SUNY series in Postmodern Culture
4 total works
Intersperses headline events, popular film, postmodern theory, and fictional vignettes in order to capture the elusive cultural imaginary of our twentieth-century fin de siecle.
Natoli offers observations from a postmodern point of view of American culture "speeding" toward the millennium in the years 1993–1995, a time sandwiched between mounting anxieties at the beginning of the nineties and the desperate final journey of the Heaven's Gate cult in the latter half of the decade. Sometimes a whole life, like the Unabomber's, defies our logical grasp. What motivated Susan Smith, the mother who sent her two babies strapped into their car seats to the bottom of a lake? Why did we pay so much attention to the O.J. Simpson trial? Are we crawling toward our own end beyond the horizon of the New Millennium while at the same time thinking we are speeding to new positions in cyberspace? Speeding to the Millennium reviews the headlines and seeks the Big Screen to give some framing to the disturbingly contingent, to the seemingly senseless.
Explores the way that popular film brings to a "sayable" level that which haunts us in the media headlines.
We are haunted by what we cannot fully identify, by what we cannot make identical to what we already are, have, and know. AIDS is visible, as is the South Central Los Angeles riot/revolt, the dead eyes of Amy Fisher, the pubic hair in Clarence Thomas' Coke, the Branch Davidian Compound shimmering in the distance, and much more. The intensity of all this does not escape the general public. Popular film plugs into this haunting power because it attracts a mass audience. This book is about what haunts the headlines as well as the Big Screen in America during 1990-1992.
Part memoir, part cultural criticism, this fast-paced ride through the postmodern landscape of American popular culture explores how our responses to headline events and popular films help script the ways in which we imagine ourselves and the world around us.
In Postmodern Journeys, Joseph Natoli continues to chronicle how our responses to headline events and popular film help script the ways in which we imagine ourselves and the world around us. Here we clearly see how svelte marketing strategies take the present pulse of the American mass psyche in order to play to the frustrations and anxieties, the desires and hauntings that can neither be fully faced nor totally ignored. In the years covered here, films such as Fargo, Titanic, Boogie Nights, Jerry Maguire, Saving Private Ryan, and Good Will Hunting crisscrossed such headline events as the deaths of Princess Diana and Mother Theresa, a record-breaking Dow, welfare "reform," the fall of Newt Gingrich, the rise of Jesse Ventura, and, overshadowing everything, Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton, and Ken Starr. Somewhere in the intersection of what the record shows and how popular film and culture put us into play with that record lies the postmodern American landscape we are imagining and creating. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, Postmodern Journeys continues the fast-paced ride into that imagined time and place.