The absence of time was ironically long a preoccupation with future-oriented science fiction films as they were analyzed from the postmodern tradition during the late 1980s and early 1990s. And what may be lost today is that postmodern films were always obsessed with time—but it was a preoccupation with time that was rooted in history’s erasure. Working from the influence of thinkers such as Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, film scholars Scott Bukatman and Vivian Sobchack, among others, found within postmodern science-fiction a particular conception of time as collapsed into space.
Postmodern cinema was obsessed with history’s disappearance amidst the perpetual present of space. Yet, as scholars of postmodern science-fiction noted, these texts represented our future, as simulacrum, to defamiliarize contemporary audiences’ own relationships to the historical present. In retrospect, this atemporality was excessively focused on time—the temporal affect of time’s erasure in postmodern film. It is this affect which has only intensified in the years since, and upon which I will build in the pages that follow.
Before turning to postmodern film criticism, I’d like to take up another science-fiction film, via a brief cinephiliac anecdote. In The Truman Show (1998), Jim Carrey stars as Truman Burbank, a man raised in a giant soundstage meant to simulate a small, sleepy seaside town. His whole life, meanwhile, has been recorded secretly by videotape and relayed across the world as an extremely popular television show. At the end of the film, Truman finally works up the courage to sail off over the sea to another destination, only to have his sailboat crash into an immense painted wall of sky marking the end of the giant soundstage. He is seemingly trapped in simulation. In a poignant moment, he angrily pounds his fist against the wall; his body slumps away from our perspective, a completely defeated man. I’ve always found this image of a hidden, devastated, Truman not cold, like so much of the film, but rather deeply moving—the image of a crushed, programmed man coming to terms with a certain self-aware truth about the artificiality of his life.
Moreover, there are several issues in this cinephiliac anecdote which I find compelling and telling. The Truman Show is certainly a particular kind of postmodern cinema, but what it may say about that genre is a complicated one. The Truman Show’s focus on the character of Truman, his “simulated” life, his “simulated” home, and his “simulated” town, all for the benefit of a live television program, forces any attentive and informed film scholar to consider its postmodern sensibilities and influences. In that sense, if I may go a step further, “postmodern” also refers to an affective connotation that these films generate in circulation—in other words, they provoke a sense of the critical and institutional legacy of the postmodern historically.
Though some postmodern film theorists have reasonably questioned the strength of Jean Baudrillard’s ideas, there is no getting around the fact that historically the French philosopher’s work was crucial to influencing a generation of film scholars interested in the postmodern. For example, as a “postmodern” film, Truman’s existence appears, to a point, to be a too-perfect embodiment of Baudrillard’s notion of simulation and the simulacrum—his hyperreal existence refers only to itself, and there is no “real” world in which he lives. The world outside “The Truman Show” in The Truman Show only refers back to the program itself, as people watch Truman’s behavior obsessively. Moreover, the show only serves to distract its diegetic audiences from the fact that all of America is in a sense as hyperreal as the giant soundstage Truman lives in.
In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard used Disneyland and the Watergate scandal as examples of the simulacrum in American culture. For Baudrillard, the simulacrum was not a representation of anything but itself. It was its own referent. Whereas “representation stems from the principle of equivalence of the sign and of the real,” the simulacrum in its purest stage “has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.” Simulacra are not unreal, but hyperreal. They are real signs in the sense that they exist and achieve a real effect, but they only affirm their own reality and do not point back to, or represent, a pre-existing one. In a section entitled “The Hyperreal and the Imaginary,” Baudrillard famously posited that “Disneyland is a perfect model for all the entangled orders of simulacra.” He argued that people enjoy Disneyland because it is a compacted version of America itself, simplified down to its utopian possibilities—a simulacrum of America itself. Yet, at the same time, Disneyland creates a deceptive effect for consumers, he argued, because the blatant hyperreality of the theme park serves to distract visitors from the fact that all of America is hyperreal—more real than real. Disneyland, Baudrillard wrote:
[. . .] is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus saving the reality principle.
Understanding Baudrillard’s discussion of Disneyland means understanding it as tied into a larger cultural critique of American consumerist culture. Disneyland deters its visitors from having to accept that all of America is a simulacrum, and to convince them that they do not seek only self-gratification and pleasure in all aspects of life. As I stated above, the extent of my narrow interest in Baudrillard’s immensely rich work is with how this notion of the self-referential simulacrum is what for so long structured film scholars’ sense of a “postmodern” cinema.
Truman’s “hometown,” as both a lived environment for him, and a spectacle for everyone else, serves a similar symbolic function. Appearing in American theatres in the late 1990s, the ahistorical utopia of The Truman Show both reinforces and agitates this sense of a “postmodern” film that had been, at that point, gaining steam for over a decade. On the one hand, the hyperreality of Truman’s surroundings and existence become reality itself, especially for a person (Truman) who literally knows no other way of life.
Inhabiting a cave of pure artifice, the breakdown between true and false reality ceases to have any meaning in the constant effect of reality offered in The Truman Show (and in “The Truman Show”). Yet, at the same time, Truman eventually comes to suspect, to feel, late in the narrative that something is wrong with his world (something is not quite good enough). There is a sense of something else, of a time that still exists outside (or within) the seeming atemporality and sterility of his hometown. Despite attempts by the television show’s overseer, Christof (Ed Harris), to frighten him into staying in the town, Truman begins to follow his intuition and actively seeks out what might exist beyond this simulacrum in which he has lived his whole life. Yet as I will discuss later, it is not simply a matter of just leaving, as there is a much more complicated sense of time also at work in this film.
The Truman Show evokes direct memories of Fredric Jameson’s discussion of Phillip K. Dick’s novel, Time Out of Joint (1959), in his seminal text, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992). Jameson’s book proved to be as influential to film studies as Baudrillard’s, and his work on Dick’s novel came within the specific context of his articulation of a postmodern cinema. In both science fiction texts, the main protagonist lives unknowingly in a world meant to simulate the “real” present world, only to slowly discover the truth and seek to escape. In Dick’s novel, the protagonist, Ragle Gumm, eventually discovers that it is not 1959 but 1998 (the “future”), and he was being shielded from a colonial war Earth was waging with Martians. Whereas Truman was being exploited for a television show, Gumm was suppressed because of the military and technological secrets he knew that could change the outcome of the war, but which were supposedly erased.
While Jameson’s far-reaching book touched on numerous philosophical and cultural issues related to the economic underpinnings and historical contexts for postmodernity, he also importantly made a contribution to film studies about a particular kind of postmodern cinema, rooted in the genre of science fiction. His discussion of movies begins not with a film, but with detailed reading of Time Out of Joint. Dick’s novel is a perfect illustration of the postmodern simulation’s relationship to (the absence of) history. As Jameson wrote in the context of science fiction’s conception of time:
[Postmodern] Historicity is, in fact, neither a representation of the past nor a representation of the future (although its various forms use such representations): it can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective.
In other words, representations of the future in science fiction were really about understanding our own present, but from a safe cognitive distance. For example, the melted ice caps in A.I. were really about our own present day ecological anxieties. This is a safe point, but it speaks crucially to a consistent sense of time as out of joint, an endlessly deferred present. Science fiction perpetuated a cyclical focus on the perpetually (ahistorical) present time—a simulacrum which denoted a perpetually displaced present. Hence, such science-fiction images were always really about, as Jameson famously stated, a kind of future-oriented “nostalgia for the present” which denied any sense of a knowable “History” and defamiliarized our relationship to the current world around us.
Like Baudrillard, Jameson’s work was highly influential on a number of film scholars who were at the time writing in the postmodern tradition. They too focused on time in the contemporary science-fiction film. For instance, Vivian Sobchack wrote in the mid-1980s about how recent genre films had collapsed time and space in their preoccupation with the end of the literal and metaphorical space frontier—“Postfuturism.” Science-fiction no longer believed in the epic journey of space exploration, but rather saw in that an idea of temporal duration that was just another part of Modernity’s failed teleology of progress.
Instead, postmodern science fiction films focused on how science and technology affected life on Earth, rather than in an infinitely expanding universe. Postmodern films, Sobchack argued then, employed a renewed emphasis on pastiche (Repo Man, Blade Runner) and surfaces (Tron, Dune) to highlight a postmodern focus on space. In this context, time losses all meaning in a state of perpetual presents. “The new SF film tends to conflate past, present and future—in décor constructed as temporal pastiche,” she wrote, “and/or in narratives that either temporally turn back on themselves to conflate past, present, and future, or are schizophrenically constituted as a ‘series of pure and unrelated presents in time.’” For example, Sobchack points out how Back to the Future (1985) is a movie about a teenager’s trip to an idealized 1950s, where he meets teenage versions of his parents. Strictly speaking, there is no “future” in Back to the Future—only a weird collage of idealized pasts and presents, wherein the present comes narratively to substitute for the “future.” Postmodern science fiction’s sense of time in the 1980s was to, in a sense, deny time’s movement in simulation, yet this move also revealed a deep anxiousness of time’s presence.
A few years later, Scott Bukatman extended the discussion of postmodernity and science fiction in Terminal Identity. Also working from the theories of Fredric Jameson, Bukatman focused in particular on the postmodern notion of a subject decentered by the depthless ubiquity of surface images. Yet rather than lament the loss of the human (and of humanity) in the contemporary technological age, Bukatman argued that the postmodern subject was defined at and through their interaction with technology—“an unmistakably doubled articulation in which we find both the end of the subject and a new subjectivity constructed at the computer station or television screen.”
For Bukatman, science fiction was in part about the present time’s inability to deal with the continual avalanche of technological innovation; fictional representations of the “future” were really about negotiating the present from a distance. Citing Postmodernism’s reading of Time Out of Joint, Bukatman argued that “what science-fiction offers, in Jameson’s words, is ‘the estrangement and renewal of our own reading present.’” Science fiction narratives reinforced a larger cultural logic of postmodernity that collapsed pasts and futures into a perpetual present. They dramatized through fictional narratives (such as, but not only, film) an inability to envision, or sustain, a linear sense of history, in an age where “time” was defined through space and surfaces.
As the comparison to Dick’s novel suggests, The Truman Show also reveals science fiction cinema’s increasingly strained, or perhaps reconfigured, postmodern sense of time. It is important to note that Baudrillard too wrote about time and movies in Simulacra & Simulation, where he outlined a particularly atemporal sense of the simulacrum’s absence of the past. In his subsequent discussion of film as another example of a simulacrum, Baudrillard argued that cinema’s inability to represent a historic past is replaced with cinema’s desire to represent itself. “History,” wrote Baudrillard, “is our lost referential, that is to say our myth.” Any notion of a past then only exists in the present “as nostalgia for a lost referential.” Cinema in particular embodied how history was a myth, he argued, something we may be able to grasp and reflect on in the present, but which no longer exists in a world where images, simulacra, refer only to themselves.
But still I am haunted by the end of The Truman Show, by the image of a man in some sense (literally) at the edge of the simulacrum, the edge of—or the beginning of, or the renewed awareness of—time. Although heavily programmed, Truman, of course, is not a simulation but a living person, a living body. While his home is sterily ahistorical, a perpetually time-less simulation of an idealized (white, upper-class) small town, Truman himself nonetheless has a history—more precisely, Truman embodies a history. Even while the simulated diegetic world around him doesn’t change, Truman does; he begins to sense that there is something else out there. As Bukatman and Shaviro both respectively argued, there was the persistent question of the “body” in postmodern narratives, alternatingly in sync with, and in resistance to, simulation and simulacra.
In a sense, by focusing on the persistence of the body and its haunted nerves, The Truman Show thus inverts a cinematic postmodern sense of time as originally put forth by Jameson, even while still internalizing the larger, self-referential, cultural logic of the simulacrum—it is a sense of the past in the present which defamiliarizes Truman’s relationship to the future. The simulated world affectively compels Truman, motivated by a sense of past time (literally, his father’s staged “death” years earlier in the same waters), to chart a different future. But we never quite see him leave the soundstage, other than to walk into a pitch-black corridor which reinforces the film’s key Baudrillardian theme: “There is no more reality out there than there is in here.” The Truman Show preserves postmodern film’s fundamental ambiguities and contradictions—there is ultimately no “real” world out there for Truman. Yet, at the same time, he is nonetheless haunted by a sense of time generated by ahistorical simulacra. This book focuses on how the presence of the simulacrum in more recent American postmodern films suggests that the present is already defamiliarized— but not by a simulation in, or of, the future. Rather, the present is perpetually disturbed and disoriented by an affect of the past.
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