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Postmodernism and the Consumer Society (1984)

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Postmodernism and the Consumer Society (1984)

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Fredric Jameson

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Postmodernism and Consumer Society - Frederick Jameson

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A short analysis of Las Vegas and the architecture of entertainment ...

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A 20 min. short documentary exploration of Las Vegas as city and particular kind of fantastic and Disneyfied urban experience. Using the Venturis 'Learning from Las Vegas' as a point of departure, it presents the architecture and design of the Strip as the quintessential post-modern city.

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The analysis here is particularly significant to our concerns - listen carefully as to the way

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Westin Bonaventure Los Angeles California

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Syracuse University School of Architecture

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Westin Bonaventure Hotel Downtown Los Angeles

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Ed Soja - The Postmodern City / Bonaventure Hotel

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Extract from an Open University program shown on BBC2 in the early 90s. Ed Soja discusses the postmodern nature of the Bonaventure Hotel I have now uploaded the full version of the documentary to YouTube: Los Angeles - City of the Future?

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Los Angeles, the City in Cinema: the Bonaventure Hotel

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What building most clearly signifies Los Angeles? In a built environment with few easily legible architectural icons, the Bonaventure Hotel has come to stand for the city as no other building does. Since opening in 1976, John C. Portman Jr.’s quintet of reflective cylindrical towers atop a stark concrete base has played in urban Los Angeles films not just an incidental if striking piece of background detail, but a piece of visual shorthand for Los Angeles (or its destruction), an ominous space for illicit dealings, a stop on or pathway for a chase, a convergence point for a final showdown, or even a part of completely different cities or realities. And like Los Angeles itself, filmmakers frequently exploit certain of the Bonaventure's features, or even invent ones that don't exist, while ignoring its other qualities entirely.

The video essays of "Los Angeles, the City in Cinema" examine the variety of Los Angeleses revealed in the films set there, both those new and old, mainstream and obscure, respectable and schlocky, appealing and unappealing — just like the city itself.

For more on "The City in Cinema", "Notebook on Cities and Culture", and "A Los Angeles Primer", visit http://www.colinmarshall.org

Films featured:

The Driver (Walter Hill, 1978)
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (Daniel Haller, 1979)
Midnight Madness (Michael Nankin and David Wechter, 1980)
Blue Thunder (John Badham, 1983)
Breathless (Jim McBride, 1983)
Night of the Comet (Thom Eberhardt, 1984)
This is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984)
Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988)
Lethal Weapon 2 (Richard Donner, 1989)
Hard to Kill (Bruce Malmuth, 1990)
In the Line of Fire (Wolfgang Petersen, 1993)
True Lies (James Cameron, 1994)
Forget Paris (Billy Crystal, 1995)
Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
Nick of Time (John Badham, 1995)
Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995)
Escape from LA (John Carpenter, 1996)
Playing God (Andy Wilson, 1997)
Epicenter (Richard Pepin, 2000)
Swordfish (Dominic Sena, 2001)
Showtime (Tom Dey, 2002)
Wonderland (James Cox, 2003)
Mission: Impossible 3 (J.J. Abrams, 2006)
Hancock (Peter Berg, 2008)
State of Play (Kevin Macdonald, 2009)
The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)
Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014)

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A new book says we're wallowing in our memories more than ever-and that cultural innovation is stagnating

Katy Perry goes '80s for her "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" video

Nickelodeon recently decided to start catering to adults. Noticing that its 1990s programming was popular enough to spur Facebook groups, blog posts, and YouTube clips devoted to shows like "Clarissa Explains it All" and "All That," the kid-centric cable network began rebroadcasting the content from midnight to 4 a.m.-and brought in spectacular ratings for doing so. The New York Times seemed somewhat surprised that the 18-34 demographic is old enough to be nostalgic, but the Awl's Dave Bry countered that "nostalgia is not new"-and that he remembers when, in the dawn of the '90s, he was invited to his first "'80s party," complete with Flashdance sweaters and "Relax" booming from the CD player. In that piece, Bry traces the cycle back through Generation X's fixation on their '80s childhoods, and even Happy Days trading on fond memories for the '50s during the early '70s.

The underlying question: Is pervasive nostalgia for the recent past... normal? Or is there something wrong with today's fixation with the past?

Music critic Simon Reynolds tackles just this question in his book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past, released in mid-July. Focusing on music, Reynolds asserts that recycling the past is nothing new, but that the vast digital advances of the most-recent decade have caused the amount of unimaginative and static retro culture to explode. He says we're victims of a "crisis of overdocumentation," facilitated by "YouTube's ever-proliferating labyrinth of collective recollection" and the fatiguing amount of digital music history only a couple mouse-clicks away. Human beings need not rely on the foggy hard drives in their skulls anymore. Instead, they can simply Google a phrase, and spend an evening tumbling down the rabbit hole of not-so-old history.

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'Retromania': Why Is Pop Culture Addicted to Its Own Past?

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A new book says we're wallowing in our memories more than ever-and that cultural innovation is stagnating Katy Perry goes '80s for her "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" video Nickelodeon recently decided to start catering to adults.

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I spent my 80s reliving the 60s! This is all brand new to me!

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Our scene begins with a young woman walking through a California town. The Lost Boys is playing at the cinema and a car goes past with Belinda Carlisle's Heaven Is A Place On Earth on the stereo.

Just in case the point isn't already made, the woman walks past an electronics store in which Max Headroom is snarling out of every television set. The only way the point could be made any clearer would be if Rick Astley, Alf the alien, Gary Coleman and Tiffany cartwheeled across the screen screeching: "Welcome to 1987, dudes!"

Thus begins San Junipero, the fourth episode from the latest series of Black Mirror, starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis. It is, as audiences have almost come to take for granted from the show, a genre-defying exploration of death, technology, love and all those other Black Mirror bugbears. But in terms of its setting, it is unusually on-trend.

Not since the actual 80s have there been so many TV shows set in that decade. When it comes to period drama on TV, oversized denim jackets are the new corsets, and these shows are as loved by critics as they are by audiences. Deutschland 83 and The Americans reimagined, in very different ways, the cold war of the 80s, while Halt And Catch Fire is a pleasingly clever look at the tech world in that decade (starring, incidentally, Mackenzie Davis, apparently the go-to woman for 80s-set drama). The delightful Red Oaks on Amazon Prime, and The Goldbergs, comedian Adam Goldberg's sitcom based on his 80s childhood, take a more traditional tack, riffing on the kitschiness of the decade.

Both shows feel as if they are inspired by specific 80s pop culture: The Goldbergs, with its sentimental voiceover and fond if unsentimental depiction of family life, is clearly the admiring grandchild of The Wonder Years and Roseanne; the setup for Red Oaks, with an awestruck kid working at a posh summer club, is decidedly reminiscent of the 1984 Matt Dillon film The Flamingo Kid. There is even an episode in the first series using that most 80s of all plots: a parent-and-child body swap.

Then there is Stranger Things, Netflix's blockbuster of all the 80s-inspired shows, which is coming back for a second series in the autumn. It was itself based on 80s movie blockbusters, patchworked together so smoothly the effect was like perfectly sampled 80s hip-hop jam, making you appreciate the originals anew while simultaneously enjoying the modern take.

On top of all this, two very different pop culture icons from the 80s are being revived for TV: at one end of the spectrum, Spike Lee is remaking his landmark movie about African-American life and female sexuality, She's Gotta Have It, as a TV series for Netflix; and at the other, US Channel The CW is planning a Dynasty reboot and remakes of LA Law, Fame and Knight Rider. TV versions of American Gigolo and Dirty Dancing are also in various stages of development. Meanwhile, a small-screen update of buddy-cop thriller Lethal Weapon airs on ITV from next month.

Despite being one of the most politically and culturally reviled decades of all, even in its own time, people have been saying that the 80s are back pretty much since 12.01am on 1 January 1990. In terms of fashion and music, this has long been the case, with both industries mindlessly reviving 80s trends in an alternately nostalgic and gratingly ironic style. In the past few years, the movie business has eagerly hitched itself to the 80s bandwagon, and announcements about upcoming remakes of classic 80s films have become as cliched as the originals often were.

But television's sudden re-examination of the decade is, in many ways, far more successful. It captures the best of the spirit of that era's pop culture as opposed to just rehashing its templates, which is what Hollywood has done in exploiting familiar franchise names but forgetting to bother with any heart. Paul Feig's much-discussed all-female Ghostbusters movie, for example, didn't quite work, not because all the leads were women, as some idiots claimed, but because it lacked the soul of friendship the original had (as well as a coherent plot and enough good jokes). Stranger Things, by contrast, rather than being hamstrung by its 80s templates, realised that what people love about 80s movies is not the plots but the feelings they provoke.

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Back to the future ... Stranger Things. Photograph: Netflix

So instead of just lazily remaking a specific beloved movie, the show's makers, the Duffer Brothers, took the camaraderie of Stand By Me, the soulfulness of ET, the sci-fi of Firestarter and the teen angst of John Hughes's movies and spun them into an original story, putting in an occasional specific reference (such as the kids walking along the railway tracks, Stand By Me-style) but jettisoning any comparison-provoking plot parallels. And Stranger Things, like all the 80s-inspired TV shows and pop culture, has a pan-generational appeal.

"I think there's a lot of nostalgia from millennials because, even though we didn't live it, we experience it all the time," says Shannon Purser, who played the archetypal 80s character of Barb in Stranger Things and was born (rather mortifyingly to those of us who can remember the 80s) in 1997. "A lot of us watch 80s movies and listen to 80s music. We like the strong bonds of friendship that were key in those movies." For this reason, both Stranger Things and Black Mirror's San Junipero episode are not actually about the 80s at all; they're about movies from the 80s, the decade refracted through contemporary pop culture. This is why the opening scene of the latter is done with such knowingly heavy hand, ladling on the 80s pop culture references. Even the name of the town is a nod to 80s movies set in similar California towns, such as The Lost Boys (Santa Carla) and Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure (San Dimas).

"I wanted it to be a fantasy form of the 1980s," says Charlie Brooker, who wrote the episode. "Hyper-real, shiny, lots of John Hughes elements, that Cocktail look - and the director was very keen to emulate the feel of those movies. Which was brilliant for us because it meant we could up the cheese factor but for a logical reason."

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Tom Cruise in Cocktail. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar/Cinetext Collection

The idea of movies such as The Lost Boys and Cocktail still being discussed 30 years later would have amazed critics at the time, who largely assumed their legacies would last about as long as the taste in a Coca-Cola-flavoured stick of Hubba Bubba. So what is it about 80s movies that have given them such a long-lasting appeal, and why is that appeal best captured now by TV?

It is pretty astonishing to look back at 80s movies now and see how sophisticated, morally, they often were, especially compared to movies today. "I look back in amazement at those 80s movies which I watched when I was a teenager, like Dirty Dancing and Fast Times At Ridgemont High," says Anna Winger, creator and writer of Deutschland 83. "Teenagers were having abortions and stuff. You could never have that now in a movie, not without it being a big deal."

John Hughes's teen films, especially Pretty In Pink and Some Kind Of Wonderful, were explicitly about social-class issues in middle America. Teen girls enjoyed sex lives in movies such as Mystic Pizza and Say Anything. Female leads in romcoms were at least as powerful as the men in the workplace, and often more so (Moonstruck; When Harry Met Sally; Romancing The Stone). Movies could star an African-American lead without it being a major plot point (Beverly Hills Cop; The Golden Child). None of this is true in movies today. Hollywood has become astonishingly conservative and bland in the past 30 years.

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The Breakfast Club: Judd Nelson (top), Emilio Estevez (right), Anthony Michael Hall (middle), Ally Sheedy (left) and Molly Ringwald (front). Photograph: MCA/Everett/Rex

Largely, this is because movies are now made for the Far East market as opposed to the western world, and are so expensive to market globally that studios go for the lowest common denominator, which means blockbuster franchises. It's why movie theatres are filled with interchangable superhero movies instead of mid-market films rooted in the everyday such as The Breakfast Club: explosions are easier to translate than angsty conversations about suburban parents. But, as the enduring popularity of 80s movies proves, those angsty conversations still hold an enormous appeal for today's teenagers. "TV is now where you can do what you can no longer do in movies," says Winger. "TV is where you can ref

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From Black Mirror to Stranger Things, why do we keep going back to the 80s?

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Our scene begins with a young woman walking through a California town. The Lost Boys is playing at the cinema and a car goes past with Belinda Carlisle's Heaven Is A Place On Earth on the stereo. Just in case the point isn't already made, the woman walks past an electronics store in which Max Headroom is snarling out of every television set.

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Here is my tribute to some famous musical in film history through La La Land's references. 

Music from the original soundtrack of the film. 

Hope you enjoy.

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Tarantino's Best Visual Film References... in Three Minutes!

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The Simpsons' tribute to Film industry. Here's some of the many tributes that The Simpsons' have paid to Cinema. Along their 27 seasons this mythic tv show has used as reference movies from famous directors such as: Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola or Steven Spielberg.

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Jameson makes specific reference to this as the 'nostalgia mode' prevalent in 1980s Hollywood.

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Theatrical trailer for the film BODY HEAT. Caused quite a stir in 1981. It was my favorite film for the longest time.

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Film Noir: Bringing Darkness to Light (2006)

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Film Noir: Bringing Darkness to Light (2006)

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See especially the opening minute with James Ellroy precise capturing of 'noir'

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Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?An analysis of the ways in which capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system.

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Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?An analysis of the ways in which capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system.

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Mark Fisher (2009)

Introduction