TIPRR 10

What interests me in our reading (and the Key Points therein) is the completely profound perplexity that gave me a headache as I read both criticisms going, “Um, okay.” I have to admit, the one quote that most caught me was Barry’s definite feelings about postmodernism when he says, “If this second aspect of the postmodern condition, this loss of the real, is accepted as a fact, then it is hard to see a ground for literary theory to occupy, since all methods of literary interpretation – Marxist, feminist, structuralist, and so on – depend upon the making of a distinction between surface and depth, between what is seen in the text and some underlying meaning.” Can we say Eeyore? As Sharon put it in class last week, the idea of what we are doing is a “theory game” and postmodernism feels almost like the killjoy to that game. Nobody likes a party-pooper but I have to admit (as Timbre describes) Baudrillard’s propositions are fascinating to me, maybe in part because I do not totally get them. On another personal note, postcolonial literature, particularly, is some of my favorite literature for the fluidity of identity, but V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life was infuriating for its downward spiraling pessimism.

In Chosen, my attempt at postmodern criticism might include looking at the pastiche use of motifs between action film and transcendentalist film. For instance, the definite action film car chase is concerning a boy who apparently has some great meaning to the Tibetan culture as it is manifest here with a kind of mystification as the boy can “predict” the future when giving the band-aid box at the beginning and its opening at the end. Ultimately, the film creates association between something greater than the car because of the car, due in part to the connection of the prescient boy. Also, there is the allusion to ballet and dance in the chase, first because of the music and then because of the obviousness to the movements portrayed – there is no movement that does not look particularly purposeful – the whole of the exercise becoming almost comical as cars (who are trying to block and stop the movement of the BMW) try not to actually run into one another in jerky stops and starts, including the BMW.

Furthermore, we are dealing with a combination of symbolic codes from action films that have no apparent grounding in reality but, instead, are merely symbols for symbol-sake. Who is the Hire? Where does he come from and how does one gain a contract with him? Where would a Tibetan monk come into contact with something of an “underworld” character? They are merely symbols. These are followed closely by the clear, almost totally ambiguous characters of the “chasers” who are mostly kept in silhouette or only flashes of faces (i.e. – two cars with men standing outside them, the doors propped open, the headlights’ synchronized turning on at a particular moment when the Hire would notice them). These characters only pose as would-be antagonists and have no particular connection either to the Hire nor his passenger; it is never explicit who they are there for because it could easily be to kill the Hire for his past work as it is to kill his passenger for the unknown purpose he contains. This leads to the idea that the boy-monk has no particular purpose except to be transported and the Hire has no other purpose than to do the transporting.

The film itself, by its very nature, is postmodern in the intertextuality of its creation: a car commercial, in the midst of an action film, produced for the internet, with a reference to the director’s upcoming Hulk film.