Post-Post Modernism in the Public Consciousness: Part 1 - A Hatchet Piece

In the true spirit of the Post-Post Modernists, I present for your reading pleasure, a redux of a previous rant...

For lack of a better term, contemporary critics have begun to call post-9/11 art Post-Post Modernism. The more I think about it, the less it bothers me. After all, it was the Post Modernists who predicted that culture would endlessly recycle itself and great artists who produced great works of art would be forgotten. They couldn’t have been more accurate. The 1970’s brought forth a plethora of iconic images from the wild 1950’s; Grease was the word, Happy Days dialogue spilled over into the vernacular, and pre-Star Wars George Lucas had a hit with American Graffiti. When the eighties rolled around, tie dies were once again in fashion and there were two Woodstock revivals. The nineties gave album oriented rock its last hoorah while slackers in bell bottoms swarmed the traveling music festivals. The very beginning of the twenty-first century found itself sounding more like 1981 than 2001, and then the unthinkable happened. Pop culture logic would solemnly swear that 9/11 marks the beginning of a new artistic period. After all, if the rapid change in technology and World War I contributed to the Modernist movement, and the atom bomb ushered in a less optimistic period than its predecessor, then contemporary critics are right on the money. But what about that awful name: Post-Post Modernism. It sounds comical, uninspired, even lazy. Could there be a better moniker for a period that is basically Modernism 2.0? If Post-Modernism saw pieces of culture trickling back into the public consciousness, what would the Post-Modernists have to say about Hollywood’s recent trend of raping classic films, compromising their dignities by re-scribbling a screenplay and handing it to an incompetent director? Doesn’t it make sense that we would recycle the name of the era itself? I believe it does. So what, right? Not that all PPM art is artistically compromised, but there is a huge chunk of it that certainly is, and nowhere is it more prevalent than in the horror film genre. Every genre has its landmark achievement; you can’t mention the words “gangster movie” without The Godfather coming to mind. Gone with the Wind is the cookie cutter for epic drama. It’s a Wonderful Life contributed more isms to the Holiday Blockbuster than any other film of its kind. And then there’s the horror genre, and those of you who know me well know just where I’m going with this. Anyone could hear Michael Bay tripping over the rights to The Amityville Horror and Friday the 13th a mile away, but that comes with the territory. However, it is sacrilege that his first remake cha-ching was a hideous re-imagining of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Richard P. Rubenstine’s production team taking on a remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is sickening. Those of us who love these films knew damn well that the unthinkable would happen sooner or later, and it did. And Hollywood would be hard pressed to find a bigger jackass to defile the sacred. Yes, I am referring to Rob Zombie’s Halloween. Go ahead, yawn, have yourself a stretch, and when you’re good and ready, listen up.

Rob Zombie re-defines Halloween – that is undisputable. Unfortunately, this redefinition is a direct result of Zombie’s incompetence as a writer and director. Zombie’s re-imagining/prequel of John Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece is yet another Hollywood victory in the attempt to convert art into eye candy for the attention spanless generation. Gone is the subtle social commentary; it is replaced with cheap cliché’ and conventions of shock cinema, only it isn’t all that shocking. Michael Myers has been reduced to the product of trailer trash rather than the evil sprout sprung from the seed of suburban complacency. And this is where Zombie’s deficiencies are most evident.

The opening of the original Halloween lasted all but five minutes: a mobile subjective camera shot, then a brief switch in perspective as a crane slowly pulled back to reveal what seemed to be the fully functional Myers family, in an uncomfortably long shot, where everything appeared to be normal with the exception of the bloody knife in six-year-old Michael’s hand. Enough said. But not for Zombie. Instead he gives the audience, who he obviously assumes is as ignorant as he is, almost forty minutes of exposition in an attempt to create a mythology for the Myers character. Michael’s step-dad is a meanie, his mommy is a pole dancer, and his sister is a whore. Somehow, Zombie felt this necessary to build Michael’s character. And at what point are we supposed to fear Michael? Certainly not when he brutally murders a school bully. Any human being that has been subjected to any kind of cruelty from peers, which is basically all of us, is going to identify with little Mikey sympathetically. The moment the audience starts rooting for the serial killer, the scares are gone. It becomes the same cheap slasher dung that plagued the eighties.

Judging by its thirty million dollar opening weekend, all of this is good. After all, Carpenter provoked his audience to look closely at the Myers clan and decipher the evil for themselves. But movie savior Rob Zombie has the solution in all of its vulgar glory laid out for his audience. Forget about the fact that the original Myers sprung from middle class America, far too concerned with production and consumption to recognize the result of person to person deprivation, a true demon of the Post-Modern era, which could be all the more relevant now in the age of the internet and i-phone than it was in 1978. This is where Zombie completely failed. Our culture may have actually been ready for a re-telling of the Myers story. Too bad Rob had to re-imagine it for us.

It’s a shame Rob couldn’t make up his mind whether Myers was white trash or the boogeyman. It’s also a shame that he took a character like Sam Loomis, so competently portrayed by the legendary Donald Pleasance, and turned him into a blubbering wimp. And as for Laurie’s friends, Annie and Lynda – who cares at this point. Slice ‘em up and get on with it. What’s the point of character development in a movie that is too over-developed for its own good? This deprived generation will never identify with Lynda and her overuse of “totally,” or Annie’s preoccupation with her hair in spite of the fact that she was wearing a man’s shirt and no pants. So what is the point of any of it? A thirty million dollar opening weekend. And that’s it.

Zombie and producer Malek Akkad new very well they had the attention of two generations: the first being those of us who loved and cherished this film as that rare achievement where good film making transcended the restraints of genre, and the second being the generation that grew up hearing about it from parents and older relatives. Perusing the message boards, I found that one defender of this film boldly stated that it was “never meant to be as good at the original.” I guess Zombie was shooting for the eighties “New Coke!” attitude. Remember how bad that sucked? Remember how quick “Coke Classic” took its place? Retracing the footsteps of Coca-Cola’s failure, Rob Zombie birthed a product that was all hype, and his taste-budless minions sucked it right down with the “new must mean better” mentality that plagues their generation. Other defenders challenged the naysayers to not compare the two films. Since when is comparing products a bad idea for consumers? If Zombie’s crowd doesn’t want his films being compared to classics he can’t possibly hope to improve, maybe he shouldn’t remake them. Maybe he should go back to directing cartoonish MTV versions of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and title them House of a Thousand Whatevers. Zombie is a tool. Really. A tool in the hands of a depraved Hollywood out of original ideas for anything besides making a couple million bucks.
Now that the unthinkable has happened, it is safe to say that the critics who have knighted this era Post-Post Modernism are perhaps more intuitive that I originally gave them credit for. But this is only the dark side of the Post-Post Modern age of horror. There is light at the end of the tunnel. With the same zeal that independent filmmakers impressed their indelible stamp of socially aware film making, there are directors attempting to do the same by recycling the mentality only, and not the art. Films like Cloverfield, The Mist, and M. Night Shalman’s The Village expose the failures of the Bush-Cheney era with genuine intelligence and unflinching attitude. And this is where the real art of the Post-Post Modern era finds its significance. Whichever genre you prefer, watch closely. Look beyond the plot. Revel in the filmmaker’s underlying commentary, and embrace Post-Post Modernism for what it accurately is.