Hollywood Utopia

224 Hollywood Utopia
Linda Hutcheon is convincing when she argues that postmodernism represents
the attempt to re-historicise, not de-historicise, art and theory. ‘Parody is the ironic
mode of intertextuality that enables such revisitations of the past. Such selfreflexive,
parodic interrogations of history have also brought about a questioning of
assumptions beneath both modernist aesthetic autonomy and unproblematic
realist reference’ (Hutcheon 1988: 225). Furthermore, critics affirm that
postmodern culture is inherently contradictory and often uses and abuses the very
discourses it sets out to challenge.
Postmodern parody, Hutcheon continues, functions ‘as repetition with critical
distance that allows ironic signalling of difference at the very heart of similarity’. It
‘paradoxically enacts both change and cultural continuity’, and as it uses the
strategies of dominant culture to challenge its discursive processes from within,
postmodern parody also reveals its ‘love of history by giving new meanings to old
forms’ (cited in Natoli 1997). The postmodern paradoxes effectively both reveal
and positively question prevailing norms, including those which continue to
legitimise ecological degradation, and they can do so because they embody both
processes. The Fifth Element effectively (re)presents, as already expressed, this
form of postmodern parody by the way it constructs both its human and posthuman
agents within an otherwise comic book super-narrative which continually
uses various forms of spectacle and excess to foreground its often contradictory
messages.
As was affirmed at the outset, the postmodernist paradigm promoting a ‘both-and’
frame of consciousness which copes with apparently contradictory discourses is
taking the place of the less inclusive modernist ‘either-or’ paradigm. Because of
the elastic and inclusive nature of the postmodernist aesthetic, this enriched form
tends to draw from all strands within the modernist/ postmodernist divide and
could more comfortably be described as ‘radical modernism’. This enrichment can
be achieved by breaking down heroic male myths, which often endorse ecological
regression, towards a more inclusive incorporation with the human hero. This
strategy is coalesced through a surfeit of progressive ecological representation
using female agency in particular. At least the other has moved on from being
either simply exoticised and/or victimised or sacrificed on the altar of conventional
notions of human agency.
Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of ‘radical otherness’ is, as John Hill affirms, as good a
position as any to start to ‘produce a model of postmodern ethics which reflects the
possibility of transgression with regards to the other’ (Hill 1998: 97). The mythic
gender representation of Leeloo is as good an agent as any to start exploring such
radical otherness but agency of this kind will need much more fleshing out if it is
to become truly potent for the future. Alien Resurrection extends this process most
effectively.