Hollywood Utopia

192 Hollywood Utopia
part of the unrepresentability and potency of the sublime, cited earlier. This can be
appreciated most especially through the use of mise-en-scène, which concentrates
on the morphing of the environment (technically and metaphorically), thereby
endlessly reconfiguring time and space.
Like the ‘cinema of attractions’ popularised by Tom Gunning with reference to
early cinema, the narrative momentum of the film is held up while matter is
spectacularly transformed without apparent explanation. In many ways ,the poor
visibility, aided by the neo-noir aesthetic, with much of the transformation
occurring in shadow and half-light, affords an even more invasive ‘spectacle of
excess’ while also exposing the ultimate metaphoric evocation of the unconscious
dream. Such dramatic material transformation (through techniques found in 1990s
special effects) serves to signal, if not embody, Lyotard’s ‘limits of Enlightenment’,
which he ascribes to the postmodern universe.
The visual and narrative climax of the film exposes an image of deep-space which,
like the black hole in astrophysics, is revealed when the main protagonist finally and
literally breaks down his nostalgic romanticised image of ‘Shell Beach’. This proves
to be an empty signifier, a piece of graffiti on a wall. The truly awesome, sublime
of the dark abyss is revealed, however, when he knocks down the wall and looks out
into empty space, forcing him to realise that he is actually on a giant spaceship.
This radically delimits his transcendent wishful fantasy. As Lyotard affirms, the
sublime, like the infinite, is not comprehensible as a whole. Looking out into the
nothingness of existence (like looking into the majesty of the Grand Canyon - and
other less oblique moments of ‘incoherent’ epiphany) can also serve to reconnect
humanity with the holistic cosmos. Screen time is allowed to stand still and the
spectacle of frozen, reconstituted future-space affords its protagonists and
audience both space and time (the camera point-of-view has moved beyond the
diegetic demands of the narrative) to contemplate their existence. 3
Humanity has become more and more enthralled by such recharged sublime
spectacles in the postmodernist universe. Guy Debord formulated this in 1967 as
follows:
The entire existence of societies where modern production relations prevail, presents
itself as one huge accretion of spectacles. Everything directly experienced has
been consigned to a depiction. [van Toorn continues] . . . Experience makes way for
the registering of impressions. A hiatus occurs between the external perception and
the internal experience
(cited in van Toorn 1997: 2).
In many ways what can be regarded as the ‘intellectual subconscious’, as opposed