Jean Francis - Lyotard

He suggests that grand narratives like religion, science, marxism and capitalism no longer have the same importance in our lives, the concept of progress and the arts, technology, medicine, and knowledge would progress to a greater good is now seen to be questionable. 

He rejects what he called 'grand narratives' or universal 'meta narratives', he rejects that everything is knowable by science or that as history moves forward in time, humanity makes progress, he would reject universal 'political solutions' such as communism and capitalism, he also rejects he idea of absolute freedom.

In studying media texts it is also possible to apply this thinking to a rejection of western moralistic narratives of hollywood films where good triumphs over evil, or where violence and exploitation are suppressed for the sake of public decency. 

Lyotard prefers micro narratives that can go in any direction, that reflect diversity, that are unpredictable. 

Jim collins: film as a postmodern medium.

there is a new divide in hollywood today, between the eclectic or 'hybrid' film one hand, smart and knowing and a more traditional kind of film keen to endorse 'authentic' values and a solid, traditional sense of reality, as opposed to a playful sense of representations.

says that different films operate on different levels:

- says that some explore a character adventure

- some make the text very self referential and 'knowing' and in that sense the journey is the texts journey. 

- the texts 'adventure' can mean different signifiers from different genres, disconnected from their typical  narrative structures.

- often there is a 'knowingness' a self consciousness in deploying generic features and on that part of the spectators in interpreting them. 

He says you read a film or tv programmes on 2 levels. 

 1. straight narrative layer 

2. the post modern layer, which is filled with meaning, pastiche, parody, intertextual references, irony, humour, and knowingness. 

TV as a postmodern medium

In its resistance to simplification or generalisation, tv is sometimes seen as one of the clearest embodiments of postmodernism.

Tv provides a constant turnover of images and symbols.

TV is seen as the central to the explosion of consumer culture, unlike modernists art which which was thought to be characterised by 'integrity, authenticity and originality' and therefore stood against capitalism and consumerism, Tv thrives and focuses on these ideologies.

Jim collins said that about TV: "TV is frequently referred to as one of the main kinds postmodern culture"

Features of Postmodernism

Simulacrum

"a copy of a copy"
"no such thing as originality"
"distinction between media and reality has collapsed"

e.g. andre 3000 and mick jagger
venice las vegas // venice italy.
pyramid hotel las vegas // pyramids in egypt.

intertextuality 
one media texts references another.
intertextuality mixes forms, genres, and conventions of media, it dissolves boundaries between high and low art, between the serious and the comical

the simpsons reference a clock work orange
fight club references the ikea catalogue (foreign language version)
the simpsons vs george bush senior.

mixing of genres - shrek, the office, shaun of the dead, django unchained, the lego movie,


Pastiche 
in modernism there is parody, which ridicules by exaggerating the distance of the original text from 'normal' discourse.

In postmodernism there is pastiche, a 'blank' parody; theres no sense of a distance from any norm.

Bricolage 
This is used to the process of adaptation or improvisation where aspects of one style are given a completely different meaning when compared with a stylistic feature of another, e.g. youth subcultures such as punks with their bondage gear and swastikas were eclectic as they converted clothes associated with different class positions / functions and converted them into fashion statements 'empty' of their original meaning. A more recent example is girls wearing summer dresses with doc marten boots.


Confusions over time and space 
Travel across the globe is now swift, inexpensive and available to most people.
most people have a fair knowledge of other cultures due to news / documentaries on TV.
The internet has broken down space and time barriers
24hr cities
Satellite link ups.

An emphasis on style at the expense of content / substance 
the visual and stylistic impact becomes more important than the meaning / message.
Media texts which defy interpretation
Retro / nostalgic
shallow / empty?
e.g. moulan rouge, pulp fiction, donnie darko,

The breakdown of a distinction between high culture (art) and popular culture. 
According to post modernists, high and low culture are of equal worth.
Against the 'elitism' of high modernism
Treating 'low art' or 'popular culture' as if they were high art pieces.

High art - fine art, opera, ballet, classical music, classical literature, art cinema, sculpture.
Popular culture - Advertising, pop music, genre films, television, pulp fiction or trashy novels, porn, music videos.

The decline of the meta - narrative 
A meta = a narrative or story which claims to explain something totally e.g. christianity / marxism.
Because society is so fragmented, we live by individual 'hand picked' beliefs rather than collective ones.
Post modern texts reflect this state of being by being ambiguous in their meaning message, they defy an 'absolute truth'

Postmodernism is said to reflect modern societies feelings of alienation insecurities and uncertainty concerning identity, history, progress and truth, and the break up of those traditions e.g. religion, family, or to a lesser extent class, which helps identify and shape who we are in the world, artists like michael jackson, madonna and david bowie have all created an identity for themselves which makes them postmodern.

Writers on postmodernism such as Lyotard, baudrillard, and jameson argued that recent economic changes produced particularly 'structures of feeling' or 'cultural logic'. Typical assertions include claims that thanks to television and mainly MTV we now live in a 3 minuet culture (length of most peoples attention spans) or that we are part of an over visual society, ' a society of the spectacle'  due to the predominance of the television and the internet.

- this has implications for realist forms of media, since our sense of reality is now said to be completely dominated by popular media images; cultural forms can no longer 'hold up the mirror to reality', since reality itself is saturated by advertising, television, and video games.
- the capacity of digital marketing makes 'truth claims' or the reliability of images tricky e.g the use of photoshop in magazine and advertising images. advertising no longer tries to seriously convince of the products real quality, but just shows us an ideal fake version of the product.

Postmodernists claim that in a media saturated world where we are constantly immersed in media, on the move, at work, at home, the distinction between reality and the media representation of reality becomes blurred or even entirely invisible to us, in other words we no longer have any sense of difference between real things and the images of them, or real experiences and simulations of them, media reality is the new reality.

video games and postmodernism - the sims.

The sims is a sandbox life simulation game, which already highlights postmodernism as you can create new, different versions of yourself, the use of this hyperreal world gives the user the ability to create new people and create new lives for them, out of the real world, however there is a use of intertextuality as the game uses music, television from real life in the game itself. The game has expansion packs which allow the player to interact with celebrity sims giving it more connections to the real world and what the user knows, the game is also self reflective as the sims can look at you at the creator and address you if they have any desperate needs, therefore the players know they are being controlled which is unrealistic, Baudrillard states that things things are 'not a copy of the real, it becomes the truth in its own right', thus highlighting that even though the sims is a simulation game and therefore similar to real life, it is actually very different in its own way, overall this game as postmodern allows the player to have much more freedom than a normal game does.

Telephone - lady gaga

Many artists use postmodern elements in their music videos to help them stand out and create media attention, which in turn is likely to increase sales, an artist who is very good at this is lady gaga. in her video for 'telephone' she refers to many existing big brands and media forms of  which the audience can relate to, this is intertextual referencing as at the start of the video she uses an opening title screen which is imitating something usually associated with films, she has this in the style 'jackie brown' which is a film by quentin tarantino who is a director famous for challenging the forms of convention and experimenting with postmodern methods, sticking with tarantino lady gaga also refers to beyonce in the video as Hunny bee which is the name of one of the characters in his film 'pulp fiction' which is considered a postmodern text, this shows that gaga is playing with the features of postmodernism and creating something new and unique.

Hyperreality is another postmodern feature that is prominent in the telephone music video as lady gaga is creating a hyperreal version of herself in the way that she dresses with a telephone on her head and even her name isn't her real name, so she has created this persona for herself to represent her in the media, but in real life she will not be this flamboyant character in real life. Lady gaga's image often reflects Laura Mulveys theory of 'the male gaze' which is that men see women in the media in a derogatory way, lady gaga applies this concept to her music videos often as do many female artists as it attracts more viewers and more sales, for example in the music video she is seen with just tape wrapped around her while she dances, which reveals a lot to the audience, all of these features are what make lady gaga the artist she is and enables her to create this character that we as an audience perceive her as, it allows her to stand out as an artist and most importantly against modernist music videos.

Explain how certain types of media can be defined as postmodern.

Postmodern media rejects the Idea that one text is better than the other, and everything is merely based on taste or opinion. The distinction between the media and reality has collapsed and is no longer there, there is now this world that we live in where everything is defined by images and representation which is a state of simulacrum. Images represent each other and refer to each other as reality rather than a 'pure' reality that exists before the image represents it, and this is called the state of hyper reality.

Drive is a 2011 american film which stars Ryan Gosling as the main character. One way that this film can be defined as postmodern is due to the location that it is set in, it is set in the city of Los Angeles, in this self contained world we forget about the outside world and everything that is going on apart from the characters and the scenes that we are being shown on the film, its a hyperreal version of Los Angeles that we are not used to seeing, the total population of los angeles is nearly 20 million, however during this film it feels extremely de-populated as there is not many people or crowds and throughout the film there is a calm feeling during the city. Something that  I questioned while watching the film was when is it set? The mobile phones used in the film are dated and again going back to the setting it feels like a dated version of LA, maybe this is the way that the director wanted the film to be viewed, the audience questioning everything and goes back to the hyperreality point that I made earlier.  Another Postmodern element to this film is that it the genre is not specific, there are many genres that this film could come under, for example it could be viewed as a crime film, however for crime films there is usually police involved, and there is no police in this film which links back to the hyperreality version of Los angeles as it only focuses on the criminal underworld, also a lot of the characters end up dead, in fact most of them end up dead, this is typical of a crime film as there tends to be a lot of violence, only a few of the actual characters in the film are significant, a lot of the deaths are irrelevant. However the film could also be viewed as a romance story between the driver and the girl, its a typical romance story, there is the boy who wants the girl but he knows he will never have her as they are worlds apart and she is already taken by another man, similar to Titanic in this respect. It can be viewed also as a phycological thriller as there are typical aspects of this genre in the film, for example, tense conversations, there are also a lot of awkward scenes where nobody talks and facial expressions are important for this film, particularly with Ryan Goslings character who is very shy and keeps himself to himself, which is why it is such a shock and juxtaposition when we see the other side to him. And finally Neo-Noir is the other genre it could fit into, in these types of films there is set characters, for example the bad guys, the boss, fall guys, villains, and Drive ticks all these boxes. Another thing that is worth mentioning is that all the characters in this film are Bad people, well everyone apart from the girl and her son, everyone else is pretty much either a murdering criminal or an accessory to awful crimes, yet we are still on their side,  the driver is the supposed 'hero' of the film, yet he violently kills many people, and he is a psychopath, he is originally portrayed as a mysterious good looking working class male, however as the film progresses we see this other side to him that is ruthless Psychopath, yet he is still considered to be a good guy. Some people may argue that there is no point to the film, however others argue that there is a point to it, this makes the film postmodern in the sense that films are not usually made in this way and there is typically a point to the story, the average audience to a film wants something tangible and wants someone to win and come out on top at the end (everyone loves a happy ending), however in drive he doesn't achieve anything, his boss and friend is dead, he doesn't get the girl that he has been after, he doesn't even get to keep the money, and he has stab wounds, so what is the point in him doing any of it?

Django combines various characteristics of various film genres, one of them being a ‘western’ which is a film set in the wild west of america, a ‘spaghetti western’ which is a low budget western made in Italy, and ‘blaxploitation’ which is a film where black people are cast as stereotypical characters of the black community, this can be seen as some sort of postmodern ‘mash up’ which coincides with the Frederick Jameson's idea of circular referencing. This is not the only feature that makes the film a ‘mash up’, the actual name of the film and the the origins of it come from two other films that have been previously made, they are Django (1966) and Hercules unchained (1959), this has created what is known as a meta, which is a piece of creative work which refers to itself or to the conventions of its genre ‘self referential’, this was something done deliberately by the films director Quentin Tarantino who is famous for his postmodern style. 

Postmodernism is particularly hard to get your head around as it is a concept that you either believe in or don't believe in, you have to form your own opinion on it which is why it is difficult to define something as postmodern or not, the actual name of the concept ‘post modern’ does not make sense, post meaning after, and modern being the present tense, something can not be after modern, it just doesn't work. 

Compared to other ‘western’ films the film is very unconventional, one particularly unconventional part of it is the music and soundtrack, the music does not fit well at all with the type of film it is, however in a way it does work as well, the one that stood out for me was hip hop artist Rick ross, this song did not suit the type of film at all and would clearly not have been in any original ‘western’ films, they also have Italian opera style ballads, so the range of music is very wide. This again is done deliberately by Tarantino, to add a comical element to his work, it adds to his ‘historical deafness’, historical deafness is our society’s lack of understanding of many historical events, due to us not actually being there so we rely on information from other people, who get it from others, etc etc, and in reality many of these things may have been exaggerated or not happened at all, the wild west is a great example of this, as many people are thought to get shot all the time, as shown in many films, and particularly Django, however obviously this is not true, as western films are made for our entertainment so clearly things must be exaggerated to create dramatic effect.