The romantic hero of fifties cinema can no longer be produced in postmodern film.

Evidence

The fifties stands for genuine rebellion, with genuine violence and genuine consequences, but also for the romantic representations of such rebellion, in the films of Brando and James Dean. Ray thus functions both as a kind of gothic villain, within this particular narrative, and also, on the allegorical level, as the sheer idea of the romantic hero — the tragic protagonist of another kind of film, that can no longer be made. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 637

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the periodization claim made concrete: aesthetic forms (the tragic romantic hero) are historically bound to their economic-cultural moment and become unproducible once that moment passes.
• QUESTION: Directly tests the falsifiability of the ‘cultural dominant’ thesis — if a film literally stages its own inability to produce a Brando-style hero, is that evidence of the dominant or only of allusion?