Postmodernism and Film: Rethinking Hollywood’s Aesthestics (Short Cuts)

This volume focuses on postmodern film aesthetics, and contemporary challenges to the aesthetic paradigms dominating analyses of Hollywood cinema. It explores conceptions of the classical, modernist, postclassical/new Hollywood, and their construction as linear history of style in which postmodernism forms a debatable final act. This history is challenged by using Lyotard's non-linear conception of postmodernism in order to view postmodern aesthetics as a paradigm that can occur across the history of Hollywood. This study also explores 'nihilistic' theorists of the postmodern, Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson, and 'affirmative' theorists, Linda Hutcheon and Judith Butler, charting the ways in which they provide the means to conceptualise nuanced and positive variants of postmodern aesthetics and deploying them in the analysis of Hollywood films, including Bombshell, Serial Mom and Kill Bill.