Discuss two or more films that you would define as ‘postmodern’ and explain why you would give them this label.
Two of the films I would describe as ‘postmodern’ would be A Cock and Bull Story and Pulp Fiction. This is largely down to the way they don’t follow a narrative, and keep reminding you what you’re watching, is a film.
A Cock and Bull Story starts with the lead characters, Coogan and Brydon, as actors, talking in their dressing room. As soon as a film start, you are told what you are watching is a construction and is fiction. This scene is particularly pointless, as they are just joking around, and this doesn’t contribute to the plot at all. The scene moves to the ‘actual’ movie with Coogan walking towards the camera as his character Tristram Shandy. This scene is postmodern as it uses music composed in the 1980’s, for an 18th century scene. It sounds like music composed in that time, but it feels like almost a mockery. The voiceover ‘the trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can’t fool around. Why not?’ Much of the film is ‘fooling around’ as nothing really happens, and it refuses to have a beginning, middle and an end, it fools around with the narrative. In these few scenes Tristram is talking directly to the audience, this is quite postmodern as Tristram is acknowledging the fact he is in a film.
In A Cock and Bull Story, there are some scenes in the first few that really remind the audience that what they are watching is a film, or just confuse them. For example, Tristam mentions Pavlov’s dogs, which didn’t happen until the 1890’s, and this is a film set in the 18th century, so it doesn’t really make any sense, so it confuses the audience. It also has a fake clip of Pavlov performing his experiment, which is a form of bricolage. Pulp fiction also does a similar thing to being in a different time. This is shown in the Jack Rabbit Slims scene. The characters, Mia Wallace and Vincent Vega go to a 50’s style nostalgia café, and they seem to change when they get there. Vincent’s car is a Chevy, which also seems like it’s from the 50’s. Vincent’s outfit, however, is like a sort of cowboy outfit, so he seems like he’s in the wrong movie. This could be a reference to what people felt like when he was going to be in the movie, Travolta was more typical of movies like Grease and Saturday Night Fever so to be a gangster in a movie seemed quite weird. Mia then makes a rectangle with her hands, and this pulls the audience out of the film, and reminds them that they’re watching a film.
When they step into the restaurant, the camera follows just behind Vincent as he wanders aimlessly through it. This is a link to his altered state from taking the heroine. This aimlessness is typical of postmodern films, as it doesn’t add anything to the plot. Everything in the restaurant is a ‘copy of a copy’, and as Vincent describes it as a ‘wax museum with a pulse’, what we see is a version, of a version. It’s a second level of representation. Everything seems false, but it very much supposed to so this confuses the audience in what this scene is about. When Vincent and Mia engage in conversation, this also seems very pointless, it just a stream of pop-culture and movie reference, and just aimless conversation, and again, this doesn’t add to the plot in any way. Vincent just goes round in circles when he asks about what happened to Tony Rocky Horror, saying ‘one way of looking at it is…. Another way of looking at it is…’, so this just feels like a waste of time.
In A Cock and Bull Story, Tristram keeps says ‘I am getting ahead of myself, I am not yet born’ when the plot seems to be developing in some way. The narrative of the film is played around with constantly, and keeps going back in time as the plot tries to advance. Although the audience thinks he is born, and can hear him talking to them, they are then being told that he isn’t born, so this is very postmodern as it refers to the fact that the movie is just a story. This happens again when a child actor is playing Tristram at a younger age. In this scene Tristram says to the audience ‘That is a child actor pretending to be me….he’s unable to convey the pain or shock of such an event’. Tristram is calling someone who is playing him and actor, when he is in fact, also an actor. The child actor stops screaming from the pain, to retaliate at Tristram, and he shows how he would of done the scene. This is very confusing as Tristram, although he refers to the child as being an actor, playing himself; he isn’t even ‘himself’. In the scenes of Tristram’s past to him, everything is real, for example he refers to his mother giving birth to him as ‘This is my beautiful, lovely mother, Elizabeth’. Everything is real, except himself in the past, who is always an actor, so this combination of people who are to him ‘real’ and actors really show how this is just a film.
Pulp Fiction also doesn’t follow a set narrative, it is split into several ‘stories’ which overlap each other in time, and have a little amount of reference to each other. We have to wait to the end of the film to see the end of the first story. But after the first story we see the same character ‘Vince’ in the future, taking out Mia Wallace, which is what he was talking about, most of the way through the first story. Also, before the end of the film, we see Vincent die, which makes it quite confusing seeing him at the end of the move. This also makes the audience not really care what happens to him in the last ‘story’ as we know he’s going to die.
Before Tristram s born, in A Cock and Bull Story, the narrative literally is ‘cut’ by the director. As the audience where getting into the plot, it ends, and we are instead watching the actors behind the scenes, however, a new narrative starts as the relationships of the actors, who are playing themselves.
In Conclusion, Both films have strong uses of confusions of time and space, as they don’t follow a set narrative, and seem to just go around in circles, instead of advancing any way in the plot. A Cock and Bull Story is also almost a pastiche of period drama’s, as it mocks the way they are put together.
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