Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Fredric Jameson 193
past. What is of absolute significance for Jameson is that such films do not attempt to
recapture or represent the ‘real’ past, but always make do with certain myths and stereotypes
about the past. They offer what he calls ‘false realism’, films about other films,
representations of other representations (what Baudrillard calls simulations: see discussion
in the previous section): films ‘in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces
“real” history’ (1984: 67). In this way, history is supposedly effaced by ‘historicism . . .
the random cannibalisation of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic
allusion’ (65–6). Here we might cite films like True Romance, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill.
The failure to be historical relates to a second stylistic feature identified by Jameson,
cultural ‘schizophrenia’. He uses the term in the sense developed by Lacan (see Chapter
5) to signify a language disorder, a failure of the temporal relationship between
signifiers. The schizophrenic experiences time not as a continuum (past–present–
future), but as a perpetual present that is only occasionally marked by the intrusion of
the past or the possibility of a future. The ‘reward’ for the loss of conventional selfhood
(the sense of self as always located within a temporal continuum) is an intensified
sense of the present. Jameson explains it thus:
Note that as temporal continuities break down, the experience of the present
becomes powerfully, overwhelmingly vivid and ‘material’: the world comes before
the schizophrenic with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious and oppressive
charge of affect, glowing with hallucinatory energy. But what might for us seem a
desirable experience – an increase in our perceptions, a libidinal or hallucinogenic
intensification of our normally humdrum and familiar surroundings – is here felt
as loss, as ‘unreality’ (1985: 120).
To call postmodern culture schizophrenic is to claim that it has lost its sense of history
(and its sense of a future different from the present). It is a culture suffering from ‘historical
amnesia’, locked into the discontinuous flow of perpetual presents. The ‘temporal’
culture of modernism has given way to the ‘spatial’ culture of postmodernism.
Jim Collins (2009) has identified a similar trend in recent cinema, what he calls
an ‘emergent type of genericity’ (470): popular films which ‘quote’ other films, selfconsciously
making reference to and borrowing from different genres of film. What
makes Collins’s position more convincing than Jameson’s, is his insistence on ‘agency’:
the claim that such films appeal to (and help constitute) an audience of knowing
bricoleurs, who take pleasure from this and other forms of bricolage. Moreover, whereas
Jameson argues that such forms of cinema are characterized by a failure to be truly historical,
Peter Brooker and Will Brooker (1997a), following Collins, see instead ‘a new
historical sense . . . the shared pleasure of intertextual recognition, the critical effect of
play with narrative conventions, character and cultural stereotypes, and the power
rather than passivity of nostalgia’ (7). Brooker and Brooker argue that Quentin
Tarantino’s films, for example,
can be seen as reactivating jaded conventions and audience alike, enabling a more
active nostalgia and intertextual exploration than a term such as ‘pastiche’, which