic form of the economic/social condition. — connects to: Cinematic catastrophe overshadows more insidious forms of violence — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 420