Creativity, originality, and postmodern film

For Frederic Jameson, one of the principal characteristics of late (i.e., postmodern) capitalism is the extension of capitalist economic control not only to new parts of the globe but also to new aspects of life, even in the capitalist West. One of these aspects is art itself, which now becomes a mere sub category of commodity production in general. However, this commodification of aesthetic production does not lead, as one might initially expect, to the output of banal, interchangeable, cookie-cutter artworks devoid of innovation'and ingenuity. After all, capitalism— especially late capitalism—is nothing if not innovative and ingenious. Indeed, as Jameson notes, postmodern aesthetic production joins a larger system of commodity production in which "the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increas- • ingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation" (Postmodernism, 4-5).

One should, therefore, expect a great deal of artistic creativity in postmodern art, even in forms (such as film) that are dominated by economics in particularly obvious ways. The films discussed in this volume—made by such illustrious directors as Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Brian DePalma, Joel and Ethan Coen, Quentin Tarantino, Tim Burton, David Lynch, and David Cronenberg—certainly indicate that creativity is alive and well in the world of postmodern film, however weak that film might be in terms of political critique. At the same time, Jameson's reading of postmodernism, at least, would suggest that this creativity is of a different sort altogether from that found in modernist art. For Jameson, one of the key underpinnings of modernist artistic production is the belief that artists should strive to develop unique individual styles that are the direct expressions of their own inner selves—thus evading the very conscription within the system of commodity production that is emblematic of postmodern art. In his view, however, the intense psychic pressures of life under late capitalism shatter the psyche itself, destabilizing the once-solid core of individual identity and rendering it ineffective as a source of aesthetic expression. As a result, postmodern artists, however ingenious and inventive their works might be, are unable to establish and maintain a distinctive and easily identifiable personal style in the modernist sense. Instead, postmodern artists "have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture" (Postmodernism, 17-18). Postmodern artistic creativity, then, resides not in the production of unique individual styles but in the clever appropriation and assembly of the styles of others, while individual films themselves have an assembled, fragmentary quality.

What all of this really amounts to, according to Jameson, is that modernist artists were able to think beyond the bounds of the capitalist system that was still congealing around them and to point, in their art, toward the Utopian possibilities of alternative systems and ways of life. Postmodernist artists, on the other hand, live and work in a world in which capitalist modernization is essentially complete and in which the ability to imagine genuine alternatives to capitalism has been seriously curtailed. In addition, the audiences for postmodern art—who can entirely appropriately be described as the consumers of this art—have a diminished ability to recognize and appreciate any Utopian suggestions that, however faint and feeble, might still be present in the art they consume.

Of course, the application of Jameson's suggestion of the loss of distinctive individual styles in postmodern art is complicated in the case of film by the difficulty of attributing any film to the work and vision of any one artist. While auteur theory (epitomized in- the United States by the work of Andrew Sarris) has attempted to treat film directors as the individual creators of films, much recent work in film sttidies has moved away from this approach, instead emphasizing the collective nature of the process of filmmaking. For one thing, the thinking goes, actors, writers, and others make substantial creative contributions to films. For another, the extremely expensive nature of filmmaking means that those who finance films have a great deal invested in them and therefore tend to expect to have some input into the creative process as well. This was especially the case in the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, when, as Thomas Schatz has effectively demonstrated, film style was often much more a product of the tastes and inclinations of specific studios than of individual directors.

In this sense, of course, directors of the postmodern era often have more control over the creative process than did their predecessors in the studio era, because studios now lack the clout to control the filmmaking process as thoroughly as they once did. One thinks particularly of someone like John Sayles, who has staunchly maintained independent control of his work as a filmmaker, both scripting and financing his own films. Yet Sayles is known more for his politically engaged subject matter than for any sort of distinctive cinematic style, and he is in any case perhaps the least postmodern of contemporary film directors. Except for occasional moments (such as the inconclusive ending of his 1999 film Limbo), Sayles employs a relatively conventional, realistic narrative style, even as the engaged subject matter of his films differs dramatically from that of typical Hollywood fare. Even a film such as Lone Star (1996), with its fragmented, nonlinear plot, is not very postmodern in that the pieces ultimately fit smoothly together.1

Sayles thus serves as a "sort of counterexample in the world of contemporary Hollywood film, while the established directors mentioned above— along with such less mainstream directors as Todd Solondz, Gregg Araki, and Mike Figgis, as well as such up-and-coming "Hollywood" directors as Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Christopher Nolan, Don Roos, and Paul Thomas Anderson—indicate the wide variety of filmmaking styles that can still be considered postmodern. This variety in no way contradicts Jameson's vision of postmodernism as a cultural dominant under late capitalism, and indeed the way in which very different directors nevertheless show postmodern inclinations in their work tends to verify Jameson's central proposal that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, the variety of postmodern film merely demonstrating the multiplicity of late capitalism itself.

At the same time, this very multiplicity means that capitalism does not establish the terms upon which art is produced in a mode of strict determination. That is, while virtually all art (and certainly all big-budget art, such as commercial film) produced in our contemporary era tends to reproduce and propagate the ideology of late capitalism, there are always cracks and fissures through which alternative ideologies can potentially shine through. The continued existence of directors such as Sayles, who is hardly postmodern at all, demonstrates the incomplete nature of capitalist.cultural hegemony in the postmodern era, while there are moments in the work of even the most postmodern of directors—such as Tarantino, Burton, Lynch, and Cronenberg— that potentially challenge the cynical, ahistorical, and emotionally flat worldview of late capitalism. Postmodern film thus contains glimmers of Utopian possibility even as it largely embodies and ratifie's the anti-utopian orientation of late capitalist thought. Given the economic realities of the business of filmmaking, an explosion of radical Utopian energy in commercial film hardly seems in the cards at this point in time. It thus remains for astute viewers to focus on the progressive potential inherent in the films we have and to read them in enlightening and liberating ways, toward a day when true enlightenment and liberation might become a concrete possibility.

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