Unlocking The Postmodern Representation In The Hurt Locker

The postmodern can be defined as both an epoch, the era after modernity, and a particular type of aesthetic, a recycling of previous styles and forms. This thesis will focus on the characteristics of postmodern cinema, manifested in The Hurt Locker, and try to unlock the politics of postmodern representation, charting the differences between nihilistic and affirmative theorists of the postmodern by drawing on two major theorists: Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon.Within film studies, much of the debate on postmodernism has been shaped by Jameson's works. The postmodern is characterized by two central tendencies: formal fragmentation and a reliance on styles that mimic those of earlier works or artists in a mode of pastiche, which is in line with French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard's vision of postmodern society as increasingly dominated by technologically generated forms of culture and experience, leading to the death of conventional reality and the growth of “hyperreality” by way of simulacrum. Indeed, pastiche, fragmentation and simulacrum figure prominently in the film as three different representational strategies either thematically or aesthetically, which makes The Hurt Locker a perfect example of postmodern cinema. But how does postmodern representation work and in what aspect is it different from modernist representation? Jameson argues that postmodern art forms are integrated as an expression of the logic of late capitalism, and thus incapable of offering political critique, their relentless appropriation of past styles simply reflective of postmodern aesthetic bankruptcy. The products of postmodern Hollywood as texts comprising a plethora of references that inevitably fail to cohere into any kind of meaningful unity. Different from Jameson, Linda Hutcheon closes in on contradiction inherent in postmodern representation and recycles parody as a specific mode of postmodern representation. Hutcheon's complex model of postmodern aesthetics offers a way out of Jamesonian-inspired nihilism by arguing that postmodern art is characterized by contradiction, due to its simultaneous re-inscription and deconstruction of past art forms. This doubled movement of both evoking and dismantling convention is crucial to the political potential of postmodern art, the denaturalization of a history of representation forming the basis of “complicitous critique”.With all of above in mind, the thesis will be divided into four chapters, with the first one offering a thorough introduction, the second pinpointing the postmodern characteristics reflected in the film, the third employing Hutcheon's theory to pick apart the politics of postmodern representation by way of parody, and the last chapter summing it all up. The postmodern twist on such established cultural tropes as American hero, black sidekick and the victimized Other in the film speaks to a deeply contradictory interrogation on American sense of self/identity especially after 9/11, with a palpable disbelief in the culturally grounded masculine identity recycled countlessly in American cinema.