Nostalgia in Fallout 3

I posted a bit on nostalgia earlier and I'm very much into video games and many games such as Fallout 3 fit into this postmodern nostalgic subversion of the past, by using period aesthetics to present an idealised view of the past but also using the ideologies from the era and presenting them in a new way.

Fallout 3 is a science fiction set in post apocalyptic world caused by an extension of the cold war during the 1950s. The player experiences the future wasteland, centuries after 1950s nuclear war, filled with early Cold War iconography, including songs by bands like The Ink Spots and propaganda posters in the style of post-WWII government messages. Much of the game's visual design is referencing 1950s and 1960s sci-fi novels and early sci-fi films.
The game doesn't just visually represent the period through it's design,  "Fallout 3 is also trying to subvert any kind of nostalgia of the 50s by presenting a landscape that existed in the minds of all those who could do no more than sincerely get under their school desks during bombing drills." - fjohnrickert

Nostalgia

I've moved onto nostalgia as it is a huge part of our postmodern culture and is evident in TV shows like Family Guy, The Simpsons, The Venture Brothers and Adventure Time, ect.
 These animated shows constantly reference the past, often the 1980s and 1990s because those were the decades that the creators were growing up in. Its a time that they look back on as being worth remembering so they reference it in their shows, and give little nods and in-jokes to those that understand the reference.
 However it's a glamorised view or a "hyper real" view; it uses the myth of the period to attempt to simulate the original, it is a copy of a copy,  Baudrillard calls it simulacra. ( I do hope I'm explained this properly and I'm using the terms properly, If not then I'll have another go later).


Here's a short essay I found on Nostalgia Films, which explains things a bit better:

Frederic Jameson’s concept of the “nostalgia film” has to be interpreted in relation to his view on postmodern culture. Jameson argues that the “postmodern nostalgia film” represents the commodification of history. Postmodernism, he asserts, is “the cultural dominant” of late or multinational capitalism and outlines two features of postmodernism. First of all, postmodernism is a culture of pastiche; a culture that is marked by the “complacent play of historical allusion.” [1] Pastiche is often confused with parody in that both involve imitation and mimicry. However, whereas parody has an “ulterior motive,” to mock a divergence from the convention or a norm, pastiche is a “blank parody” or “empty cow,” which has no sense of the very possibility of there being a norm or a convention from which to diverge.

Jameson condemns the world of pastiche as “a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum.” [3] Rather than a culture of creativity, postmodern culture is a culture of quotations, that is, cultural production born out of previous cultural production. It is therefore a culture “of flatness of depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense.” [4] According to Jameson, postmodern culture is a culture of images and surfaces. It derives its hermeneutic force from other images and surfaces, that is, from the interplay of intertextuality.

Jameson’s principal example of the pastiche of postmodern culture is what he calls “the nostalgia film,” which sets out to recapture the atmosphere and stylistic peculiarities of America in the 1950s. The category includes a number of films from the 1980s and 1990s, such as Back to the Future, Peggy Sue Got Married, Rumble Fish, Angel Heart, and Blue Velvet. Jameson claims that, “for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged lost object of desire – not merely the stability and prosperity of a pax Americana, but also the first naïve innocence of the countercultural impulses of early rock and roll and youth gangs.” [5] A nostalgia film “does not reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality”. Rather, it reinvents “the feel and shape of characteristic art objects of an older period.” [6]

In Jameson’s view, the nostalgia film evokes a sense of the narrative certainties of the past. Therefore, it works in two ways; that is, it both recaptures and represents certain styles of viewing of the past. Crucial for Jameson, however, is that nostalgia films do not attempt to recapture or represent the “real” past but are structured around certain cultural myths and stereotypes about the past. As such, they offer what Jameson calls “false realism:” films about other films, representations of other representations, films “in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces “real” history.” [7] In doing so, the nostalgia film effaces history through its “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion.” [8]

Its failure to be historical relates to a second stylistic feature of the nostalgia film as identified by Jameson: “cultural schizophrenia.” Jameson uses the term in the sense developed by Lacan to signify a language disorder, a failure of the temporal relationship between signifiers. The nostalgia film is characterized by a cultural schizophrenia that experiences time not as a continuum (past-present-future) but as a perpetual present which is only occasionally marked by the intrusion of the past or the possibility of a future. The reward for the loss of conventional selfhood – the sense of self as always located within a temporal continuum – is an intensified sense of the present. Hence, a culturally schizophrenic film such as the nostalgia film has lost its sense of history and its sense of a future different from the present. As such, nostalgia films suffer from what Jameson calls “historical amnesia,” locked into the discontinuous flow of perpetual presents. [9]

Even though Jameson’s neo-Marxist discourse relates nostalgia to the postmodern era of late capitalism, he fails to address why this nostalgia emerges in the first place. In her chapter on “The Sexual Politics of Nostalgia,” Susannah Radstone argues that the critical discourse on nostalgia is limited in that it too often situates nostalgia in a social, political, and cultural context. Instead of discarding nostalgia as a form of commercialized history, Radstone argues that one should also take into account nostalgia’s place in the constitution of social identities and groups, as well as the “politics of nostalgia,” that is, “the question (…) of the meanings and significance of the view(s) of the past offered by nostalgia culture” [10]as well as the social and political desires expressed by nostalgia. - Jaap Verheul _(Frederic Jameson: “The Postmodern Nostalgia Film”)

Funny Games

I've mostly been looking at examples of how the postmodern prevails in our popular culture and entertainment and it occurred to me that the film "Funny Games" by Micheal Haneke is a postmodern film, and I'll explain why. Oh and there's probably going to be spoilers.

I'm going to talk about the 2007 remake with Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Michael Pitt, because Haneke himself remade his original 1997 Funny Games (German) shot for shot for American audiences. 

The film, in a nutshell  about a typical family that go to visit their holiday home by the lake and are tortured and then killed by two strange youngsters.

Firstly I believe that the fact that he remade his own film is postmodern as he is taking his a film he made 10 years previously and repackaging it for a new audience, to create a new experience, claiming he did it to reach a wider audience.

The film is a criticism of the horror genre, it aims to make us realise that we enjoy watching gore, horror, torture and other human beings being subjected to general nastiness, by subverting what we expect to see with a hollywood horror film. The film hightlights the fact that as human beings we have a blood-lust and see the horror genre as a form of entertainment.The  killers enforce this throughout the film, saying "Whether by knife or by gun, loosing your life can sometimes be fun."

One of the killers, Paul, (Michael Pitt) seems to be self aware. He is fully aware that he is a character in a film that is for entertainment and is the reason for his actions. He is torturing his victims because he is in a film and his acts of torture or purely to entertain the viewer. This is evident in a scene when Anna (Naomi Watts) says "Why don't you just kills us." and one of the killers slowly replies, "You shouldn't forget the importance of entertainment." Paul then breaks the fourth wall. addresses the audience and says "What do you think? You think they stand a chance? Well, you're on their side aren't you." 

Here's a clip of him breaking the forth wall by looking at the audience with a knowing smile.

Not the clip I wanted to use but I couldn't find any other.

Haneke knows what we expect to see in a horror film and so he manipulates the audience, he leads the viewer to expect something to happen but then subverts it and shocks the audience.

This is evident in the strip scene of the movie because in many hollywood horror films there is a scene where an attractive female character will get naked for some reason or another, and it is usually intended to be sexy. But in Funny Games, its just plain horrible to watch, as it is intended to be. The films leads the audience to expect the strip to be done in a sexy manner, but it is just disturbing and forces you to question your tastes and ideas of horror.

Why do we like watching harm being done to others? ect

Here's the horrible scene for your enjoyment.

Funny Games is a deconstruction, and the above scene especially, of torture porn. The films strips away the rules that we expect from the horror genre and shows us a "truth" of what we are seeing, a "truth" that is different from what we are accumstomed to. With Funny Games Haneke has created a film more horrible to watch than any of the gorey pornographic films that he criticises.

I didn't intend this to read like a sort of film review.

Post Modern Buildings

The Sick the Bad and the Ugly

Sick Building Syndrome

Sick building Syndrome was a problem that occurred in postmodern architecture, starting in the early 1970s when the architecture style changed dramatically. People who worked or inhabited these ‘sick buildings’, usually came down with symptoms. These included: non-specific hyposensitivity reactions, irritated eyes, nose, throat and neurotoxic health problems.

Sick building syndrome was only diagnosed to a building under the circumstance of abnormal numbers of occupants becoming sick in a short period of time (usually just days and weeks).

After examination of accused sick buildings the most common cause of sick building syndrome found is bad ventilation and air quality. Because of this bad ventilation there was no extraction of pollutions from office by-products, mould and industrial chemicals.

This was a major problem for architectures in post-modern times and now buildings built in the 1960s-70s come with the risk of being badly ventilated and designed.

In early 1980s onwards, there was a mass clear up done in these buildings and mould, algae and Gloeocapsa Magma was all extracted. Ventilation systems were revised and refitted and air quality was checked.

Examples

Above: A building from 1960-70 that has been refurbished and used by the H & M franchise.

The Bradford and Bingley Bank was a famous 'architectural disaster' and was even shunned by Prince Charles who said it was a “a monstrous carbuncle”. It has now been closed down and is still standing in the town of Bingley.

The postmodernism architectural style went through an ugly, impractical period before things got better.

What is Post Feminism?

What does Post feminism mean? 

1) “death of feminism”, “anti-feminism”, “feminism is irrelevant now”
2) the next stage in feminism, or feminism that intersects with other “post-” philosophies/theories, such as postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism.

Like Post-Modernism, Post-Feminism just means After Feminism. 

"But the “after feminism” idea doesn’t have to be seen as a negative. What I like about the idea of postfeminism is that it can help to situate contemporary feminism as a continuation of the long history of the women’s movement.
I use postfeminism in a positive sense. For me it helps make sense of the times we live in. Women and men of my age have grown up after the heights of the “first wave” and “second wave” of the women’s movement and have therefore benefitted from many of the things that feminists fought for in previous generations. (Examples include: women being able to vote and go to university, establishment of things such as rape crisis centres and in Australia, legislation such as the Sexual Discrimination Act...).

So, this is where postfeminism comes in. I don’t use postfeminism to describe the “next stage” or “next wave” of feminism. I use it as a way of trying to understand how feminism is constantly shifting and evolving, without resorting to age-based bickering.

http://postfeminist.wordpress.com

I really like this article i found of the postfeminist wordpress blog. It really does help me to understand what post-feminism within postmodernity actually is. Like Postmodernity, feminism is always changing and evolving, hence the 'Waves'. It shows that everything is open to interpretation and is based on freedom of speech/thought rather than have just one straight forward definition of what Post-feminism is.
It's been very hard to pin-point an exact definition within texts as it's hard to tell when feminism ended and post-feminism started. Like Post-modernity i have come to understand that it is not as simple as one after another but to work they both co-exist alongside each other and work together in ways, creating new and evolutionary changes within femininity during the post modern era.

Postmodern feminism - Women burning bras?

This video doesn't really explain postmodern feminism very well but i found it interesting how it focuses on the way most peoples view of feminism is that of a middle class woman burning bras. This video crudely says that 'women want mens peckers chopped off, then we'll be equal'. Blunt as this may seem, this video shows a biased review of feminism and that the media don't focus on any other womens rights (like the women in lesser privileged countries).

Postmodern feminism thanks to this video has been shown as a group of middle aged white women who always have something to 'bitch and moan' about. Personally i don't think this is correct but i can understand how some people might think that. Overall this i think goes back to the underlying ideologies of postmodernity being able to express your views and break away from the traditional.

How I see Post-modernism and Modernism

not fully knowing or understanding the concept of postmodernism and modernism I decided to draw a little picture of what I thought it was, if its completely wrong you can all say stuff like "Hey Lee, you goober, that's totally not what its all about! why would you even think that" and then I'll be like "oh damn"

Anyway.. my view on Postmodernism is that its initially the rejection of something whether it be an idea or opinion and then the development of a new idea/opinion/plan which in turn is rejected and changed, I've read and heard that some people argue that postmodernism doesn't exist but if its the rejection of something, such as an idea then hasn't Postmodernism always existed?

Also from that would that mean things such as religion would come under the category of Postmodernism and Modernism because ideas such as the Flying Spaghetti monster are a rejection of all other religions (pretty much all religions are rejections of other religions)

http://www.venganza.org/ - Flying Spaghetti Monster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Pink_Unicorn - invisible pink unicorn

But again I kinda feel my definition is quite rough and vague and in turn leaves me with more questions but there is a lot of contradictions because through history there have been a lot of ideas that have frequently resurfaced so would that make it a Postmodernism idea or because the idea has already existed would that make it Modernism.

confusing.