Au-Cinema Films

Defining Postmodernism

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Postmodernism is such a notoriously slippery term that the word has become almost meaningless. This is ironically appropriate, because mean-inglessness is a core concern of postmodernism. On the Internet, I came across the following quotation, which nicely sums up the indeterminacy of the term: "To some it's an excuse to pile together oodles of wild and crazy décor, to others it's another example of the weakness of standards and values, to others a transgressive resistance to the sureness of categories, to others a handy way to describe a particular house, dress, car, artist, dessert or pet and to others, it's simply already over."11 am not going to attempt a blanket definition of postmodernism in all of its many manifestations in art, architecture, literature, music, and film, but instead I will try to define what I mean by a postmodern cinematic sensibility by looking closely at Woody Allen's films, and Annie Hall (1977) in particular.

Some of the funniest moments in many Woody Allen movies revolve around the main character's depression, based on a horrified recognition of the meaninglessness of life. In Annie Hall, Alvy Singer's mother takes him to see the family doctor because "He's been depressed. All of a sudden, he can't do anything." Alvy explains that he has read that the universe is expanding and "Someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything." As a result he has stopped doing his homework because "What's the point?" In Deconstructing Harry (1997), the theme comes up again, when the black prostitute Cookie asks Harry Block why he is so depressed and why he has to take so many pills. Harry, alluding to antimatter, which will cause the universe to implode in upon itself, asks her if she knows about "the black hole," to which Cookie answers, "That's how I make my living."

Like many of Woody Allen's one-liners, this one has more than one source of humor. On the one hand, we laugh because of the immense comic incongruity between two very different kinds of black holes, taking pleasure in Cookie's carnal deflation of Harry's cosmic angst. On the other hand, we recognize a certain plausibility in the connection. An addictive need for sex, the kind which could drive a man to seek a prostitute, could very well have its origin in feelings of vulnerability, fragmentation, and identity diffusion, projected onto a cosmos conceived as flying apart or collapsing into itself. In that sense, the black hole really is the means by which Cookie makes a living.2

It is also the means by which Woody Allen makes a living. From as far back as his days as a stand-up comic, Woody Allen has been trading on his ability to make jokes about human anxiety in a postsacred age in which the ontological rug has been pulled out from under us. With the loss of faith in God, an ultimate being from whom truth and moral values derive, human beings have only themselves to rely on in their quest to find meaning in life. Yet our belief in a coherent, unified self as a potential center of meaning has also come under attack by the teachings of postmodern psychoanalysis and philosophy, both of which suggest that the concept of a centered, unified authentic self is as illusory a hope as is that of an all-knowing God.

Sigmund Freud teaches that we continually struggle with conflicting internal impulses, some of them unconscious or repressed. Hopelessly split in our desires, and no longer certain of our motives, we literally do not know who we are or what we really want. Picking up where Freud left off, the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan theorized that our sense that our selves and lives form a coherent, and thus meaningful, whole is based on an illusory, language-based fiction we create in order to hold our selves, which are actually not whole but fragmented, together. Drawing upon Lacan's observations, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida argues that all concepts of truth (or meaning) depend upon language, but words refer to nothing concrete in the world, only to other words. Through the technique of deconstruction,

Derrida demonstrates that all our certainties are based on assumptions that are themselves based upon assumptions in an infinite regression. Woody Allen jokingly expressed the tenuous sense of self promulgated by postmodern philosophy in an early stand-up comic routine when he complains that his first wife, a philosophy major, was always demonstrating to him that he didn't exist.