The Emotional Life Of Postmodern Film PDF Download

It is widely assumed that postmodern critical and aesthetic practice projects a glacial, emotionless universe that renders it irrelevant to or even incompatible with what has becomes known as the "affective turn." It is just as widely assumed that of the two terms at the heart of this "affective turn," affect and emotion, emotion is the less critically interesting or politically productive of the two - the pedestrian, slightly stodgy cousin of a esubjectivized, mobile and liberatory affect. In bringing postmodernism and emotion together through an analysis of a series of "postmodern emotions," this thesis attempts at once to salvage postmodernism from critical redundancy by revealing the idiosyncratic, hybrid emotions that permeate it, and to salvage emotion from critical redundancy by describing the theoretical and political challenges posed by its postmodern incarnations. The textual frame through which this somewhat binocular argument will be articulated is itself two-sided. On the one hand, I broach a number of significant theoretical texts, from Sigmund Freud's "The Uncanny," to Fredric Jameson's famous meditation on Los Angeles' Bonaventure hotel, to Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Inhuman. On the other, drawing on cinema's status as both a commercial medium with an inbuilt relation to emotion, and an aesthetic form of historical significance to the elaboration of postmodern aesthetics, I examine a series of self-consciously "postmodern" films from the 1990s, a period when postmodern concepts and practices achieved a broad popular currency: Wes Craven's Scream (1996), David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001), Harmony Korine's Gummo (1997) and Wes Anderson's Rushmore (1997). In a series of close readings, I endeavour to show that far from incompatible with postmodernism, emotion is absolutely key to its theoretical and aesthetic articulation, and that the postmodern aesthetic strategies and cultural shifts seen as most hostile to emotion can become the most productive tools for reflecting on emotion. This conjunction of postmodernism and emotion forces us to revise our received understanding of emotion - throwing up a series of idiosyncratic, borderline feelings, from ecstasy, euphoria and sublimity, to knowingness, bewilderment, fascination and boredom, to a peculiarly self-reflexive instantiation of fear. Emerging under the intense pressure of postmodernism's destabilizing critique of hermeneutics, embodiment and subjectivity, these distinctively postmodern emotions diverge in striking ways from the rigid cognitive appraisal model of emotion that continues to structure feeling theory's assumptions about emotion. In tracing these divergences, this thesis suggests that emotion may be quite as valuable as affect to the affective turn's efforts to reassess feeling's relation to agency, sociality, embodiment, faciality, hermeneutics and intentionality. Yet if the conjunction of postmodernism and emotion helps us transform our understanding of emotion, it also helps us reconfigure the clichés of postmodern aesthetics - converting the flat, depthless surface into a textured plane bristling with fractures and gleaming with gloss; the failure of cinematic suture into the bewildering loss of orientation; practices of allusion into a knowing social network glimmering with knowing winks. Far from a moribund critical and aesthetic practice incompatible with and irrelevant to current work in the field of affect and emotion, then, this thesis suggests that postmodern aesthetics and theory may provide the perfect platform from which to enrich and engage this burgeoning field.