AS, Jameson

Cursing my way through Jameson (though at least he writes in what can be recognized as sentences), I came across a couple of points that made sense and immediately did the happy-couldbemistakenforhavingtopee-dance:

“…the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture.” (494)

Coupled with:

“Nostalgia does not strike one as an altogether satisfactory word for such fascination […] yet it directs our attention to what is a culturally far more generalized manifestation of the process in commercial art and taste, namely the so-called “nostalgia film.” (495)

And voila, I start thinking about one of my favorite films from the past few years, Brick.
This Sundance darling is an anachronistic spin on the classic film noir set in the soulless concrete hallways of a high school in somewhere suburban California. Bogart speak abounds, 1940s dress mingles with contemporary styles, and a lone wolf wades through an underground rife with drugs and murder all for the love of his lost girl. It’s moody and atmospheric; it’s also, a la Jameson, an imitation of a dead style and a dead speech. The language the characters speak is colored with that of typical noir films, minimal and brusque:

The Brain: The Pin is kinda a local spook story, yeah know the King Pin.
Brendan Frye: Dope runner, right?
The Brain: Big time. Ask any dope rat where their junk sprang and they'll say they scraped it from that, who scored it from this, who bought it off so, and after four or five connections the list always ends with The Pin. But I bet you, if you got every rat in town together and said "Show your hands" if any of them've actually seen The Pin, you'd get a crowd of full pockets.

Brick is a veritable mishmash of allusions to The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity, not to mention a subtle nod to The Usual Suspects. Yet it garnered acclaim for its unique vision and originality. Retro was interpreted as new. The filmmakers did what postmodern architects do – they inserted past elements into newish ones to create an artistic whole. Everything old is new again. An entire genre can be revisited, updated, and mass produced for premium profit all in the name of originality. Damn fine entertainment yes, groundbreaking no, and postmodern to the core.