POSTMODERNISM IS REDUNDANT

BUT PROGRESSIVES HAVEN'T NOTICED

One great advantage of being a misanthropic old git is that I can be honest, above all with myself. I’ve now decided to barely believe a word of ‘critical wisdom’ about films, books, restaurants, bands, cities, etc. They’re probably only useful when avoiding critical discourse and just letting rip, accepting that it’s ultimately personal reactions being offered. In that spirit, maybe this splenetic piece may save someone from wasting over two hours?

I foolishly ignored all this, when I decided to watch David Lynch’s ‘masterpiece’ Mulholland Drive (2001). This is often described as ‘the greatest film of the 21st century’. Perhaps people who watch it feel they need to join in this preposterous assessment. Yes, it contains some great acting and wonderful scenes. But it’s not really a film - more a performance of one - done knowing it would get gushing reactions from film theorists and critics. Read the reviews in The Guardian and especially the comments underneath this 20th anniversary piece (Mulholland Drive at 20) which gives a brief synopsis of the film.

The responses are performative and often aggressively defensive. The focus is on being clever, setting up a contrast with those who don’t ‘get’ the film and aren’t sophisticated enough to. This is how ‘progressives’ approach everything. Their primary concern isn’t with the issue itself but on what their responses say about them. They do the same with contemporary political and social issues - immigration and Brexit are the best examples. And it’s fascinating that many of the commentators on the film focus on themselves and how, since no one’s life ‘makes sense’, it’s wrong to expect this film to:

Does ‘Mulholland Drive’ mean anything as a story? Is it relevant to anything? Should it be? I have dreams far stranger than that which I enjoy tremendously, or nightmares from which I snap out of in cold sweat. When I finally realise I'm awake, I shake my head, sometimes yawn, and go about my day. I have coffee, put some clothes on, and soon I'm off to work. On my way to the subway, I pass that dwarf immigrant beggar who always gives me a smile. I put my headphones on to cancel the soundtrack of car horns and incessant ambulance sirens. The train, when I can get on it in rush hour, is full of masked strangers who only make eye contact with their mobile devices. With the comforting isolation of headphones or earbuds, we all emerge from below ground on a conveyor belt, still in full anonymity, eyes downcast. I buy a pack of smokes from a one-armed vendor who always salutes me in a Soviet pioneer fashion. Lighting a cigarette, I glance over the newspaper headlines: "Elk with car tyre stuck around its neck for two years is free at last", "Japan’s island-shaped curry inflames tensions with Korean neighbours", "Man set off fake shark warnings with tag removed from great white". Encouraged about my place on this planet and its shape, I start another 10-hour day in my cubicle.

This is interesting but it’s not about the film and - especially - not about its surrealism and postmodernism or its confusing structure. As for finding his weirder dreams just as enjoyable - would other people be similarly entertained? Life is also sometimes boring; would this chap rave about dull films, which perfectly capture that tedium?

In truth, any number of successful artistic creations (for example Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart and Kafka’s Metamorphosis) are about situations just as disjointed and nightmarish as Lynch’s world. But they work within themselves, establishing an inner coherence - however insane - and keep to it. The reader can understand that world. And we all want to understand things, which doesn’t mean accepting or feeling at ease with them.

It’s often an effective complexity for stories to operate on many levels. An example is the famously ambiguous Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw. But it’s crucial that there’s one basic narrative level at which the story works, unambiguously, so that the more esoteric interpretations can then operate against it. Mulholland Drive doesn’t have a basic narrative level at which it works. Nor am I convinced it works at any other level - dream or fantasy. Anyway, as a structural device, how utterly overdone and lazy is the ‘it was all a dream’ revelation! Who didn’t rush the ending of some Year 9 story by penning: ‘and then I woke up.’

So on to the methods Lynch employs. One basic problem with Mulholland Drive is its surrealism. This is a technique which produces quite limited and repetitive effects and now seems more dated than cave painting or swinging bladders on sticks for royal laughs. It also makes things blur into each other, so the overall effect is diminished and annoying. In films and novels, it’s almost always a pain in the arse because we both need and enjoy narrative. I recently read, with mostly irritation, The Master and Margarita. My problems were:

1. How to know when the surrealism ends and the narrative takes over.

2. How to then care enough to construct a narrative and an overall meaning.

3. How to avoid getting annoyed with witches on broom sticks, clever cats and all that cobblers.

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I know Bulgakov wrote ‘in code’ to attack Stalinism and the Soviet system. But the surreal elements are wearying, albeit with some moving sections (especially the religious parts). So I’m better off reading Solzhenitsyn. And - significantly - he wasn’t an opium addict.

But strange flights of fancy and surreal narrative jumps are all that Mulholland Drive has in its structure, which supercharges my level of annoyance. I felt not a single emotion watching it, other than fear at the stunning vision behind the grimy diner. Nothing moved me emotionally. It’s an intellectual exercise, with some beautiful cinematography of LA at night. The exemplar postmodern film, which contains what could be a gripping thriller, only to obliterate it in tedious narrative confusion.

The purpose of that trickery is to make these quite obvious points, some of them absurdly banal. They could almost provide a checklist for postmodernism:

1. Identity can be illusory, so can our sense of it.

2. The film industry is based on illusions; the reality of Hollywood is very different from the film version.

3. Dreams can become nightmares.

4. Stories in real life aren’t neat and self-contained.

5. What seems normal can become the opposite, surface attractiveness can be meaningless.

6. People’s inner lives are confusing and don’t make ‘sense’.

7. Multiple interpretations can be made from seemingly simple events.

8. Our culture is now so varied and complex that almost infinite ‘intertextual’ links can be made between things.

9. Irony and self-mockery are omnipresent in our culture.

10. They coexist with the eternal human realities of life, love, desire, beauty, horror, success, failure, death.

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All of these points were known to me and I’d imagine almost everyone. I watch film for a narrative that works, often a very simple one. The film dates from 2001, the year of 9/11. Various cultural critics say that event put an end to postmodernism, with the reality (and surrealism) of the Twin Towers attack making knowingness and mocking irony seem both redundant and callow. The ‘postmodern paradigm’ is now so rampant in our culture that it’s tiresome and lazy to keep making it. I think there’s something in that.

Paris, Texas (1984) is at first quite baffling, but it all makes sense and the elements come together. It doesn’t ‘end’ but the viewer feels moved enough to rethink the whole thing, after the emotional catharsis of Travis’s meeting with his wife. The film is fragmentary - in the way earlier 20th century Modernism did so much with - but it isn’t smartarse, nor does it feel ashamed with its own message and undercut it. The same could be said for the original film featuring a Travis - Taxi Driver - and his final denouement. Both films contain horrifying but not unreliable narratives and central characters. Modern critics label both as ‘problematic’, as if that is a flaw. Both Travis characters seem believable in a way that no one in Lynch’s film does.

Another film that applies to - which now seems annoyingly tricksy - is The Usual Suspects (1995). It’s impossible to make sense of, since there’s no way of knowing what truly happened and when the Spacey character is improvising in his cop interview. Or, if there is, I can’t be bothered going back to disentangle. At least it ends though!

A good film which is actually more modernist that postmodern is American Beauty (1999). It does have a narrative trick, but this isn’t overly complex or baffling. The ending is emotionally simple and moving. It was released two years before 9/11, and maybe it signifies the end was nearing for postmodernism? The same could be said for the brilliant Fight Club (1999), which even finishes with tower blocks in Manhattan collapsing…

I think the artistic movement that’s still important is Modernism. Above all, in its fragmentary techniques and yearning for coherence through them; a return to an illusory but vital sense of completeness and a comprehensible cultural foundation:

These fragments I have shored against my ruins…

No wonder Eliot and Pound are such an anathema to progressives! But their vision of our society now seems more relevant than the trite redundancies of postmodernism and cultural relativism. True, Mulholland Drive is almost 25-years old. But it regularly tops critics’ contemporary lists for the greatest films of those 25 years.

Just think what tumultuous events films - and indeed literature - don’t seem to have been affected by during those years! Our critically approved art rehashes the establishment pieties of multiculturalism, identity politics, solipsism, historical revisionism and cultural relativism. Where is the art reflecting social fragmentation from mass migration, ensuing cultural collapse, the surge in ‘populism’, constant wars and the Covid pandemic?

Postmodernism is completely unsuited to such a task. Its inherent superficiality, assumed intellectual superiority and designer anxiety is completely perfect for the ahistorical amnesiac ‘progressives’, whose political and cultural stranglehold is leading us to disaster.