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192 Chapter 9 Postmodernism

Jameson argues that postmodernism is ‘the cultural dominant’ of late or multinational
capitalism (modernism is the residual; it is unclear what is the emergent).
Having established that postmodernism is the cultural dominant within Western
capitalist societies, the next stage for Jameson is to outline the constitutive features of
postmodernism. First, postmodernism is said to be a culture of pastiche: a culture, that
is, marked by the ‘complacent play of historical allusion’ (Jameson, 1988: 105).
Pastiche is often confused with parody; both involve imitation and mimicry. However,
whereas parody has an ‘ulterior motive’, to mock a divergence from convention or a
norm, pastiche is a ‘blank parody’ or ‘empty copy’, which has no sense of the very pos-
sibility of there being a norm or a convention from which to diverge. As he explains,

Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead lan-
guage: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior
motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any convic-
tion that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some
healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody (1984: 65).

Rather than a culture of supposed pristine creativity, postmodern culture is a culture
of quotations; that is, cultural production born out of previous cultural production. 43
It is therefore a culture ‘of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the
most literal sense’ (60). A culture of images and surfaces, without ‘latent’ possibilities, it
derives its hermeneutic force from other images, other surfaces, the exhausted interplay
of intertextuality. This is the world of postmodern pastiche, ‘a world in which stylistic
innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through
the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum’ (1985: 115).
Jameson’s principal example of postmodern pastiche is what he calls the ‘nostalgia
film’. The category could include a number of films from the 1980s and 1990s: Back
to the Future I and II, Peggy Sue Got Married, Rumble Fish, Angel Heart, Blue Velvet. He
argues that the nostalgia film sets out to recapture the atmosphere and stylistic pecu-
liarities of America in the 1950s. He claims that ‘for Americans at least, the 1950s
remain the privileged lost object of desire – not merely the stability and prosperity of
a pax Americana, but also the first naive innocence of the countercultural impulses of
early rock and roll and youth gangs’ (1984: 67). He also insists that the nostalgia film
is not just another name for the historical film. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact
that his own list includes Star Wars. Now it might seem strange to suggest that a film
about the future can be nostalgic for the past, but as Jameson (1985) explains, ‘[Star
Wars] is metonymically a . . . nostalgia film . . . it does not reinvent a picture of the past
in its lived totality; rather, by reinventing the feel and shape of characteristic art objects
of an older period’ (116).
Films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Mummy Returns
and Lord of the Rings operate in a similar way to evoke metonymically a sense of the
narrative certainties of the past. Therefore, according to Jameson, the nostalgia film
works in one or two ways: it recaptures and represents the atmosphere and stylistic
features of the past; and it recaptures and represents certain styles of viewing of the