MTV, which offers a sort of Cook’s tour through the history of film style, is generally both attentive to the surface appearance of various styles and blind to their historical contexts and meanings. Gravity’s Rainbow, for instance, is both a well-researched historical novel set during World War II and a contemporary meditation on history couched in the language, idioms, and sensibility of the late 60s and early 70s. It’s a paradoxical hallmark of postmodernist art to be preoccupied with certain aspects of the past while being closed off - whether through indifference or ignorance or (real or metaphorical) amnesia - to certain other aspects. It may even get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even - as Slothrop now - what you’re doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment…” We learn that “‘personal density is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth….Temporal bandwidth’ is the width of your present, your now … the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. An early instance of this trend can be found in the fate of Tyrone Slothrop, the hero of Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, who gradually gets phased out of the book as a visible presence once he starts shifting his attention from his inscrutable, troubling past to his immediate present. Now it appears that amnesia - both as subject and as metaphor - is making a minor comeback as a postmodernist theme. With Kyle McCulloch, Kathy Marykuca, Ari Cohen, Sarah Neville, Michael Gottli, and Victor Cowie.Īmnesia is a subject we associate with film noir of the 40s and 50s, and social commentators tend to link its use in such films - with their gloomy and murky moods, their amnesiac heroes’ helplessness - to some version of postwar angst. From the Chicago Reader (March 1, 1991) - J.R.
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