Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 23

Postmodernism Shanghaied

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One of the most prevalent trends, however, in pop culture’s subsuming of
the term is the incessant branding of certain pop culture icons as postmodern —
anything, anyone with the slightest of edges is necessarily and immediately
postmodemized. Consequently, Jenny McCarthy is a “postmodern bimbo” (Entertainment Weekly Oct. 1997); Dwight Yoakam is a “postmodern hillbilly” (People
Nov. 1995); the Spice Girls are “postmodern sexist” (USA Weekend Dec. 1998);
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction gives pulp-fiction cliche’s “postmodern twists”
(Newsweek Oct. 1994). Same thing occurs with certain movies and books. Gus
Van Sant’s remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho is “post-postmodem” (Entertainment
Weekly Dec. 1998). Likewise, it was the rare piece indeed that did not drag out the
term in reviewing Mark Z. Danielewski’s House o f Leaves: the novel is a “sort of
postmodern fun house where the reader becomes the author’s partner” (Newsweek
Mar. 2000).
Absolutely, however, the hands-down-cards-folded king of pop culture
postmodemization is Jim Carrey. In The Mask, he is a “postmodern cousin of the
Three Stooges” (Aug. 1994); in Ace Ventura he is a “postmodern stooge in a Ha
waiian shirt” (Dec. 1994); in Dumb and Dumber he performs the “postmodern
smart-dumb clod with a new kind of whiplash abandon” (Jan. 1995); in The Truman
Show he is a “postmodern Capra hero” (June 1998). All right, I’ll admit this: every
one of these reviews appeared in Entertainment Weekly — and every one of them
was written by movie critic Owen Gleiberman. However, Gleiberman was not the
only critic plugged into Carrey’s postmodern tendencies: even the late, great Jack
Kroll, in a review of Dumb and Dumber, notes that Carrey’s character Lloyd Christ
mas is a “postmodern version of Harold Lloyd” (Newsweek June 1995).
And so it goes: an idea subsumed, even consumed, by mass media, by the
masses in general, by irrepressible pop culture. Still, theorists rage as to its specific
meaning, its inherent purpose. And all the while pop culturists fling it merrily
about, satisfied only that the term meets their immediate needs: that it signifies all
that is beyond yesterday, anything that has the glint of tomorrow. Postmodernism
is, then, simultaneously, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jim Carrey, Thomas Pynchon
and Jenny McCarthy. Undoubtedly, the etomological debates will conti