Calvin the postmodernist historian

A short list of postmodern movies

I'm sure there are many more movies I could add to this list, but these are the ones that I've seen recently that made me think of postmodernism.

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500 Days of Summer

This startling introduction to a rather weird chick flick sets the tone for the entire movie. It adds humor to the plot, but is also a intrusion on the writer's part. This makes us watch the movie in an entirely different way because we contemplate just how much the writer's own experiences played into the making of this film. It also makes this film fit into the grey area of history and fiction. I remember at the beginning of the semester we mentioned movies that start out with the "Based on a true story" subtitle as being postmodern historical fiction. 500 Days of Summer is similar to that because the intro makes it sound as if the film could be based on a true story. 



"Author's Note: The following is a work of fiction. And resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. 
Especially you Jenny Beckman.
Bitch."

Forrest Gump

Forrest Gump reminded me of Doctorow's style of creating a fictional character that comes in contact with many actual historical characters, because who's to say they didn't meet? In this movie, Forrest is the guy who gives Elvis his dance moves, uncovers the Watergate scandal, speaks to a bunch of hippies at the Lincoln memorial, and who helps fund the Apple technology company. The writers of this film make it realistically seem like Forrest was the secret behind all of these real historical events, and this is what makes this particular film postmodern. 




The Lego Movie

This movie was weird enough as a Lego movie, but add in human characters and it gets even weirder. We learn at the end of the movie that the whole story was being narrated by the small boy who didn't like his father's perfectionist attitude with the Lego city. I personally did not see this twist coming, but I think that's what makes it postmodern. The Lego Movie's ending forces you to think about who is telling the story, and does so in a jarring way almost similar to the short story we read in class. 

Dana's arm

In class we discussed a lot about what the loss of Dana's arm meant for the story. When I thought about how she lost her arm, it reminded me most of when Isaac lost his ears. Isaac was a slave who was trying to escape, and when he got caught his punishment was the loss of his ears. Dana's predicament is similar. She finds herself unwittingly accepting her role as a slave, and this makes her almost as much of a slave as any of the others on the plantation. When she tries to escape this slavery by killing Rufus, it results in the loss of her arm. 

At the end of the book Dana has become a slave to Rufus, and this is why her freedom takes her arm in return. Dana has no control over her life anymore. It is completely dictated by Rufus and his control over the time travel. She submits to the expectations for her at the time, and understandably so because she has to in order to survive, but this still means that she is forced into a kind of temporary slavery. The only way she could escape was through killing Rufus, the one who had control over her. 


This makes the fact that it was Rufus' grip that decided the fate of her arm even more significant. Even to the end, Rufus had control over her life and left a mark that would forever tie her to her past. 

Postmodern Television

Two of my favorite television comedy shows are Parks and Recreation and The Office. Both of these television shows remind me of postmodernism in the way that they are filmed and the settings themselves.

The shows are filmed as if there was a documentary crew there to research the lives of the characters. We know this because in The Office  we see characters fiddle with their microphones, and look into the camera. Some even talk at the camera during the show. Parks and Recreation and The Office directly interview the characters to add in extra commentary to the events that are taking place in the show. So, there's this weird time aspect where we're watching the action and plot take place, and also getting the characters' opinions on what is happening as they look back on it from a future time. 

In the last season of The Office, the characters are seen watching their own documentary of the paper company which was produced in their world, but which is the same documentary that we--as the audience--are also watching. It's like inception or something. A documentary within a documentary.

Also, both shows use shaky camera movement and sudden zooms to make it look more unedited, and this draws attention to the fact that there is a camera man who is controlling what we see. In fact, in The Office, we even meet one of the camera men in the final season. The camera man becomes a character who changes the story when he intervenes in a scene of the show. I guess one could say this is slightly similar to how Dana tries to stay distant from the past, but, in the end, ends up changing the story anyway.

The setting of the stories is also slightly postmodern. Both shows feature what would normally be considered as horribly mundane and boring plot settings. One is set in the office of a company that sells paper and another is set in the parks department of small town Indiana. Neither are glamorous, or would at first glance lend themselves to much humor, but the shows end up being hilarious. Perhaps this is evidence of postmodern idea that everyone--even a boring office worker--has something to contribute, and that it's not just about an elite group of individuals.


Here are some videos that show the unique style of tv shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation 

The Office:

Parks and Recreation:

Historical memory and healing

In the panel presentation that my group gave on Kindred, the author Sarah Schiff proposed the idea that historical fiction can be used as a tool for healing communities within our country by creating common historical memories. I found this idea interesting--the idea that a book could have so much power that it could help mend relationships between racial and gender divides.

I'm skeptical of this idea mainly because these issues obviously are deeply rooted in society and there are so many different angles to the problem and fiction isn't the only thing that can solve the problems, but I think Schiff does have a good point. Books like Kindred make the historical ideas something much more personal to the reader--something a regular historical textbook probably can't do. Obviously, some fictional liberties had to be taken to write such a novel, but perhaps this fiction can tell us more about 1800s slave plantations than a textbook can. By having a character that we can emotionally relate to, the issues of slavery and race are no longer distant things you read about in a historical textbook.  The characters of history seem more human. And this then forces us to take history more seriously when we think of these historical characters as people, instead of merely as facts and data we read about in a textbook. 

Schiff argued that this way of telling history then allowed the readers--regardless of gender and race--to rebuild a historical memory that is more accurate than ones from textbooks. According to her, historical fiction, in a way, tells more truths than facts by conveying ideas etc. This common historical memory would then pave the way for more civil conversations and a common understanding of traumatic issues from the past, and it would help people accept their history and move on together instead of staying divided over small factual details and hard feelings. Quite optimistic, but altogether not a bad idea. 

Check out the rest of the article here.