Postmodern pastiche blurs the present into a timeless simulacral past

Evidence

Finally, the setting has been strategically framed, with great ingenuity, to eschew most of the signals that normally convey the contemporaneity of the United States in its multinational era: the small-town setting allows the camera to elude the high-rise landscape of the 1970s and 1980s (even though a key episode in the narrative involves the fatal destruction of older buildings by land speculators), while the object world of the present day -artifacts and appliances, whose styling would at once serve to date the image — is elaborately edited out. Everything in the film, therefore, conspires to blur its official contemporaneity and make it possible for the viewer to receive the narrative as though it were set in some eternal thirties, beyond real historical time. This approach to the present by way of the art language of the simulacrum, or of the pastiche of the stereotypical past, endows present reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage. Yet this mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way. It cannot therefore be said to produce this strange occultation of the present by its own formal power, but rather merely to demonstrate, through these inner contradictions, the enormity of a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 86

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely illustrates pastiche-of-the-stereotypical-past and the waning of historicity through a single film’s staging choices.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the reader’s interests in how economic/cultural conditions produce aesthetic form - the pastiche here is framed as symptom, not cause, of the loss of historical experience.
• XREF: The claim that images of the past consume present reality resonates with Baudrillard’s simulacra and could connect to the reader’s own position-mapping. — connects to: Treating time as a series of nows annihilates past, present, and future alike — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 408; Extreme postmodernism erases historical specificity into a millennia-old cultural constant — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 129; Postmodernism functions for Jameson as a cultural dominant marked by depthless pastiche. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 484 (+9 more)