Introduction

• Postmodernism can be understood as a philosophy that is characterised by concepts such as RE-IMAGINING, PASTICHE, PARODY, COPY, BRICOLAGE
• Post -modernism always fits into media and communications
• It’s an approach towards understanding, knowledge, life, being, art, technology, culture, sociology, philosophy, politics and history that is REFERENTIAL – in that it often refers to and often copies other things in order to understand itself.
• The film Memento is self-referential, it seems as if Lenny is self referential too, as identified by his tattoos reminding him of what to do

Parody vs Pastiche

• Memento includes pastiche, but is NOT A PARODY
• Pastiche is a work of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that imitates the work of a previous artist
• Parody is a work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony

Intertextuality: surface signs, gestures & play

• In the film Memento, Lenny’s body is a surface sign
• As Shuker notes, two points are frequently made about music videos: ‘their preoccupation with visual style, and associated with this, their status as key exemplars of ‘postmodern’ texts.’ (2001:167)
• Shuker refers Fredric Jameson’s (1984) notion of the ‘metanarrative’ that ’embody the postmodern condition’ (168). For example, the fragmentary, decentred nature of music videos that break up traditional understandings of time and space so that audiences are ‘no longer able to distinguish ‘fiction’ from ‘reality’, part of the postmodern condition’ (ibid)
• Meta narrative = “the overall thing”
• Alongside their similarity to adverts (essentially the music video is a commercial tool to sell music products) ‘making them part of a blatantly consumerist culture‘ (ibid). And of course, the ‘considerable evidence of pastiche, intertextuality and eclecticism‘ (ibid) which is the focus of this next section.
• BRICOLAGE is a useful term to apply to postmodernist texts as it ‘involves the rearrangment and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’ (Barker & Jane, 2016:237)
• INTERTEXTUALITY suggests signs only have meaning in reference to other signs and that meaning is therefore a complex process of decoding/encoding with individuals both taking and creating meaning in the process of reading texts

Post-modernism

• It suggests that we don’t know what is true anymore
• Music videos are of a fragmentary and decentred nature to break up the traditional understandings of time and space, so that audiences are “no longer able to distinguish ‘fiction’ from ‘reality’.”
• Bricolage is the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs.
• Surfaces and Styles over substances = surfaces and styles become the most important feature of defining features of the mass media and the popular culture